The Other Schindlers (4 page)
Read The Other Schindlers Online
Authors: Agnes Grunwald-Spier
Bertha persuaded the CDIR to help out and this resulted in those with special needs receiving financial assistance. Bertha Bracey was a courageous woman who had an unerring instinct for what needed to be done. She had started her work in Europe as a young woman in the early 1920s: ‘Her main challenge was to encourage youth in exploring new attitudes towards international peace and personal responsibilities in the new democratic Weimar republic.’
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Her faith as a Quaker made her strong and one of her favourite phrases was ‘hold on tight’.
The phrase ‘hold on tight’ might be recalled as a mother’s behest to her child or a needed instruction in the early days of the motor car; but Bertha would urge it is also a reminder that there are times in our lives when we need to hold on tight to our faith. And, as we reflect on the dark times she lived through, we know that she spoke from the depths of experience.
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Her knowledge of Germany gave her great influence in the early days of Hitler’s regime. ‘Bertha was one of three or four British Friends who were able to exert pressure through eminent people in church and state both in Britain and Germany in order to secure the release of individuals in political custody.’ She was awarded the OBE in 1942 in recognition of her work for refugees, and she was generally recognised as having achieved much in creating the Germany Emergency Committee (GEC) as its secretary from April 1933. On 25 April a Case Committee was appointed, and it reported on 3 May that it had eighteen cases under review. By September 1939 it had 22,000.
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Her work with the GEC from April 1933 was summed up:
Bertha Bracey had borne the chief responsibility for building up the organisation and for directing its work. Her creative vision, her sympathy for the friendless and
persecuted, which she invited many others to share, and her wide knowledge of the refugee problem had had an influence far beyond the confines of Friends House and Bloomsbury House, and had brought her the gratitude of large numbers of those she had helped.
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Towards the end of her long life – she was 95 when she died – she wrestled with Parkinson’s disease, and when it was particularly troublesome she referred to it light-heartedly as ‘Mr Parkinson’s visiting again’.
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Her family did not know a great deal about her doings. There is mention in family correspondence of Bertha going to Poland after the Nazi occupation and bringing out mothers and
children
. Her niece Alma has written:
Bertha was very reticent and never talked about her self-imposed commitments. This last episode – re Poland, cannot be verified I don’t think – it’s sort of word of mouth. Friends certainly backed her and her rescue team but it was all obviously hush hush and the family really knew nothing about her activities … A brave and far-sighted woman with remarkable organizing ability. She had high standards.
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She was an inspiration to many, even towards the end of her life. A letter sent to her, dated 1 April 1988, refers to the words of one of her carers in the nursing home: ‘She is wonderful, we are supposed to minister to her but she ministers to us. Whenever I feel a bit low a visit to Bertha bucks me up in no time.’
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‘Is there anything I can bring you?’ asked a visitor of hers in the nursing home during her last days. Bertha roused herself from a partial slumber to the alertness we remember so well. ‘Yes,’ she responded, ‘bring me glad tidings of great joy.’
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In July 2001 a sculpture representing the family was installed and dedicated in the courtyard of Friends House in London. It was sculpted by Naomi Blake, one of the victims of the Nazis saved by the Kindertransport. Its plaque reads:
To honour Bertha Bracey (1893–1989)
who gave practical leadership to Quakers in quietly rescuing and re-settling thousands of Nazi victims and lone children between 1933–1948
Charles Fawcett (1919–2008)
was born in Virginia in the USA into a privileged family. He had a difficult start as the family home was burnt down five days after his birth and his mother died when he was 5, followed by his father two years later. He was therefore brought up as an Episcopalian by his mother’s sister – Aunt Lily Shumate – in Greenville, a small town in South Carolina. The family
were originally Huguenots who arrived in Virginia in the 1660s. Consequently, he grew up as a Southern gentleman of the old school:
His romanticism, sense of honour, attitude to women, enormous charm, modesty, old-fashioned courtly manners, are all a product of the acceptable face of the old South. His accent remains that of the Virginia gentleman and he has sincerely
subscribed
to its rigid honour code all his life – the reverse of the narrow bigotry often attributed to the South.
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Charles, who lived in Chelsea for many years, told me he was brought up to help people and to be a Good Samaritan. He said his hometown was a place of just one religion, where although there was segregation, black people were well treated because there were no plantations. Charlie recalled that his aunt had two black servants who lived in the family home, and when he came back from school he went to see them before he saw his aunt. Everybody in the sleepy little town had the same ethics and he grew up knowing he had to do the right thing. The people of Greenville ‘were really good people who helped each other’.
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April Fawcett, Charles’ wife, discovered a letter from Charles’ mother, Helen Hortense. Helen had married late in life and had four children after the age of 40. She developed breast cancer and was treated in the Mayo Clinic in Baltimore. A month before she died she wrote to her sister Lily entrusting her with the upbringing of her children. In the poignant letter, dated 5 June 1922, she wrote: ‘I thank God that I can leave my babies with someone who cares for them and will love them and make them mind too. Please always make them obey you, dear, and when they are grown they will be glad to tell you of your having made them mind.’
I think poor Helen Hortense would have been astounded to learn what a wonderful job her sister Lily made of bringing up Charles. She would have been truly amazed to know how many people he helped during his long and
colourful
life. It has been suggested that his early experiences influenced the whole of his life:
It is not over fanciful to suggest that the pattern of his entire life – the quest for the most elegant and elevated of women, the immersion in the romance and glamour of Paris, Rome – as well as remote portions of the jungles of the Congo and the Amazon, was fashioned from memories of his unhappy childhood. Always
responding
to causes of the underdog, deliberately seeking out hardships and dangers – restless and adventurous, he treated the natives of the Sahara with the same
courtesy
that he showed to the members of the various royal families with whom he became close friends over the years – trusted and admired by one and all.
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Charles was a 22-year-old art student in Paris when the Germans invaded France. He had worked his way around Europe using his assorted talents to keep himself; apparently he received tips on his trumpet-playing from Louis Armstrong and learnt wrestling from a professional. He had joined the American Ambulance Corps in 1938; later on in the war his flatmate Bill (William Holland) told him a lot of wounded British troops were being sent to Germany in a few days. Bill was half-German, through his mother who was a German aristocrat, related to the German commander-in-chief of occupied France, which was how he knew what was happening. Bill and Charles ‘borrowed’ an ambulance from the Ambulance Corps garage, rescued the troops from their hospital and set off for free France. It is alleged that on leaving the hospital Charles told the POWs, ‘Gentlemen, consider yourselves liberated.’ A British voice shouted, ‘You’re a Yank.’ Charles responded, ‘Never confuse a Virginian with a Yankee.’
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After several adventures they ended up in Marseilles and Charlie remembered that he knew a Countess Lily Pastré, whose family home was just outside the city. She took the prisoners in but sent Charlie into town where he met up with Varian Fry.
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Charlie’s countess had started an organisation called
Pour que L’Esprit Vive
, which still exists today. It was created during the economic and social crisis of the 1930s to help artists and intellectuals who were often living in precarious
conditions
. As the war and occupation progressed, she devoted her magnificent home and fortune to sheltering artistic exiles who were mostly Jewish. She protected the harpist Lily Laskine (1893–1988), the pianists Youra Guller (1895–1981) and Monique Haas (1909–87), and the Czech painter Rudolf Kundera (1911–2005) lived with her for three years. She also paid for medical care for the Romanian Jewish pianist Clara Haskil (1895–1960), and in 1942 helped her escape to Vevey in Switzerland. Since 1963, a prestigious piano prize in Clara Haskil’s name has been awarded every two years.
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It is said that she also housed the Spanish cellist Pablo Casals (1876–1973), who was a Catholic, and the famous black American dancer Josephine Baker, who found fame in France.
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After the war, Josephine was honoured by the French government with the highest Medal of the Resistance (with officier’s rosette) and made a Chevalier of the Legion d’Honneur for her work in the Resistance – which included smuggling secret messages written on her music sheets.
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Charlie says he did not know anything about Jews as a young man because he did not come across any until he was a young art student in Paris. One day Jewish students were involved in a fight, and to help them out Charlie kicked a table over. Some considerable time later he met them again, in Marseilles, and they told him about Varian Fry and his work with the refugees. Charlie became impressed with Fry’s work and joined his team of workers. He told Fry how shocked he had been at discovering German anti-Semitism. Whilst his story
was not as dramatic as Fry’s experiences in Berlin in 1936, it obviously shocked him. He had been in a café where Jews had been drinking coffee. When they left, he saw two German officers point to the cups and say, ‘Take these away and sterilise them.’
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Varian wrote with obvious great affection about Charlie:
Charlie was a youngster from the South – Georgia, I think – who had been doing ‘art’ work in Paris before the war. I put that word in quotation marks because as far as I could see Charlie’s conception of art consisted of drawings of pretty girls, preferably nude. He had many feminine admirers, and there was always at least one of them in the office as long as he worked for us …
As a doorman, Charlie had one great drawback. He couldn’t speak anything but English, and most of the refugees didn’t speak any English at all. But his
ambulance-driver’s
uniform awed the over-insistent ones, and his good nature cheered the depressed among them. If few understood what he said, none disliked him. In fact, I think he was probably the most popular member of the staff.
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Charlie was an impressive figure in his army greatcoat. Mary Jayne Gold, the young American heiress who bankrolled much of Varian Fry’s work, described her first meeting with him in the Hotel Continental as she made her way down a broad flight of stairs into the hotel lobby late one afternoon:
up the stairs flapped a large khaki of definite military cut. Inside was a very tall young man with hair of about the same sandy colour as the coat. Another fellow of normal proportions and dress followed him. Instinctively, I retreated a few steps. The tall one introduced himself as Charles Fawcett, then presented his friend, Dick Ball. He glanced around to see if we were out of earshot and made me take a few steps back until I was pressed up against the wall. Leaning beside me as if we were already hiding from the police, he told me he had learned that I had an airplane, so he had come right over. I looked at his well-cut boyish features and curly light hair while he disclosed in a soft Georgia accent that he and his friend wanted to fly to Gibraltar. He was visibly disappointed when I told him that I had left my plane in Paris.
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She described him as ‘doorman and reception clerk’ at the new office on Rue Grignan. He told her that he kept order when people got ‘nervous’ and then bent over and spoke in a lower tone. ‘I’m really the bouncer just in case anybody gets in there that doesn’t belong.’ He stood up straight ‘and drew his magnificent khaki coat together. “See? It sort of impresses people. I’ve had to cut the brass buttons off – but it still looks official … almost.”’ Mary said, ‘It sure does.’
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The situation had to be fluid and Charlie wasn’t just a bouncer. In September he and his chum Dick Ball were escorting groups of the younger and more experienced Resistance workers over the low mountains near the coast to the Franco-Spanish border. This became one of the regular escape routes, often led by Lisa and Hans Fittko. According to Varian, at least 100 people were estimated to have escaped that way in the six months that followed.
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In December 1940 Charlie left Marseilles whilst Varian was in Vichy trying to help those on his list who were trapped in camps. The area of Vichy France contained 120 concentration camps, containing about 60,000 civilian internees, and between 25–35,000 forced labourers and foreign workers, often in appalling conditions. ‘It seemed like the whole of the unoccupied zone was one great, heartless prison.’
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Charlie had become aware that the police knew of his work for the French Resistance and for security it was time to move on. Varian later described the preparations for Charlie’s departure:
Charlie had been loaded down with secret papers and reports, including some for the British … Since he was a sculptor they had simply put some of the reports in the heads he had modeled, and Charlie had poured in wet plaster to seal them up. One of the most secret reports, listing the Spanish Republican refugees in hiding in France, and urging visas for them, had gone in to the third valve of Charlie’s trumpet. Charlie had tightened all the valves with a wrench covered with a cloth and had learned a couple of tunes he could play without ever having to use the third valve, in case any questions were asked. Still other reports had been pasted into the rim of his suitcase.
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