Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII (26 page)

We left the synagogue and made our way up to the Jewish graveyard, high above the town. The graveyard looked down over the Sidex steelworks. An old crippled woman, dressed in rags, struggled to unlock the padlock on the gate. Yes, she said, she thought she had a Rosenberg gravestone here, but she didn't know where to find it.

There were grand avenues of graves, all overgrown, and we walked up and down reading all the names we could manage before it got too dark. Below us orange flames from one corner of the Sidex plant were now lighting up the contours of that hideous creation and marking out the clean black lines of the delta.

11.
Crasna

I
t was quite possible we might not be allowed across the Ukrainian border, Ion announced the next morning as we left Galatz behind. He had been unable to get his passport renewed in time for our journey, though an official had told him he might be able to negotiate a day pass at the border. I said we would talk them into it. Ion shrugged. “If we get un type soviétique, we have no chance.”

Of all the places in her life, Vera had well and truly closed the book on Crasna.

It was only thanks to Annie Samuelli that I had heard the name at all, though Uncle Siegfried also mentioned Max's “6,000-acre estate” but without giving any clue as to where it was. With the package from Canada, however, I had also received a photograph album that included pictures of Vera at a large, elegant house. One showed Vera as a child with long blond plaits cradling a dog in front of a large stable; others as a young woman striking poses on a veranda. But again, there was nothing to say where the house was.

“Krasno” is the Russian form of “Crasna,” and “Illshi” is the name of one of the old boyar, or noble, families who owned the land around this part of northern Bukovina in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Northern Bukovina changed hands several times in the twentieth century. In the early years of the century it was still a part of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire, but with the empire's dissolution at the end of the First World War, it was given to Romania. Then in June 1940, when Germany, the Soviet Union, and Hungary were all vying for slices of Romania, northern Bukovina was taken by the Soviet Union. Today northern Bukovina is in Ukraine.

While it was almost impossible for Jews in Romania to own land in the early years of the century, on these isolated eastern marches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire a wealthy German Jew might gain acceptance as a landowner. And it was when Crasna was part of Austria-Hungary that Max purchased the estate, paying for it with the riches accumulated in Galatz.

Acquiring the estate at Crasna must have been the achievement of a lifetime for Max Rosenberg. He had become a boyar himself—a feudal landowner and a de facto nobleman. And yet no sooner had he bought the place than he was forced to abandon it for several years, because in 1914 he was called up to fight for Germany.

Vera's earliest memory, or at least the earliest she ever avowed, was of the outbreak of the First World War. It was another story she told only to her Home Office interviewer. Vera was six when war broke out in the summer of 1914. At the time her family, apparently oblivious to the possibility of war, were planning a holiday on the Dutch coast, a good place for the various branches of this cosmopolitan tribe to come together.

While Max stayed behind in Romania, or perhaps at Crasna, Vera, her mother, and Wilfred, then just three, travelled west from Galatz, taking the train to Berlin. The idea, Vera said, was to break the journey in Berlin, where Ralph, who had been brought over from his English prep school, was to join them for the last leg.

Taking up the narrative, the immigration officer then wrote: “Miss Atkins says that her family had just arrived in Berlin when the outbreak of war was announced,” but his dry tone quite failed to disguise what must have been the panic of that moment: Hilda and her young family stepped off the Orient Express in Berlin in early August 1914, looking
forward to a family holiday, only to hear the news that their entire world had fallen apart and all the Great Powers were at war. No longer could Hilda continue west to Holland; nor could she return easily to the east, as armies would be gathering in that direction.

Her mother's horror at her position must have made an impression on six-year-old Vera. For on top of everything, Hilda now found she was physically trapped in Germany, which for her was the enemy. Her sister May and her husband Anthony were already ensconced in England, in a new house they had bought on the Sussex coast at Winchelsea. Two of her brothers, Montague and Arthur Atkins, were volunteering to fight for the Imperial forces, and May would soon be working for British postal censorship. Yet Hilda's German husband and his brothers were sure to be called up to fight for Germany, where she would now have to stay for the duration of the war.

Her only recourse was to take refuge with her husband's German relatives, and she continued on to Cologne. The immigration interviewer, summarising Vera's words, put it like this: “The outbreak of war naturally changed their plans, and they then travelled to Cologne to join her father's parents and remained there throughout the war.”

Stories about wartime in Cologne circulated among the family in later years. Ralph joked about how his mother used to hang a Union Jack in his bedroom in case he should forget whose side he was really on. Wilfrid, presented with swede to eat in Cornwall, protested that it reminded him of the gruel they lived on in wartime Cologne. Hilda's children had the company of their cousins, Gert and Klaus, also growing up in Cologne, and saw as much as possible of their cousins Trude, Aenne, and Hilde, daughters of Max's sister Bertha, who lived in Hanover. But they saw almost nothing of their father, who was now serving on the Eastern Front. Of the Rosenberg brothers, Uncle Siegfried recorded, at least two won the Iron Cross in the First World War.

For Hilda this was a miserable period, as Vera's immigration officer's report confirmed: “Miss Atkins told me that although she was only a child at the time she remembers the unhappy atmosphere of strain in the house, where her father's people naturally had the German point of view and her mother, an Englishwoman, had quite other sympathies. Later
they left the grandparents and went to live on their own in Cologne, where they were taught by a governess who was a refugee from Belgium.”

Ion said we were now closing in on Romania's border with Ukraine. Everyone was wearing peaked woolly hats. Horses and carts outnumbered cars, and giant rusty pipes curled up out of fields and over roads. The first dirty snow appeared on the roadside, and we passed tourist signs for painted monasteries.

Suddenly I couldn't see anything but thick fog, wet on my face. We had been talking so much we hadn't noticed the steam rise from under our feet. Ion pulled up. We both jumped out, and he lifted the bonnet. The car was boiling over. Geese squawked at us. My greatest fear now was that the Mercedes wasn't going to make it to the border, but Ion said he had driven across the whole of Europe when Ceausilaescu fell. The Merc wouldn't let us down.

By dusk we had reached Radautz, a town right on the border, and we decided to try our luck with Ion's papers first thing in the morning.

I asked Ion if he thought there was any chance we would find the Rosenbergs' house. He said he thought it unlikely but not impossible. A few of the grander houses had been used by the Communists as schools or sanatoria, and today some old families from la belle époque were even trying to get their houses back. Ion himself was one of them. “We are called nostalgiques,” he said. Vera was not a nostalgic, I replied.

Why Vera's father and her two uncles had chosen to return to Romania after the First World War was not at first clear from Siegfried's memoir. Much of what the brothers had built up here before the war had now been destroyed—the shipyards on the Danube and the timber mills were all obliterated.

For Max, returning here meant starting again from nothing at the age of nearly fifty. Perhaps he had simply fallen in love with the place, and looking from my tiny hotel bedroom across the undulating forested landscape, framed by snow-tipped mountains, it was easy to see why. Crasna was now only about twenty-five miles away.

The next morning we found the frontier policeman at Radautz
sitting at a desk inside a wooden box, his bullet-shaped head bent over a large, filthy ledger, a big thumb tracing down a line as he laboriously filled in numbers, names, and dates in columns.

Another uniformed figure was slowly tearing off little slips of paper with serrated edges and giving them to people in a long queue.

Our man looked up eventually. He looked at Ion. Ion said something, and the man stared hard at me, then jerked his chin at Ion as if to say: Why are you wasting my time? Ion showed his papers and explained what we wanted, but the answer was niet. We had landed un type soviétique.

Not only was it impossible for Ion to get a day pass at this border, the man said, but I could not pass into Ukraine here, even with a visa. Crossing at this post was only for locals. We would have to go to the main north-south border post, at nearby Siret, and even then Ion would not be allowed across. I would have to go alone.

Trucks were lined up on the tarmac at the Siret border post; they weren't moving. I was now sitting in a yellow Trabant. It was unbelievably small, and I was hunched next to a man named Constantin, who wore a shiny black leather jacket, had dark-red cheeks, and smelled strongly of aftershave. Outside the temperature was plummeting, and a storm from Siberia was forecast.

Ion and I had found Constantin in the car park at the border, and I agreed to pay him fifty dollars to take me to Krasno'illshi. He told Ion that he knew exactly where it was and that he spoke French. Ion and I exchanged mobile telephone numbers. He insisted I be back by nightfall. Constantin was now talking to me in very fast Romanian with the odd French word thrown in, and he seemed to think I understood.

Soon several tall Romanian border guards were standing around the car, then bending double, their large, round, flat faces staring in through the windscreen. They were all wearing long green overcoats that looked like they weighed a ton. Despite the freezing cold their sheepskin earflaps were tied up on top of their caps. Outside scores of women with children wrapped up in thick wool scarves clutched little pieces of paper with serrated
edges. Contents of suitcases were tipped out and rifled through by great big hands as large Alsatians sniffed around them.

This entire frontier, carving northern Bukovina from Romania, had been slapped down in a matter of hours in June 1940, when Russia issued an ultimatum. Families living here had to take split-second decisions that would affect their entire lives. Anyone in the north who could rushed over to the south to be in Romania before the line was drawn. Those who didn't make it were trapped in the Soviet Union. For the next fifty years members of the same families, fellow Romanians, would grow up in different countries, visiting one another occasionally by crossing this hellish checkpoint.

Now it was the turn of the Ukrainian guards. “A book!” exclaimed one, asking me what my business was. “About a woman from Krasno'ill-shi? This is interesting to you?” He tilted his head. Eventually the border post spat us out the other side.

Constantin was chattering away again as we drove north into Ukraine towards the town of Czernovitz. Did he know where he was going? We turned sharply left, then stopped and took in an elderly couple loaded with baskets. At a place called Liborca the higher peaks of the Carpathians were suddenly visible, and we stopped again, where more rusting pipes looped over the road, and picked up an old man with a mouthful of gold teeth, and suddenly everyone in the car kept saying “Krasno'ill-shi.” We were trailing slowly behind a cart full of plump women sitting on logs, chewing gum.

Back across the River Siret again, we began to climb through woods, and soon we were winding through the streets of a wretched place called Ciudin, which I had found on my map. “Krasno'illshi 23 kilometres,” said a sign, but suddenly, about two kilometres further on, we were there.

“School, school, école, école.” I was trying to explain to Constantin that we must find the village school because it was my only hope of finding somebody who spoke French or English. We tried a senior school, where we were greeted by a thousand staring eyes, but here nobody spoke anything
but Russian. Krasno'illshi was a sizeable little town of plain houses lining muddy zigzagging streets, but I hardly noticed it, too busy looking for a large mansion with a lake and stables. Instead we passed a huge decaying pile of iron—a factory of some sort, with conveyor belts suspended in the air on what looked like pulleys ready to tumble any moment. We passed a large onion-domed church, newly painted pale blue and gold. And then we saw a mass of pretty bobble hats and plaits and little girls playing hopscotch. It was the junior school. Zinovia Iliut spoke French, they told me. She was the history teacher. She was sent for.

A round-faced woman with intelligent, dancing eyes and nut-brown skin, wearing a green sweater and long skirt, Zinovia appeared, half-smiling, half-suspicious. I explained I was a writer trying to find out about somebody who had once lived at Crasna. Did she know the history of the town? Did the name Rosenberg mean anything to her?

She looked quite blank and still nervous. No, she said emphatically. History here had been wiped out. “Avec le communisme, c'etait coupée,” she told me, making a chopping gesture with her hands.

Then Zinovia looked at me more closely. Where had I come from? How did I get here? “De Anglia,” piped up Constantin as if he had personally brought me all the way from Anglia.

“De Anglia?” she said, wide-eyed. “It is a miracle.” She looked at Constantin again for confirmation. He nodded smugly.

“Pas possible,” said Zinovia, and laughed. She took us through to a teachers' common room and, sitting down, explained that when this part of Bukovina was cut off from the southern part, everyone was told to forget their past. It was forbidden to teach the children about Romania for many years, and they did not learn their own language. They learned Russian. “We are a forgotten community. We have learned not to ask questions about the past.”