The last tycoons: the secret history of Lazard Frères & Co (3 page)

Economic reality quickly overtook the Rohatyns. Felix's grandfather was a bit of a speculator, and in the hangover from the Great Depression that swept across Europe in the early 1930s, he "rapidly lost all of his money," causing the failure of his bank. Thus began the small family's quasi-nomadic existence in Eastern Europe as Alexander moved from one of his father's remaining breweries to another. The first stop was Romania, where the family moved shortly after Felix was born so that his father could manage a brewery there. They returned briefly to Vienna in 1935, but in the wake of the July 1934 assassination of Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss by the Austrian Nazis the growing specter of anti-Semitism was palpable. "I mean, the Austrians were Nazis themselves," Felix explained some seventy years later. The family quickly moved again, this time to France and in particular to Orleans, a city south of Paris on the Loire River. Alexander became the manager of another of his father's breweries.

Once there, though, Felix's parents divorced. "A very traumatic thing for me," Felix told
The New Yorker.
And when he was eight, his mother sent him to a French-speaking boarding school in Switzerland. "I remember that at the time I was so unathletic and overweight that I had great difficulty in tying my shoelaces," he said. "It took me so long to get dressed in the morning that I would go to bed with my pajamas over most of my clothes in order to save time. It was not a very glorious exercise." While Felix was away at school, his mother married Henry Plessner, a prosperous scion of a Polish Jewish family that owned a precious-metals trading business. The Plessners moved to Paris, where Henry ran the family operation. Plessner, a devoted Zionist, developed significant business relationships with both Lazard Freres et Cie in Paris and Les Fils Dreyfus, a small Swiss bank founded in Basel in 1813. Although Felix didn't get along with his stepfather at first, Plessner's relationships would prove to be very valuable to Felix.

The story of Felix's escape from the Nazis is intense and personal, and says much about his outlook on the world--especially when the multiple layers of veneer that he has applied to it over the years are stripped away. In 1938, Felix left his Swiss boarding school and returned to Paris. He remembered the continuous droning of the air raid sirens in the streets of Paris following the German invasion of Poland, and France and England's declaration of war. He carried a gas mask with him to school. There were big posters all over Paris declaring that the French would defeat the Germans. In May 1940, as the German armies were approaching the outskirts of Paris, he mistook for thunder the artillery outside the window of his luxurious Sixteenth Arrondissement apartment. His mother, Plessner's mother, and the family's longtime Polish cook fled Paris and headed south in their car. Strapped to the roof were mattresses. They also took with them as many gas coupons as they could find. In what is now one of the legendary Felix stories--whether apocryphal or true is not clear--his mother had him open the end of several tubes of Kolynos toothpaste and fill them with gold coins from a collection his stepfather had assembled. His stepfather, meanwhile, who remained a Polish citizen, had already been taken to an internment camp in Brittany for Jewish refugees. His outspoken Zionism had landed him on a Gestapo list. Thus began Felix's well-documented two-year odyssey across three continents, which took him and his family to Biarritz, Cannes, Marseille, Oran, Casablanca, Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro, and then finally to New York City--"the classic route, false papers, the whole bit," he told the
Wall Street Journal
in a 1975 profile. His harrowing escape across war-torn Europe couldn't have been more different from that of his future Lazard partners Andre Meyer and Pierre David-Weill, although in a way it was probably every bit as harrowing as the clandestine existence in the French countryside of Michel David-Weill--Pierre's only son.

At the outset, Felix's mother decided the family would be safe if it could get to Spain. So they set out to get across the Spanish border before France fell to the Germans. "We started driving down with thousands of other cars and trucks and bicycles and people walking along the roads," he explained more than sixty years later. "The roads were jammed, and every now and then German planes were coming over and strafing a little bit here and there. We kept going down [toward Spain], and we had to bribe people at gas stations to sell us coupons." Felix was eleven years old, and the Germans were sweeping through France. The family managed to get to Biarritz, the glamorous French city on the Atlantic coast adjacent to the Spanish border. Just before the Germans arrived in Biarritz--and even though they did not have Spanish visas--the family went to the closest town on the French-Spanish border, Saint-Jean-de-Luz, a picturesque fishing port, where guides were known to help refugees navigate the border crossing. But Plessner's elderly mother wasn't strong enough for a hike across the Pyrenees. So just as the Germans were occupying Biarritz and marching past the optimistic French posters--"something I will never forget," Felix said--the family set off again, this time for Cannes, on the Mediterranean.

The armistice had just been signed in June 1940, creating a divided France: German-occupied France and Vichy France. For a family of Jews from Vienna, there were not many good options. Biarritz was in German-occupied France. Cannes was in Vichy France, although still unoccupied by the Germans. "And we thought, clearly it's not good either way, but we'll be better off in Vichy France than in German-occupied France," Felix explained. "So we decided to try to drive down to Vichy France and to go south in order to ultimately try to get visas to go someplace. But we didn't really have any papers to get across these demarcation lines. And my mother talked to a guy in a hotel or something about some back roads that we could use to get across there, where there wouldn't be any German checkpoints. It was very early in the occupation. And so we took a secondary road out of Biarritz and we came around, out of the woods, and there was this long line of cars because there's a German checkpoint. And I didn't know much, but I knew enough to know this was bad news. And so we were there in this line and we couldn't turn, so we were inching along. And the car was getting closer and closer. I knew there was a young German soldier checking something. And finally we got there, and he decided to light a cigarette. And he waved the car ahead of us through, and my mother took her driver's license and waved it at him and he motioned us through. I don't think he stopped the car behind us or two cars behind us, but I mean it was very close. It was very close." Felix told
The New Yorker
that ever since this life-or-death incident, "I have felt that I had a great debt to somebody somewhere." Of this same incident, he told the
New York Times
columnist Bob Herbert in 2005, "It was a miracle." Somehow his mother was able to get messages to his stepfather, who had managed to escape, along with some others, from the internment camp. "As the Germans were coming in one side of the camp, they jumped over the other side and four of them stole a car and drove south," Felix explained. "And because they were always just a few miles ahead of the German columns, everybody thought they were Germans, so they got gasoline and stuff like that." Felix and the women kept driving south to the Mediterranean and stopped at a
pension de famille--
a small hotel--between Cannes and Marseille, where at last Plessner joined them. They stayed at the pension for nearly a year.

The Rohatyns' next objective was to try to secure visas to get out of Vichy France into a safer country, preferably America, which to Felix represented freedom and opportunity. "There were always hidden radios wherever we were going--because you weren't supposed to listen to overseas broadcasts--but I had managed to listen to Roosevelt and Churchill speaking, even though I didn't speak the language very well," he explained. Roosevelt inspired him. But visas to America were extremely difficult, if not impossible, for Jews to obtain. Visas to South America were slightly more plentiful, but only on the express condition that once they were obtained, the holders would make no effort to actually immigrate to the specified country. "Securing these visas was a dangerous and agonizingly difficult process," Herbert wrote in the
Times.
Exacerbating Felix's parents' overall concern was the deal the Vichy government made with the Germans, in April 1941, authorizing the roundup of all foreign-born Jews for deportation to the concentration camps. In all, some seventy-six thousand foreign-born Jews were deported from France with the help of the Vichy government. Some twenty-five hundred returned. The Rohatyns had to get out, fast. Felix's parents sought to get Brazilian visas but found themselves far down the list--number 447, to be exact--and their prospects for escape were growing dimmer.

Then another miracle occurred. This one, which Felix discovered the details of only recently and by serendipity, involved the courageous intervention of a relatively unknown Brazilian diplomat named Luiz Martins de Souza Dantas, the wartime Brazilian ambassador to France. Souza Dantas helped at least eight hundred Jews escape the Nazis and has since been dubbed "the Schindler of Brazil." He died in 1954. A recent book about him is titled
Quixote in the Darkness.
Souza Dantas, who was related by marriage to Katharine Graham (who in turn was related to Andre Meyer and to George Blumenthal, another Great Man of Lazard in the early twentieth century), helped Felix and his family obtain Brazilian diplomatic visas. They "looked very elegant," Felix said of the documents.

The Brazilian visas appeared to give Felix and his family a safety net, but they still hadn't given up the hope of obtaining the coveted safe passage to America. In pursuit of that dream, the family purchased tickets on a ship going from Marseille to Oran, a bustling port city in northwestern Algeria. The idea was to go from North Africa to Lisbon, one of the few places where it was still possible to secure visas to America. But the passage to Oran did not go smoothly, either. "As a last step, you had to go see somebody that was on an Italian commission because the Italians had taken over that part of France," Felix explained. "And they didn't like our papers, so they took us off the boat. And we didn't really know what was going to happen to us." But two weeks later, they tried again to take the ship to Oran. This time they were not taken off the boat.

They made it to Oran just as it appeared the Germans were set to invade Algeria, too. So they quickly took a train to Casablanca, Morocco. Felix has seen the movie
Casablanca
so many times that the reality of his experience in the city is utterly intertwined with Bogart's portrayal of it, and he has difficulty separating fact from fiction. He remembered, though, regularly visiting the docks in Casablanca to figure out when they could get a boat to Lisbon. He also recalled meeting and befriending Leo Castelli, who after arriving in New York became one of the world's foremost dealers of contemporary art. Castelli, it turned out, had also secured safe passage through the use of a Brazilian visa. For months, the Rohatyns attempted to get passage on a boat to Lisbon. "There were not that many ships going to Lisbon, and it was hard to get on them," he explained. But eventually, around the beginning of 1941, they did get on a boat bound for Lisbon, which must have seemed like paradise because the electricity was still plentiful and the city was ablaze at night. "I think that was probably the best moment, where I felt really that we had crossed over from one side to another," he said about arriving in Lisbon. Felix enrolled in a French-Portuguese school. But within months, the Germans looked like they might go through Spain, invade Portugal, and close off access to the Mediterranean.

The time had come to finally leave Europe. Still hoping to get to America, "we went to the American Consulate and got in line on the quota," Felix told
The New Yorker.
"It was very much like Menotti's opera 'The Consul.' There was a wait of eighty-seven years or something." Part of the problem, Felix said, was there were "people at the State Department...who really didn't want any more Jewish refugees in America. So the visas were very hard to get and [required] a very long, long wait."

With time running out, the family decided to use their unusual Brazilian diplomatic visas and get on a ship to Rio. The cross-Atlantic passage, beginning on March 17, 1941, took some two and a half weeks. They had no idea whether, when they arrived in Rio, they would be shipped back to Europe, as had happened to other Jewish refugees who thought they were safely on their way to Panama or Cuba or even America. But in Rio, the family was welcomed with open arms. "They thought this was a great visa and rolled out the red carpet," Felix said. It was yet another miracle.

Once again, they set about trying to obtain visas to America. This time it was a fifteen-month wait. In the meantime, Felix enrolled in school, played soccer, and developed a love for horseback riding and the samba. "I became enamored of the samba, as music, as culture, as rhythm," the socially conservative Rohatyn explained somewhat improbably. "And as a reflection of what Brazil was all about, which at that time was the country that gave us refuge." Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto's version of "The Girl from Ipanema" is still one of his favorite songs. Finally, in June 1942, Felix and his family were able to get the American visas and boarded a DC-3 from Rio to Miami. The plane, though, made an unexpected stop on the Caribbean island of Trinidad, because of "military priorities" or some such reason, Felix remembered. "We thought, 'My God! Are we gonna get stuck here or sent back or what?'" Finally, after a few weeks on the island, they got on another plane to Miami. They had made it.