The Chrysalis (11 page)

Each time Mara tried to question the nature of
The Chrysalis
's journey to Nice and beyond, Hilda cut Mara with the sharp edge of her own story and that of her parents. She reminded Mara over and over that
The Chrysalis,
the devotional portion of her father's renowned art collection where he honored his family's conversion to Catholicism, was a painting for which the Nazis had killed her parents.

As the two women jousted over the topic of
The Chrysalis
's significance to Erich Baum, Hilda turned to her lawyer, as if she'd just remembered something. “Bert, could you hand me that envelope I found last night?”

Her gnarled knuckles scraping over the tabletop, Hilda passed a large white envelope to Mara. “What is this, Ms. Baum?” Mara asked.

“Oh, I think the contents explain themselves. Why don't you open it?” Hilda answered, with the tiniest grin on her face.

Mara sliced open the heavily taped envelope, and curling yellowed photographs spilled out from it. She looked at them. In one, a delicate woman, overwhelmed by an elaborate coiffure, perched imperiously on a rococo side chair. Mara brought the picture closer, noticing the hesitancy of the smile on the woman's deeply colored lips and the direction of her gaze. The woman's eyes were fixed on the round-faced, dapper man at her side, who sported an infectious grin and a pomaded helmet of black hair. A young girl, blond ringlets escaping from a bow, stood between them, linking her hands with theirs. They formed this little chain for the camera again and again in the other photos, captured at Christmas holidays, birthdays, Easters. The innocence and immediacy of the young family transfixed Mara, and she could almost feel her fingers interlaced with theirs. This was precisely the human element that she had hoped to keep out of the case.

As she pored back over the photographs, trying to formulate questions that might defuse their emotional resonance, Mara saw that the surfaces of walls, tables, and mantels surrounding the young Baum family overflowed with paintings, sculptures, silver, and woven tapestries. When she looked closely at certain pictures, she saw
The Chrysalis.
The artwork started to morph into instruments of destruction. A silver chalice became the butt of a rifle. A striking sculpture turned into a blade. A richly embroidered tapestry formed a noose. A priceless painting depicted a gas chamber. The Baums' smiles melted into screams, and the little girl between them cried.

Mara looked over at Hilda Baum's beaming face; the photographs had the desired effect. “These are pictures of your family,” Mara pronounced somewhat hesitantly.

“Yes. With
The Chrysalis,
of course.”

Mara felt blood seeping from her wounds. She needed to turn everyone's attention away from these sympathetic pictures as quickly as she could. If she didn't, she risked losing not only the case but also herself to the Baums.

It took all of her strength to try again with a different line of questioning. Mara needed to lance Hilda with
DeClerck,
make plain her failure to search, and then stab her with the German Art Restitution Commission release. “Ms. Baum, in late 1945 and 1946, the year following the war, what efforts did you make to find
The Chrysalis
?”

Hilda sampled her tea and then answered deliberately. “The year following the war. Let me see if I can remember, Ms. Coyne. I think I spent much of that time trying to find my parents. I confess my search for
The Chrysalis
really didn't start until I learned that the Nazis had killed them.”

Again, Mara tried to steer away from the Baums' personal story. “Ms. Baum, I would request that you respond only to my inquiry about
The Chrysalis.
”

“Can you please repeat the question?”

“In late 1945 and 1946, did you look for
The Chrysalis
?”

“No, Ms. Coyne, as I mentioned already, I focused on finding my parents. Other than that, I really have no memories of the last year of the war. It is as if on the first day of peace, I awoke. I went directly to the Red Cross, where there were lists of people who had survived the concentration camps. My parents' names were not on those lists. I went roaming throughout Italy, where I was living at the time, throughout any part of Europe I was permitted to enter, trying to find them—”

Mara broke in, “Ms. Baum, please just answer the question I asked. About
The Chrysalis.
”

Hilda's lawyer struggled to stand up. “Ms. Coyne, I object to your last statement. You opened the door with your question, and my client should be permitted to answer, in her own words and in her own way.”

Mara winced. He was right. Any attempt Mara might make to take Hilda's obfuscation up with the judge on motion or in a middeposition phone call would backfire: Mara would seem heartless and unreasonable. So she gestured for Hilda to continue.

“I spent late 1945 and 1946 combing through refugee camps, interviewing anyone I could find who might have crossed my parents' path as they made their way across Europe from the Netherlands. My parents thought they had been granted safe passage to Italy to see my husband, Giuseppe, and me where his connections could offer some kind of protection for them. They had to travel via Berlin, of course: All international trains had to pass through Berlin at that time.” Tears formed in Hilda's eyes as she recalled her parents' innocent trust of the Nazi officers who'd showed up at their home early one morning with visas and train tickets, despite the fact that their own daughter had tried for months to procure those same tickets and visas without success.

“They so wanted to believe, because they needed to get out of the occupied Netherlands after they'd been classified as Jews. Father's grandfather, you see—an ardent Catholic, by all accounts—had been born Jewish but converted as a child. Somehow the Nazis managed to hunt down any weak link in someone's lineage. I continued to receive my father's letters, which arrived more and more sporadically due to the vagaries of the diplomatic pouch. While they were unfailingly pleasant, I knew that my parents' lives must have become a living hell—”

“Ms. Baum, you are straying very far from my questions. Let's refocus on your attempts to find
The Chrysalis.
”

“Ms. Coyne, I am an old woman. You're asking me to recount events that happened over sixty years ago. To properly remember them, I must review them in order.” Mara surrendered to Hilda's trump card. No judge in the world would let Mara cut off Hilda's litany if she claimed it was necessary for her full recollection of the facts.

“From Italy, my husband and I did what we could to protect them. We were able to get my parents a letter, signed by the reichskommissar of the Netherlands, Seyss-Inquart. I know what it said by heart:

No security or police measures of any kind are to be carried out against the Jew and Dutch citizens, Erich and Cornelia Baum, who reside in Amsterdam….

We thought they'd be safe, that the letter would protect them. But Father's passion, his art, was too much of a temptation for the Nazis. I suspected they would want Father's art collection. Not the Impressionists so much. The Nazis' hatred for ‘degenerate' modern art was well known, although they could not ignore its value in trade. No, I surmised the Nazis would covet those old masters and German portraits that my father had collected early on. The Nazis stalked my parents for those paintings, harassed them for them, deprived them of what few liberties they had as so-called Jews just to get to them. They threatened to arrest them if they left the house without the stars my parents often refused to wear, unless they handed the paintings over. The Nazis tried everything short of outright hauling them off to concentration camps. But the Seyss-Inquart letter put a stop to the harassment, and being good, obedient Nazis, they wouldn't dare defy Seyss-Inquart's letter. Not in the Netherlands, at least. So they staged the trip to Italy.”

Liquid warmth spread across Mara's lip. She tasted blood. She'd been biting her lip throughout Hilda's testimony.

“In 1946, in refugee camps, I finally met some people who knew what had happened to my parents in the Berlin train station and beyond: a sweeper from the Berlin station and two concentration camp survivors, Jewish acquaintances of my parents from Amsterdam. When my parents' train pulled into Berlin, a Nazi officer presented them with a document, in which Father would agree to sign away his art collection and tell them its whereabouts. Father refused to sign, waving the Seyss-Inquart letter in front of them. But with my parents out of the Netherlands and actually before them with the loot nearly in hand, the letter did not deter the Nazis. They disengaged my parents' car from the train and then dragged my parents into Nazi headquarters in Berlin for interrogation. They tortured my parents. Father first, to get him to sign away the art collection. When he resisted, screaming that he would not, they whipped Mother in front of him. Father remained stalwart.

“So, they put my parents on another train, this one going toward Munich, to Dachau. When their torments yielded nothing, the Nazis shot my father to death in the public square in the center of the prison, in front of all the prisoners. After this, Mother had no value alive, so they killed her at Dachau. With the death of my parents, the Nazis were free to confiscate the rest of the art collection. Including
The Chrysalis.
”

Silence. The cross-examination Mara had at the ready could not be asked. In the stillness that followed, Mara could almost hear her grandmother gasp.

Hilda stared at Mara, her eyes triumphant. “So, to answer your question, Ms. Coyne, I began my search for
The Chrysalis
after I learned all of this.”

fourteen

AMSTERDAM, 1942

“W
ELCOME HOME, MR. BAUM, SIR.”

Willem opens the door for Erich as he crosses the threshold to his home and then helps him off with his overcoat. His once elegant cashmere coat is now emblazoned with the garish yellow of a crude star, cut as if by the dull-edged scissors of a kindergarten child. Though labeled a Jew by the Nazis, Erich cannot quite think of himself as one.

As the coat lifts off his shoulders, Erich feels the weight of the star lift off him as well, allowing his stature to elevate and his shoulders to square. For this one fleeting moment, he can almost bear the day's humiliation of calling on old colleagues in hopes that they'll ignore Reichskommissar Seyss-Inquart's rules prohibiting Jews from working in the financial industry, a necessary exercise now that an Aryan “trustee” has taken over his insurance business, leaving him with no livelihood. He abides this shame every day during his long walk to and from the business district, as Jews are no longer permitted to ride in cars or on public transport.

“Thank you, Willem.” Erich marvels that the servants have stayed, though he reminds himself that his house has been their home as long as it's been his, and he supposes they have nowhere else to go. No one is hiring help these days, not even the Nazis or their Dutch henchmen, and he and Cornelia can still provide the servants with meals and shelter, though cash is now scarce since the reichskommissar forbids Jews from withdrawing money even from their own bank accounts. Yet he feels like a fraud as the servants rush to minister to him. Outside these doors, he is the abomination unworthy of subservience, and they are pure Aryan gold.

“Erich, is that you?” He hears his wife's voice ring out from the parlor.

“Yes, dear. Who else?” These days they have no callers, so different from the halcyon days before the occupation. Their former friends are afraid to be seen in the home of Jews.

As Erich walks toward the parlor, he runs his fingers along the dark rectangular markings on the faded red silk damask walls, scars where paintings once hung. Not for the first time, he says a silent prayer of thanks that he listened to his daughter and removed his paintings to France before the Netherlands fell to the Nazis on May 14, 1940. Otherwise, Erich would have had to hand them over to the reichskommissar's local band of government-sanctioned art looters, the Dienststelle Mühlmann, in compliance with the ordinance requiring Jews to surrender all valuables to the Dienststelle Mühlmann's agent, the Lippmann, Rosenthal and Co. Bank. Though he turned over only the few, lesser paintings that remained on his walls when the ordinance was issued, the Nazis have heard rumors that he once had other treasures and now hound him for their location.

“A letter has come. From Hilda.”

He hurries into his wife's rosy Victorian domain with its rococo murals of cherubs taking flight, so different from the austere décor and uncluttered surfaces of his study. The parlor's shelves and tabletops are littered with silver frames of every imaginable shape and size, capturing events from a life that has passed. Cornelia sits in her usual wingback chair near the fireplace with an envelope, rather than her usual needlepoint, perched on her tightly closed knees.

“What does she say?” Erich is almost afraid to ask. Their daughter Hilda's letters have grown increasingly rare and ever more filled with unwelcome news.

“I daren't open it, Erich. It is addressed to you.”

“To me?” He is confused; Hilda's letters are usually directed to his wife.

“Yes, and it came by the embassy pouch.”

He rushes to take the envelope from Cornelia's hand and then slices it open with an ivory-handled letter opener from the parlor desk. A second, sealed envelope flutters out onto the floor.

After reaching down to grab the fallen letter, he sits in the wingback chair facing his wife's. His hands shake as he tries to open the second envelope without breaking its ornate waxen seal. Only then does he pore over the two letters.

“What do they say, Erich?” Cornelia looks at him, her eyes brimming with expectation.

He hesitates, but there is no way to soften the news. “She cannot get us visas to Milan.”

The hope pours out of her eyes in tears. “What will we do, Erich?”

“She did manage to get us this.” He places the document enclosed in Hilda's letter into his weeping wife's hands.

Her cries stop for a moment as she dabs her eyes with an embroidered handkerchief and reads the missive. “So this will protect us from the reichskommissar's deportations and the other ordinances against Jews? From the Dienststelle Mühlmann's questioning?”

“So it seems. For now, at least.”

“But what of your brothers and sisters and their families?”

“The letter does not safeguard them. And Hilda would have arranged protection for her dear Maddie if she could.”

Cornelia's sobs resume. He rises and runs a consoling but preoccupied hand along her shoulder as he leaves the parlor. He wishes he could comfort her, but there is something he must do. Something he had hoped to avoid.

His body feels heavy as he climbs the stairs to his study. The once gloriously spartan room, which had brought him such peace, now serves as a stark, even barren, reminder of all they have lost—all they still stand to lose. He sits at his desk and begins to compose a letter of his own, a letter to his daughter.