Ida and Louise

4.

Would Ida and Louise have begun their refugee work had they not loved opera and its performers? I doubt it. Opera mattered to them above everything, and in the beginning they were responding directly to requests for help from people they so dearly admired, in particular Krauss, Ursuleac and Mitia Mayer-Lismann. Ida's income meant they could provide financial guarantees. Their willingness to help bound them closely to the Krausses and their world in a way that was more profound and rewarding—and equal—than as fans hobnobbing with them backstage. To say that a closer relationship with Krauss and Ursuleac may even have been an important incentive to their work doesn't diminish their achievement. As Ida wrote, Krauss and Ursuleac 'sugared that ghastly pill—with both their matchless performances and their dear friendship'.

And so it was, in the beginning, that the Mayer-Lismanns and Krauss and Ursuleac supplied them with the names of Jewish friends, mostly musical and intellectual, who wanted to leave Germany. A routine emerged. Because Louise still worked at the Civil Service, travel was largely confined to weekends. Every two or three months, she would cover her typewriter on a Friday evening and hurry from Whitehall to Croydon airport, where Ida would be waiting. They would be in Cologne by 9.30 p.m. and then catch the Munich train, alighting at Frankfurt. On Saturday they would meet their contacts and make arrangements. On Sunday they would take the train to the Hook of Holland and catch the overnight ferry to Harwich—a different route home to avoid the frontier police becoming too familiar with them. On Monday both would be back typing at their respective desks.

Their first case for which they had obtained the necessary financial guarantee and relevant paperwork was Mitia's daughter, Else, a seventeen-year-old music student. She later recalled (to the Recorded Vocal Arts Society in 1987) the moment she saw Ida and Louise get off the train:

It was very exciting to meet them at the Bahnhoff in Frankfurt... my dollish hat was nothing in comparison with the hats of the Cook girls... the entrance of the Cook girls into our lives was revolutionary, because we never ever, ever realized or knew that anybody like Ida and Louise existed. They were so unique...they were never depressed...[their] attitude to life has been something which is an enrichment...it was an extraordinary experience.

Else Mayer-Lismann was the first refugee to make use of a flat in Dolphin Square, on the Embankment, which Ida had recently taken on to serve as 'a clearing house' for those they brought over to Britain. It was relatively modest, only big enough for one family at a time, but the windows were of a good proportion and it was filled with light. And with Ida and Louise still continuing to live at Morella Road with their parents, it provided an excellent headquarters and temporary accommodation (Ida and Louise would keep it until Ida's death).

Word began to spread in Jewish communities of the sisters' willingness to help, and their circle of contacts widened to include people in Berlin and Munich as well as Frankfurt. Hundreds of letters from strangers begging for help began arriving at the British Refugee Headquarters addressed simply to 'Ida and Louise'. The sisters felt an increasing sense of urgency to do their duty, and subterfuge and cunning now began to play a part in their trips. They learned, for example, that in order to persuade others—friends and family, and towards the end, strangers—to provide a financial guarantee they had to convince them that they wouldn't necessarily end up spending the money. Refugees couldn't leave Germany with their money or possessions. On the other hand, they could convert some of their cash into exportable goods, which the sisters could then carry across the border without alerting too much suspicion. Jewellery, especially diamonds and pearls, was one obvious export—tiny things which in Britain could be easily converted back to cash. Faced with Ida and Louise's resolute ordinariness, which customs official would imagine that the pearls and diamond brooches fastened to their chain-store, glass-buttoned jumpers were anything other than paste? (The only jewels they could not accept were diamond earrings; neither sister had pierced ears.) They left their own wristwatches behind and returned with the best Swiss models on their wrists. A cleverer dodge came with the fur trade. In the winter months they would travel out with labels from fashionable London stores, tucked safely in the bottom of their handbags, and relabel and then wear the German furs that their contacts had given them for export.

As for their cover, Ida and Louise had from the beginning decided that they would pose—though posing required no effort—as two eccentric opera lovers who were prepared to travel all over Germany for their art. Still, the frequency of their trips began to attract attention at the immigration post at Cologne aerodrome. At first they had been waved through, but now they met unfriendly questioning. A better cover was needed and here their hero, Clemens Krauss, stepped into the breach.

The sisters' relationship with Krauss during this time is an interesting one to contemplate. What did they make of him? In Blythe House, the archive of the V&A, which encompasses the Theatre Museum, there exist nineteen boxes of material spanning the course of the sisters' lives. Most of it comprises opera and theatre programmes, photographs of stars and letters, but it also includes cuttings they kept from newspapers published in March 1935, just before Krauss transferred from the Vienna Staatsoper to succeed Furtwängler in Berlin. They suggest that Ida and Louise should certainly have understood that Krauss's move laid him open to the charge of Nazi sympathies. One report clipped and kept by the sisters, headlined FIGHT IN VIENNA OPERA HOUSE, writes of 'the scene of unusual demonstration' during a performance of Verdi's Falstaff. As Krauss approached the conductor's rostrum he was met with loud cries of 'Shame!' and hisses from Austrian government supporters, while other sections of the opera house—the Nazis—cheered him on. By the interval, police with truncheons were breaking up a fight. In another story, published the following day, it was reported that Krauss had pulled out of the performance that evening, as had his friend, the leading tenor, Herr Franz Volker, and that a Tchaikovsky opera had to be hastily substituted for the 'Egyptian Heles'. Three days later, he was installed in the Berlin Opera House.

It was two years before he could prove conclusively to the sisters that he was not a Nazi. In 1937, hearing of Ida and Louise's worry about the border guards, and by now having got himself out of Berlin and transferred to Munich, he offered to use his position and influence at the Munich State Opera to ease their reception at the border. Whenever they needed a trip 'covered', he told them, he would supply them with details of all opera performances and their casts lists so that they might improve their credentials at immigration control. Whenever possible, he added, Ida and Louise could also choose the programme. That way, in fulfilling their mission, they could be rewarded with one of their favourite operas. 'Sometimes we thought we could not bear to go back yet again into that hateful, diseased German atmosphere,' Ida wrote in We Followed Our Stars. 'And for that extra bit of courage and determination which took us back time after time, Clemens Krauss and...Ursuleac must take full credit.' Following Krauss's death in 1954, Ida wrote:

[The decision to transfer from Vienna to Berlin] was wrong, of course—tactically, and perhaps humanly too. But, although his enemies would have us forget the fact, Berlin at the time was still an open capital city, like any other European city, for the purposes of political, social or artistic matters. I think I can say now after twenty years of close friendship with him...that Krauss bitterly regretted that decision very soon after it was taken. But to retrace the step was impossible and, in making what he could of a situation which revolted him, he threw himself, with single-mindedness characteristic of him, into serving the art he loved, even in the midst of horror... it was only with his active and unfailing help that we managed to bring twenty-nine people out of Hitler's Germany.

To show they had nothing to hide, they began to stay in the finest hotels precisely because they were packed with high-ranking Nazis. 'We knew them all—Louise and I,' Ida writes in We Followed Our Stars:

Goering, Goebbels, Himmler, Streicher, Ribbentrop (who once gave Louise 'the glad eye' across the breakfast room at the Vier Jahreszeiten in Munich). We even knew Hitler from the back... If you stood and gazed at them admiringly as they went through the lobby, no one thought you were anything but another couple of admiring fools.

The contrasts and adventure in their lives are almost too novelistic. They arrive, say, in Berlin after a shaky plane journey from Croydon. They reach a house and there, in front of an anxious Jewish family, pick up a couple of furs, rip out their labels and replace them with those brought from London. Later, befurred, they stride into the foyer of the Adlon, Goebbels and Himmler in the crowd. The next day they interview would-be Jewish refugees before heading off for a night at the opera—one which, if performed under Krauss, might have been scheduled entirely for their benefit. They return the next day by train and steamer. On Monday morning, Louise goes straight to her Civil Service desk. Ida makes her way to the bank vaults to deposit a diamond or two. Amazing; but it wasn't Ida's kind of novel. Hers would always favour love over unhappiness, often expressed in grand gestures or fluttering hands, and complicated by emotional indecision rather than any of the real inconveniences of life, but resolved—always—with a happy ending. ('As Mary stepped out on to the terrace she saw that he was standing there in the moonlight, like a figure on a stage, and he held out his arms to her. Without even pausing to think what she was doing or what this might imply, she ran straight into his arms. And as he held her and kissed her she made only a fugitive clutch at her vanishing common sense'—Unbidden Melody, 1973.)

What happened to Ida and what she invented for money (which allowed things to happen to her and to others): those were separate compartments. In We Followed Our Stars, she writes:

I marvel now when I think of how we lived in a state of high drama part of the time, and continued our normal lives during the rest of the time. I wrote novels and Louise worked at the office. We had holidays. We had our recurring opera seasons. We had our family interests and our hobbies, particularly our gramophone records, which were a great consolation to us between opera seasons.

Louise learned German and in Frankfurt the sisters began to work with a German agent, Frau Jack, a Roman Catholic who had assumed responsibility for collating lists of potential families to be interviewed by them in a room in her house in Arndtstrasse. The sisters, the families saw, possessed the power and the funds, thanks to Ida's income from Mills & Boon and contributions from friends and family, to offer them a way out. 'We weren't playing God,' Ida told McCall's in 1966:

It was more like gambling at Monte Carlo. I still shudder when I think about it. The Jew who had a practical skill—an electrician or an engineer—sometimes made it ahead of the intellectual. The one who had converted all his material assets into diamonds or what-have-you and was able to demonstrate to his English guarantor that he would not become a dependent on him had it over the man and his wife who were still clinging—as though furniture were a part of life itself—to their bedsteads and family portraits.

On November 10 and 11, 1938, Hitler gave the order that throughout Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia all Jewish males were to be rounded up and sent to concentration camps. Certain age groups were released but only on condition that they signed an undertaking to be out of the country within eight weeks, taking little money and only a tiny proportion of their goods. A month later Mitia Mayer-Lismann, now safe in Britain, handed Ida and Louise a list of names and addresses with the words 'God bless you and help you' scribbled in violet ink along the top. Among the names was that of Lisa Basch, an aspiring twenty-five-year-old photographer whose industrialist father had been taken to Dachau (he was later released on the condition that he left Germany immediately).

Louise couldn't leave her job on this occasion, so Ida went alone to the Basch family home, a large Gothic mansion in Offenbach near Frankfurt. Its contents were in ruins: the SS had stormed through the house when they arrested Herr Basch, ripping paintings, breaking mirrors, shattering every piece of china, and tearing out the keys of the grand piano. The remnants of the Basch family remained; two sons were already in the United States and a daughter and son-in-law getting ready to follow. Basch and his wife were waiting to leave for France, where a business associate had provided a guarantee. That left Lisa as the only Basch with no exit, the only one without a guarantee. Ida interviewed her that day and later raised a guarantee. Lisa eventually left Germany in April 1939 for England via Paris.

That was not their last case, but by the spring of 1939 they were no longer so stolid in the face of fear and desperation. Days spent at Frau Jack's were long and traumatic; the sisters hated the fact that they could not help all whom they saw. They would go back to their hotel room to hold each other and sob. Late on August 24, 1939, Ida's thirty-fifth birthday, the telephone rang at Morella Road. It was Frau Jack: 'Ida, there is one more. A young man and his wife. Is it possible? They have only one more week.' It wasn't possible. The war came ten days later.