Warburg in Rome (2 page)

“I’m not suggesting anything like that, young man,” Morgenthau said. “But damn. We need Warburg’s money. It seems crass, I know. But there it is. We need his influence with the community. I’m in a box here, you know that, don’t you? The President gave me the Refugee Board—and no independent funding. I can’t sign a canteen chit without State and War cosigning. Damn!”

“But are you a Jew?” the man on the sofa asked Warburg.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Are you a Jew?”

Unaccountably, Warburg thought of the prayer shawl his father had offered him when he was sixteen, white wool with black stripes. His father had called it a
tallit
, said it had been his own grandfather’s, and that it was time for David to have it, for his bar mitzvah.

“Were you bar mitzvahed?” David had asked his father.

“Yes. I wore it.” He had held the shawl out to his son.

But David had stepped back, saying, “Have you been to temple since?”

His father had shaken his head no, all at once mute with what could only be read as shame.

“Well, I can’t do that,” David had said—the fierce integrity of youth.

His father forced his shoulders into a shrug, unable to hide his disappointment. “No matter, I suppose,” he said, and again indicated the cloth. “Maybe the stripes are black as a sign of mourning.” He then turned and walked away. His father never mentioned the
tallit
again.

Now Warburg shifted to look down at the man on the sofa, saying nothing.

“This may work whether or not you are a Warburg,” the man explained. “It won’t work if you’re not a Jew.”

Silence thickened the air. What was this? The WRB postings abroad were staffed from Treasury, three from the legal office alone. Istanbul. Lisbon. Algiers. Warburg doubted that any of them were Jews. There simply weren’t that many Jews in the department. Why would Rome be different? Why, for that matter, was Warburg being brought into this now at all? Weeks earlier, when the President had first approved the rescue project, Warburg had asked to be a part of it, but Harold Gardner had said it was out of the question. Warburg, with his credibility on the Hill . . . his potter’s wheel.

Morgenthau left his desk to return to the alcove and sit. He gestured for Warburg to sit beside the third man. “Forgive me. The phone rang before introductions were complete. Warburg, this is Rabbi Wise. Rabbi, Warburg.
David
Warburg. One of
our
names, if not theirs.” He laughed, dispelling the tension.

But the rabbi’s name was what registered with Warburg. Stephen Wise was the head of the American Jewish Congress, famous as the leader of the “Stop Hitler Now!” rallies that had helped Morgenthau push Roosevelt off the dime. Warburg joined him on the sofa, extending his hand. “It’s an honor, Rabbi. We all appreciate what you’ve been doing. I read Gerhart Riegner’s cables.” World Jewish Congress cables that Wise had steadily funneled from Geneva to Washington. Indeed, Warburg had copied out lines from one of the Riegner cables and placed it under the glass on his desk. Without prompting, he could have recited it there and then: “Never did I feel so strongly the sense of abandonment, powerlessness and loneliness as when I sent messages of disaster and horror to the free world and no one believed me.”

“So are you?” Rabbi Wise was not deflected.

Warburg answered, “I’m too tall to be a Jew. Jews are no good at basketball—so I was told growing up. At Middlebury they forgave me my name because I had a deadeye set shot. I told you my father was a butcher. But he did not keep kosher. He was called Abe, but he was not a temple-goer. I was not bar mitzvahed, because neither of my parents was observant and I didn’t see the point. My parents did not insist. So what does that make me?” Warburg asked. “Once I’d have said it makes me plain American, but what would Hitler say? Hitler, of course, makes the difference.” Warburg let his gaze drift to Gardner. “I didn’t know it for certain until I got to Yale, but yes, I am a Jew.”

“Temple-going doesn’t matter,” Morgenthau said. “Hell, I raise Christmas trees on my farm in Dutchess County. I wouldn’t know a Seder from a sedan. No offense, Rabbi.” Morgenthau, too, looked at Gardner. “I like your young man.”

Two

The Files

I
T WAS WELL
after midnight when the tall, dark-haired woman used the cast-iron key to unlock the stout wooden door of the Villa Arezzo on the Aventine Hill. She had found the old key in one of her father’s boxes. The click of the lock made her wince. She pushed the door inward, but slowly, hoping to dampen the creak of the hinges. Since before her father’s time, the palazzo had been the Rome headquarters of the Croce Rossa, the Red Cross, and as a child she had played here, although never in the thick of night. Now, for a long time, she stood in the once grand foyer, not moving. Her own breaths seemed loud in her ear, but otherwise, no sound. No one here.

Marguerite d’Erasmo was the twenty-four-year-old daughter of a French mother and an Italian father. He had been the director general of the Croce Rossa. He had died before the war broke out, but he was still revered here, and it had been the most natural thing in the world for his daughter to don the blue uniform, and she’d been wearing it since the war began. By 1943, last year, she was head of the Women’s and Children’s Committee for all of Italy.

But only weeks ago, everything changed. When Mussolini was overthrown and the king announced Italy’s withdrawal from the war, the Germans had swiftly moved south and the Wehrmacht stormed Rome. Not so fast, Berlin was saying. The Red Cross offices were promptly taken over by rough-mannered German soldiers.

In the beginning, they hovered in the corners of the faded palazzo with their weapons holstered, leaving Marguerite and her colleagues to do their work. But soon enough the soldiers were replaced by newly arrived functionaries of the German Red Cross, although they, too, wore the familiar field-gray uniform. They ordered the Italian workers to get out. Marguerite had been one of those to protest, but the German in authority had pulled a pistol from inside his tunic and leveled it at her.

Even in the darkness, Marguerite efficiently made her way up the familiar grand stairway to the second-floor room, which was quartered by four large desks—one had been hers. The room, with its window, was brighter than the corridor, and she stood at its threshold for a moment, taking in its shapes. There was her typewriter, still on her desk—just what she needed. Good. But first, something else. She pulled the door closed behind her, shutting it without a sound.

In shadow, the room seemed like a chamber in a mausoleum. Along one wall, evoking burial vaults, stood five metal file cabinets, each with four drawers. Still there, apparently unchanged. Good.

She crossed to the armoire in the corner, opened it, and found—sure enough—the pair of large canvas satchels that had long been stored there. She picked up the bags, went to the center file cabinet, and quietly pulled open its top drawer. The well-ordered look of the folders told her they’d been untouched—thank God. She began to stuff the first canvas sack with files and papers, the census records of certain Red Cross internment camps, located in the environs of Rome and to the north.

After Mussolini had mistaken the fall of Paris in 1940 for a sign of Hitler’s imminent triumph and thrown in with him, a mass of refugees poured into Italy from beyond the Alps, fleeing Italy’s new ally. They came by the thousands: fugitive conscripts, able-bodied men avoiding work camps, Communists, anti-Vichy Frenchmen, opponents of the Nazi-friendly regimes in Slovenia and Croatia, and—notwithstanding Italy’s own racial laws—Jews.

Throughout that year and the next, Marguerite knew, Jews came from the Balkans, Greece, Romania, Austria, Poland, and France. They came through mountain passes and by boat, landing in any number of the dozens of harbor towns along the peninsula’s pair of long coastlines. Mussolini’s government turned a near-blind eye to such fugitives, allowing them to be helped by the Red Cross, as well as by churches, convents, and schools. Marguerite and her colleagues had grown frantic when, soon enough, those foreign refugees were outnumbered by native Italians, displaced as the Allies began bombing industrial centers like Milan, Turin, Naples, and Bologna. Many thousands were made homeless by the air raids, with ever larger numbers of terrified city dwellers fleeing into the countryside. The Red Cross was overwhelmed.

Those in the camps were desperate, but Marguerite’s focus had narrowed. Red Cross officials throughout Italy, fully aware of German policy, had long since stopped recording Jewish identities in their census lists, but names and places of origin were still registered. Italian relief workers had taken to referring to the foreigners who’d been first to seek haven as “old refugees,” a euphemism for Jews, but the Gestapo, once unleashed, would not be fooled. Family names and birthplaces would be tip-offs. The particular file drawers containing “old refugee” records were what had brought Marguerite here tonight. It had been one of her jobs to keep these files collated and updated. She realized what a danger they posed.

Days before, Rome had been jolted by news passed from mouth to mouth that more than a thousand of the city’s Jews had been hauled into trucks in the old ghetto by the Tiber. Urgent word spread for surviving Jews to hide, and doors in every neighborhood had opened to them. Meanwhile, outside Rome, hundreds more Jews were being dragged away from Red Cross camps, and Marguerite had no doubt that the Gestapo elsewhere was making use of the organization’s census lists. But they would not use these!

She quickly emptied the contents of four drawers, filling both satchels—the records of several thousand people. Stuffed, the sacks were heavy, but the padded leather handles enabled her to lug them across to her desk. She placed them carefully to the side, then took her chair. After looking back at the door to be sure she had firmly closed it, she snapped on the gooseneck lamp, found the Geneva-stamped International Red Cross forms, fed a page into the typewriter, and made the keys dance. She drafted orders under her own name for a mother-child survey of Italian-run displaced persons camps in the regions from Tuscany to Veneto. Next to the Geneva seal, she embossed the page with her certification die. It was time to get out of Rome, and this credential—together with her blue uniform and more than a little luck—would make it possible. She would move from town to town collecting official data on children—and filing everything else in her mind. These orders would justify her steady northward progress, aiming at her eventual transport across the frontier into Switzerland. At Red Cross headquarters in Geneva, all that she had learned in Nazi-controlled Italy would matter to someone. It was the only thing she could imagine doing.

No sooner had she sealed and pocketed the self-created visa than she heard it—the big door downstairs, the sound for which she’d had one ear steadily cocked. She switched off the gooseneck lamp. Darkness. She listened. Again she heard it, a second banging of the door. Someone entering the building. She heard a man’s voice, then laughter. Then “
Sehr
gut!
”

Instinctively, she plunged down into the small space under the desk, curling herself tightly. Her exceptional height notwithstanding, she was lithe. Calm, she told herself. If she remained in this black hole, she would be all right. She clutched her knees and froze. That she could hear them jostling in the entrance foyer below meant they were not attempting to be quiet, therefore not sentries, not searching. Soon the noises grew muffled. Then fell to silence.

Marguerite remained where she was, not moving. The odor of the desk’s underside hit her—raw, unfinished walnut—and suddenly she was taken back to another place, the cavern of another desk. She had often crouched like this under her father’s roll-top desk, which was a feature of his study in the family villa in Parioli, the patrician Roman neighborhood where Marguerite had grown up. She loved to hide under her father’s desk right before he returned home each evening, knowing he would stop there first to check the day’s mail. She would pop out and squeal, then collapse into giggles. He would always fall back, feigning surprise, then relief. “
La mia principessa!
” At that he would sweep her up into his arms, making her feel, simultaneously, that she was flying and that she was safe.

Marguerite’s father had lost his position as Red Cross director upon the publication of his 1935 report documenting the use of mustard gas by Italian forces in Ethiopia. Both he and Marguerite’s mother were widely denounced as traitors. Even Marguerite’s schoolmates had used the word:
Traditore!

Later that year, she was told that her mother and father had been killed in an automobile accident. Though only a girl of fifteen, she knew that her parents were murdered by black-shirted thugs. After the “accident,” the Grand Council of Fascism expropriated the d’Erasmo villa in Parioli and seized the family assets. Marguerite, orphaned and disinherited, moved in with the Cistercian sisters at her school. An exuberant, expressive youngster until then, she became shy, withholding. She came of age as if she were a nun.

So silence like this came naturally. And since this was the abject posture of prayer, her most familiar entreaty took form from her unthinking lips:
Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection
. . .

Suddenly sounds burst from below again, only now what Marguerite heard was the laughing voice of a woman. Then she heard the pop of a bottle being opened, champagne. The Germans had entered the room directly beneath her, the public reception chamber, furnished with tattered fainting sofas and Turkish divans. The voices of at least two men. More laughter. “
Glück
,” one cried, “
und lange Leben!
” Revelry. New arrivals. More women. Germans and their local
Liebchens
having found a love nest.

The sounds rose and fell, squeals of delight and feigned resistance, drunken snorts, a pathetic bacchanal. Marguerite uncurled herself to leave the cavern of her desk, hefted the two canvas satchels, one in each hand, crossed through the darkness to the door, opened it an inch, and listened. The men were singing now,
Ein Prosit, ein Prosit
—a toast, a toast! And Marguerite took the cue.