GOLD
1 – The last apple
Joachim Fingel ate his last apple with his new gold teeth. He was practising his new bite for the dentist. The dentist’s assistant was called Faith. She had been named after an American film star, once seen by Faith’s father as she jumped nude with her legs open into a blue swimming pool on the Californian coast in an illicit coloured movie purchased in Hamburg. Faith had become a Nazi youth leader. She was waiting in the dentist’s reception room with Joachim’s files to prove he was a Jew. It was not out of the question that Joachim had once resisted her advances. He was handsome and possessed an Alfa Romeo car. He practised a new smile in the dentist’s hand mirror, whilst the dentist was upbraided for unnecessary sympathy towards the Jewish race, and consequent wasting of resources. Joachim was persuaded to open his mouth, brush his new gold teeth and relinquish them in great pain to the dentist who had just put them in. Faith held the spitting bowl and her two brothers held pistols. The apple holding the last imprint of Joachim’s new golden bite was thrown out with the surgical waste, from where it was recovered by his tearful girl-friend, Natalie. She treasured the browning apple and placed it above the fireplace in her grandmother’s parlour where it was known that fruits petrified due to a freak dryness in the room, a shadowy stillness in the house and an absence of noise in the street outside. Natalie’s grandmother already had a bunch of petrified grapes from the earthquake town of Posillipo near Naples, a petrified orange from the Holy Land, and a petrified avocado from Elba that had grown in Napoleon’s garden. They were lined up along the mantelpiece desiccated into stone for eternity.
Joachim’s newly fashioned gold teeth went into a Nazi safe and were eventually taken to the precious metals smelting works at Baden-Baden to help constitute gold bar 557/KLObb, which at the war’s end, fetched up in Bolzano, a city on the borders of Italy, Austria and Switzerland known for its inability to make good spaghetti.
Joachim was taken to Augsburg by mistake. The ticket around his neck read Auschwitz. He was handsome even without his teeth and he did not look at all like a Jew. He died in a cellar in the company of a captured English airman, who, believing he was to be tortured and killed, vowed to take the life of at least one German before he perished. The niceties and significances of Joachim being a German Jew meant nothing to the Englishman. Joachim was strangled with a ligature made from strips of the Englishman’s underwear.
Approaching death without underpants was a curious condition for an Englishman, but the airman knew that nakedness and associated humiliations were usually on the torturer’s agenda, so it might be said that he was preparing himself and anticipating events. Perhaps he even dimly sought to see if the anticipation of sexual masochism could be enjoyed before the pain-without-entertainment took over. But nothing the Englishman anticipated at the hands of his captors consequently ensued. After the airman had strangled the handsome toothless Jew as he was painfully trying to eat a plate of hard beans, the Englishman was set free. Perhaps he was being rewarded for being an exemplary anti-Semite.
Natalie was hounded by the authorities for having been associated with a Jew with gold teeth. Offering her family’s money and her own body as collateral, she escaped across France and over the mountains to Spain. She later married a rich Portuguese who died young and left her a fortune. When she had walked the Pyrenees escape route, Natalie had become aquainted with the sculptor Maillol, and at least ten bronzes of her fresh, bold and buoyant naked physique exist in the world. One of them is presently exhibited in the ground-floor cafeteria area of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Maillol had once written in his diary that he had intended to have this particular statue covered in gold leaf because for him Natalie had been such a golden girl.
Without really trying, Natalie and Joachim both left a permanent memorial; the first in depicting Eve in bronze and the second by making a lasting bite in her apple.
 

GOLD
2 –  Blondi
On the 18th February 1942 a photograph of Hitler’s dog Blondi was published in the Berlin newspapers.  Almost immediately loyal National Socialists took steps to own Alsatian bitches called Blondi, or to rechristen their Alsatian bitches accordingly. It was estimated in June 1942  that there were over 20,000 dogs in Greater Germany who, if well-trained, would answer to the name of Blondi. It caused some havoc in the public parks. An Alsatian dog is also known as a  German Shepherd Dog; it was therefore also a most patriotic gesture. Such was the enthusiasm for canine rechristening it did not go unnoticed that dogs other than Alsatians were also being called Blondi.
By the time of the first disappointments of the battle of Stalingrad in October 1942,  the enthusiasm for canine identification with the Fuhrer’s bitch was subject to interesting variations and reversals. In Pomerania the Gauleiter Hans Liebermann-Richter, a keen enthusiast for racial purity of all kinds, insisted that the name Blondi could only be given to Alsatian bitches, and that all other dogs of that name were to be exterminated. Moreover, to call a mongrel Blondi was a dishonour to the  Fuhrer. In response to more than a few observations, it was also announced that the name Blondi could not be given to a male dog. To call a male dog Blondi was tantamount to an acknowledgement of trans-sexuality, which was undifferentiated with homosexuality, which did not exist, said Hans Liebermann-Richter, in Germany, outside of the concentration camps where such filth rightly belonged, and was Jewish.
In Alsace, in January 1943, in response to the continuing humiliations at Stalingrad, it was insisted that all Alsatian bitches must be called Blondi in honour of the Fuhrer. It was a small gesture of particular patriotic support; afterall, the province had given the dog its name, in the same way that Dalmatia had given a name to a breed of black spotted white dogs. In Strasbourg, the capital of Alsace, any citizen maltreating an Alsatian bitch called Blondi, or making steps to have such a dog put down for whatever reason, even if that reason was deemed to be a mercy killing, should be arrested. Injuring or killing an Alsatian bitch called Blondi with a motor vehicle was a criminal act punishable by hanging. In Alsace, the total identification of the Fuhrer and Alsatian bitches called Blondi was confirmed. To abuse Alsatian bitches called Blondi was to abuse the Fuhrer.
Since 1939 all Jewish citizens of the Third Reich had been forbidden to own a dog. In March 1943, a humorist in the Police Bureau in the Nazi Party District of Thuringia turned the tables, and decreed that all Jews should forthwith be obliged to own a dog, and that dog must be an Alsatian bitch called Blondi. It was a gesture to give all Jews an ever present reminder of the Fuhrer; to set in their very midst a watchdog over their activities. It was thus metaphorically implied that the Fuhrer was an omnipotent watchdog to universal Jewry. There were not so many Jews left in Thuringia, so it was an obligation easily policed. All Jews accompanied by their Blondi bitches were to report daily to their local Gestapo headquarters where the animals were examined for their good heath, smartly brushed coats and general well-being. To possess an unhealthy and underfed dog could mean severe punishment for its owner.
In Volksdorf, the dog-loving, widowed mayor, Josef Hammermann, whose recently deceased wife had been called Blondi, issued a declaration that all Jews compulsorily owning a dog called Blondi, should provide it with a gold collar in honour of the Fuhrer and in honour of his own wife. Josef Hammermann found himself in some trouble for linking his deceased wife and the Fuhrer in the same dedication, though his deputy, Harald Copernica, rearranged the wording in an attempt to limit the damage. Copernica had been sleeping with his boss’s wife and his attempts to straighten out the embarrassment were clumsy, perhaps through incompetence, but more likely through jealousy, since just before her death, she had started sleeping with her husband again. Local gossip escalated the embarrassments and the decree was eventually rescinded, but not before the twenty-seven Volksdorf Jewish owners of Alsatian bitches called Blondi had been arrested, their dogs placed in a pound, and the gold collars confiscated and melted down into two gold bars. One gold bar was lost, possibly purloined by the mayor’s deputy as compensation for emotional injury. The other gold bar found its way to Cologne and then Baden-Baden where it was wrapped in a green baize cloth and placed in the vaults of the most prestigious bank in the city. A Weichmar army sergeant, Hans Dopplemann, has been credited, at the very end of the war, as being the recipient of this gold bar, along with another 99 gold bars, which he packed into two large suitcases, placing them on the back seat of a black Mercedes, license number TL 9246. Ninety-two of these gold bars were later discovered in a forest just outside Bolzano, an Italian town near the border with Switzerland, where, it has been said, they cannot cook good spaghetti even to satisfy ravenous dogs.
The original bitch Blondi, perhaps the only creature that showed its owner an affection and devotion that was just as truly reciprocated, was whelped of a puppy called Wolf. Adolf had always believed that his name was an antique form of the German word for “wolf”, so in a complex way, an identification was made that just possibly has a suggestion of an acknowledgement of fatherhood, and therefore, at the very least in metaphor, of bestiality. This original Blondi had her own personal attendant, a Sergeant Fritz Tornow, whose sole responsibility was to feed the dog and take her for walks when her owner was not able to do so, being away on business as a Fuhrer. When Hitler began to doubt the efficacy of the brass-capped ampoules of prussic acid as a means to his own voluntary self-destruction, he had one tested on his bitch. A doctor, Professor Werner Haase, accompanied by Sergeant Fritz Tornow, was summoned to the bunker under the Reich Chancellery in Berlin in May 1945, and with a pair of pliers, they broke a capsule of the stuff into the dog’s mouth. The experiment was very successful. Death occurred at once. At his own finale, Hitler decided not to use the dog-tested prussic acid. He shot himself instead with a 7.65mm Walther pistol. It is not recorded what happened to the puppy called Wolf. Perhaps it escaped to Brazil. Perhaps it was adopted by a Russian soldier. Perhaps it was shot.
 
 
 

GOLD
3 – Property of the BBC
Massima Troy hid her jewels in the back of her radio, and referred to them as “Property of the BBC”. Listening to the BBC in occupied Europe was usually punishable by death. She thus kept her treasures close to the ultimate solution. If caught, she planned to say,
“I am listening to my jewels”, which might have been ironic, even witty, certainly cryptic, even funny, but no defence against a death-sentence.
And of course she was indeed discovered listening to the BBC.
It was a programme called Worker’s Playtime, and she was listening to her radio at Knokke-le-Zoute on the coast of Belgium, sitting nonchalantly at four o’clock in the afternoon, in her white bra and yellow panties, in her six metres by eight metres garden among the hollyhox, with a fine view of the English Channel over her garden wall.
Worker’s Playtime was classified subversive. It had been devised as a regular entertainment to amuse workers in the English armaments factories manufacturing bullets and shells to kill Germans. Shopfloor workers, for the most part female, would hum and whistle along with the Worker’s Playtime music played through loud-speakers whilst they polished shell-casings, tamped down explosives, screwed bolts tight, and labelled death-missiles with the chalk-scrawled message, “This one’s for you Jerry!”
The programme was very popular in England. It had a memorable signature tune which was wholly instrumental on the radio, but was often sung in school playgrounds with rude and infantile lyrics that used complicated chimes and rhymes and near-rhymes that changed weekly according to which war-time celebrity was in the news. Ribbentrop was rhymed with chocolate-drop, he’s a fop, bottle of pop, Himmler was ridiculed with “something similar”, Daimler, kissed her, missed her, mussed her, undressed her, Goebbels was slandered with no balls, snow-balls, small balls, Rommel with pommel, pell-mell, hot hell, Quisling with whistling, King’s Lynn, Errol Flynn and Gunga Din, Lord Haw-haw with jaw-jaw, see-saw, green door and “ask-for-more”, Churchill with Fat Bill, underhill, dung hill, Dunhill, “sugar-the pill”, window-sill and grist to the mill. Edward VIII’s wife, Mrs Simpson came in for the greatest slander, perhaps because she was American and female, and perhaps because she was considered a traitor, a Nazi-lover, and certainly an American divorcee who had persuaded a king to abdicate. Children with half an ear to their parent’s gossip, were savage. Mrs Simpson was made to suffer. Her name was rhymed with ding-dong, slept long, day long, Suzy Wong, Lipton, gone wrong, Sam’s song and diphthong. Many of these references were of such local interest that it is not so easy to decern their source, though popular songs, film-stars and tea packers were included along with brand-name cigarettes, cars, imported Americanisms, and radio-comedy punch-lines. It can be supposed that children only half-heard the original names, and Chinese whispers in the playground were responsible for distortions, diminuatives and degradations. Most of the children using the rhymes would never have known their point of origin.
In the garden overlooking the sea at Knokke-le-Zoute, the Belgian police threw Massima’s radio up in the air, and its smart, art-deco-styled Bakelite plastic casing smashed to golden brown pieces on the crazy paving of her garden-path. They found her jewels, her dead husband’s cuff-links, his golden tie-clip, his gold coins and the fifty 19th century Spanish gold medallions he had collected whilst fighting with the Republicans in Spain. They were all dumped in a canvas mail-bag, and Massima, in her white bra and yellow panties, was stripped and variously abused.
The mailbag, with Massima’s gold wrapped in her yellow underwear, was eventually cycled over to Sluis just across the Dutch border by a postboy, Florian Gorrel, who was related to Massima’s dead husband. He thought he might become unofficial keeper of his family’s treasure. The gold was kept in the Sluis post-office for six months. Florian regularly inspected its hiding-place in a suitcase of rusty monkey wrenches. One day the gold had gone. The yellow underwear was publically abandoned on the floor of the unclaimed parcels room. It had been used as a rag to soak up the spilt oil from the post-office lamps. Florian was distressed that his aunt’s underwear could be used for such a frivolous purpose. He used his American cigarette-lighter to set them afire in the post-office back yard.
The gold had been taken on a goods-train to Antwerp and placed in a Gestapo office filing-cabinet in the basement of the Grand Central Railway Station, whose station-master, van Hoyten, was punctilious with other people’s property, even if it was Jewish. Van Hoyten had Massima’s radio treasures wrapped in a green baize bag normally used for keeping billiard balls, and he attached a ticket simply saying “Knokke Radio Gold”. In July 1944 the golden objects in their billiard-ball bag were locked in a portable safe, and driven to Baden-Baden. Sometime in October 1944 they were melted down to constitute a small part of a 500 gram gold bar stamped with an eagle with spread wings and the reference number Ft67.
Four days before the end of the war, this gold bar was picked up by two military associates who had never handled gold before, and loaded into the back seat of a Mercedes car, along with 99 other gold bars. These military men, a sergeant and a corporal, did their job with fixed smiles on their faces and a certain trembling in their lower arms. The ninety-nine gold bars were then driven to Bolzano which used to be a favourite holiday resort of BBC announcers on account of a radio seminar once held there in 1928 when the English guests had been so well treated they had formed a club called the BBBCCC, the Bolzano British Broad-Casting Corporation Club. The members of this club were not necessarily keen spaghetti eaters which was just as well because in Bolzano they would have been disappointed.
The Belgian Gestapo Police officers bundled a very bruised and never-to-menstruate again Massima off to Auschwitz where the BBC was regarded as a crystal palace with fountains and girls in polka-dot dresses forever speaking in low voices into amethyst microphones. This image of the BBC belonged to Forrest Puncturio. For twenty-eight days, a moon’s cycle, which was a long time for a Jewish Belgian patriot to survive in Auschwitz, he was regarded as the official dreamer of his camp-hut.  He had worked at Bush House in London, home of the BBC’s overseas services, until patriotism and perhaps stupidity and certainly some homesickness, had created a plan of absurd human smuggling to get him back to Brussels and then to his Canadian-backwoods-style log cabin in the Ardennes, and then to an arrest in a police-station at Spa, and now to Hut 45 in the men’s section of Auschwitz. Forrest Puncturio liked wooden huts. He remembered the split-pine panelling on the walls of the underground canteen of Bush House in the London Strand with great nostalgia. He worked at Bush House for two years, writing, recording and editing lengthy anti-fascist propaganda texts for anybody who might care to listen. His most fond memory of the Bush House canteen was that the light bulbs had never been switched off, day or night, not even for a moment, since war had been declared in September 1938. It was now 1943. Those light bulbs had been shining continuously for five years. He remembered a proud and melancholic Pole getting drunk and smashing a light bulb with a wine-glass, and he remembered an enraged Newfoundlander throwing a chair at a chandelier because a U-boat had torpedoed his uncle’s fishing-boat off Scotland. But on both occasions, the light bulbs were swiftly and quietly replaced, and, without a murmur, the management took care of the costs  If the lights had been going out all over Europe, they never went out in the BBC canteen in the Overseas Broadcasting Studios of Bush House in the Aldwych Building in the Strand, London.
Massima Troy and Forrest Puncturio became strange conversationalists for the length of one sunny afternoon in August 1943. Massima had wandered close to the wire. Her hut was full of Romanian women and she could not speak their language. She looked down at the sparse grass, searching for a different sort of plant, any plant. She missed her seaside garden and the hollyhox plants that grew three metres tall, especially the dark red ones, and the sea-holly with its blue foliage and yellow flowers, and the pink campion enjoyed by ladybird beetles that came over the sea from England. Forrest Puncturio saw Massima Troy from his hut window and wondered how she could have approached so close to the wire and not been shot. He went to meet such a courageous lady. He walked nonchalantly in her direction, kicking a brick. At fifty yards he whistled to her and they walked towards each other, exchanging pleasantries. And then all afternoon, standing and then sitting on the grass, they talked through the two fences of electrified wire, five metres apart. They talked about everything; cities they had known, Paris, Venice, Rome, a small town in the Florentine Hills called Pratolino where a giant stone statue overlooked a deep lake of pink lilies and mysterious black fish, and the early autumn crocuses in the woods in Fiesole, walks they had taken in Ravello and the Canary Islands, birds and plants they had seen, and white horses they had glimpsed in bright sunlit fields, and smiling babies, and sleeping children, absent relatives, the long lines of the recently dead, Charles Darwin, evolution, the irrelevance of religion, swimming in blue pools, nights of sexual pleasure. Eventually they forgot to keep looking over their shoulders at the gun-turrets and the solitary sentinels, and the guard hut. They talked into the evening, their shadows growing longer. Then they started talking about the BBC, and they were discussing the announcer John Snag who read out good and bad news in exactly the same deep soothing tone of voice, when a volley of bullets killed them both. They died within moments of each other. Perhaps Massima Troy died first, for Forrest was certain that for a few seconds he could hear her humming the signature tune of Workers Playtime. Their bodies, five metres apart, lay under the August moon for eight hours. They were dragged away by their heels at dawn, and each was buried is a separate lime pit. Massima Troy was my aunt, my mother’s elder sister.
 

GOLD
4 – Butter crucifix gold
This is the short story of a gold bar that was slightly smaller and slightly richer in colour than the other 91 gold bars discovered on the back seat of a car that crashed outside the North Italian town of Bolzano where they cannot cook a good spaghetti.
The gold bar was wrapped in brown paper and tied with a knotted shoelace. It was like a golden slab of country butter. The brown paper and the shoelace helped to identify where the gold came from, for once upon a time it belonged to children in an orphanage in Toulouse. The gold bar was their surety to the nuns who were their protectors, and it was made of melted down crucifixes.
On certain saints days in summer the nuns would untie the shoelace and unwrap the brown paper and polish the golden bar on their sleeves. They would line up the forty-six children of the orphanage in the cloister of the convent, and, waking slowly, pass along them, holding the gold bar under the children’s chins so that the sunlight reflected a golden glow upwards upon their faces. The nuns would offer a benediction to each child.
“There you are Therese, God loves you, casting his Holy Light upon your cheeks and making you look so beautiful. God be with you always. May his light always shine upon you”.
“Jean-Pierre, you are truly blessed by the collected power of all the little crucifixes. God be with you for ever and always”.
Therese’s grandfather, tortured to death in a Marseille police-station, had been accustomed to pick a buttercup from his garden and hold it under Therese’s chin. He would say that the golden glow reflected so richly on her face, that she certainly loved butter and would one day fall in love with a wealthy man and marry him.
Jean-Pierre’s mother, blown into unrecognisable pieces by an explosion when he was four years old, had been accustomed to hold a slab of butter under Jean-Pierre’s chin in exactly the same way as the nuns held their gold bar. She had said that because Jean-Pierre’s chin shone so yellow in the butter’s reflected light, he would grow up to be very lucky indeed.
However, no luck, no riches, no love and no marriage. God was not with these children. For ever. And always. They were carted off to Lyon in a dirty lorry, put on a slow train and gassed at Dachau. Their corpses were burnt. They were Jewish children. They had no right to be in a Catholic convent, cared for by Catholic nuns and bequeathed a golden bar, the colour of butter, made of Christian crucifixes. Besides what was all this? A confusion of faith and money, greed, butter, crucifixes and superstition. German National Socialism would sweep all such superstitions away. For ever. And always.
The golden butter bar found its way to Baden-Baden. From there it was taken to Bolzano in a confused plan to hope to buy away a small Jewish girl believed to be an officially recognised orphan with an official German Aryan soldier for a father, and an official French Jewish cook from Vaux-le-Vicomte for a mother. Could it ever have been possible that someone might have put butter under the chin of this particular orphan?
 

GOLD
5 – The Scheherazade Commandant
A commandant in Sesnovakia ran his camp on the Scheherazade principle. Entertain me every day and your life will be spared. Fail to lighten my boredom and you will be thrown down the latrines, into the dog-pound, under a train, onto the electric wire; the commandant could be inventive with his punishments. But the Scheherazade principle was only a principle. Story-tellers were not in fact in demand in the camp, because the commandant was a xenophobic, German-speaking Czech, and his command of foreign languages was limited. All his guests were foreigners, mostly Poles and Russians and assorted Balkan peoples with a few gypsies and an irregular supply of Dutch. He did have three German speaking Austrian homosexuals under his jurisdiction, one of whom was mute and therefore not the best of  story-tellers. The Scheherazade principle was adapted to work in other ways; entertain me with a song, or a dance, or a recitation or a striptease, or an obscenity or an act of cruelty against your fellow inmates, and you can live another day. Most people have one small trick, even if it is only employed to amuse children. Pull a foolish face, fart rhythmically, de-stone cherries with your toes, speak the Lord’s prayer backwards, juggle milk bottles, whistle through your nose, sing falsetto, bray like a donkey, do a card trick, spin a plate, count in threes. Those tricks that could be performed visually and without exotic props worked best in Sesnovakia, but even so, few people can satisfactorily continue to amuse day after day with only one small modest entertainment. So these people with a limited anti-tedium vocabulary went to the wall, or rather the fence, quite quickly, unless they could offer something else. That something else in some cases was a little gold. Difficult to know where the gold came from. But when you are desperate to sleep another night in a below-freezing hut on a splintered wooden bed covered in vomit without a blanket, scratching yourself down to the bone because of the jumping lice, it is amazing what resources you can stoke up from the recesses of your abilities.
Realising that his guests could produce such golden miracles, the commandant permitted the socially under-talented to pay off their entertainment-dues with gold. Needless to say in stories like this, the commandant grew greedy, stepped up the pressure and became more inventive with the sadism. His, as it were, now paying guests became more inventive, meaner, more competitive, rasher, doing great injury to one another to see another foggy day in this paradise of North Poland in the Winter-time. Bring me a ring a day. Bring me two rings a day. Bring me five rings a day.
Work parties sent out at dawn to dig sewage trenches near a village with one deserted church and two small farms and a cobbler’s shop amazingly returned with gifts for the commandant. The smallest dental work of the camp’s inmates was relocated. The woman’s quarters became suddenly a rich mineable source, and the segregation laws became curiously lax. Even more curiously, the guard huts were not so completely out of bounds. The commandant, by inference, was allowing his guests to steal from their jailers. He found himself becoming a richer man. He placed half his wealth in the Deutsche Bank, the other in his own particular no-questions-asked bank situated in a black trunk under his bed.
The mute, Austrian, homosexual performed his Scheherazade tribute as obscene tricks. He was quite dependable as an innovator.  He performed expressionlessly, which encouraged those who doubted he was truly mute to reassess their prejudices. He kept a wedding ring on his person but not on his finger. One day it fell out of its hiding place and rang tinkling on the concrete floor of the bath-house where the commandant and his closest cronies had assembled on one of their regular Scheherazade candle-lit evenings, accompanied by the very best gold-paying guests whose breath and bodies warmed the bath-house just a little. Nothing was allowed to go to waste in a work camp. When the metallic sound of the spinning ring ceased to reverberate, three sets of people pounced. First, the Commandant who now knew no shame as far as gold was concerned, second, those inmates who had failed to find the day’s gold quota, and third, the Austrian performer himself. If the Commandant and his eager gold digging guests had learnt ferocious cruelty that is rarely seen outside the gates of Hell, then the Austrian surpassed them. His life was in the wedding ring. He killed the Commandant with a shower pipe ripped from the wall, forcing it into his mouth and his throat in a no-doubt ironic attempt to make the Commandant like himself, first mute and then dead. The Austrian and forty-nine camp guests were butchered to death in six minutes. The fallen wedding ring disappeared.
The Commandant’s gold in the Deutsche Bank was safe enough, but the gold in his trunk under his bed was soon pilfered. First, wrapped in a cement sack, this gold journeyed to Warsaw and then to Vienna, transported in an armoured car. It stayed in an apartment belonging to a blind man opposite the SemperDepot for six months, until it was smelted down in September 1943, and, as an oversized shining gold bar, predate-stamped May 1939 to confuse any snooper, it was taken to Cologne and then Baden-Baden where Karlheinz Brockler managed the Gestapo treasury of Baden-Wurttemberg. It stayed there almost for the duration of the war. In fact it was removed from the bank cellars only on May 4th 1945 by Corporal Guelferle, who was acting on orders from Sergeant Hans Doppleman who was fulfilling the directive of Karlheinz Brockler’s brother-in-law Lieutenant Gustav Ivan Harpsch who had urgent need of this gold bar along with 99 other gold bars that had been idling there, awaiting events, like all gold awaits events. All gold has a future and patiently waits transformation. The 99 gold bars were packed tightly and neatly in two sturdy black leather suitcases. Most of them were taken on a four day journey to Bolzano in North Italy where the citizens cannot cook a good spaghetti to save their lives, their purses or their moral reputations.
 

GOLD
6 – The coat of yellow stars
A Jewish writer notorious for his predatory relationships with younger women, heard the rumours of Heydrich’s recommendation to Hitler, encouraged by Goebbels, that all Jews should be obliged to wear a yellow Star of David. The writer phoned his uncle, a tailor in Babelsburg, to order a coat of many yellow stars, to be worn, not by himself, but by his current lover, a black singer from Chicago, Greta Nairobi, who was currently performing in Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann at the Stadtsoper in Berlin. Greta refused to wear the coat of yellow stars in public, she thought it was too great a provocation, but she wore it on the cabaret stage, whilst singing, to accompany its trangressional nature, a song which had lyrics that the Jewish writer had borrowed from a familiar source but had altered to suit the circumstances.
 Twinkle twinkle yellow star,
 How I wonder what you are,
 Up above Berlin so high,
 Like a Rabbi in the sky.
The writer had secured Greta Nairobi a midnight cabaret spot at the Auberge, which those with a satirical ear, also knew to be the name of Hitler’s favourite restaurant in the Obersalzberg. Gentile members of cabaret audiences with a scepticism for National Socialism sang the song at private parties, in the privacy of their steam-filled bathrooms, and whilst riding bicycles very fast down steep hills in Bavaria.
The antics of the Jewish writer and his black mistress were tolerated for six weeks, by which time the Babelsberg tailor was becoming famous for turning out imitations of his initial creation, re-creating it in yellow and black silk, and once in yellow, stencil-dyed, black beaver-fur, and once in silver lame with appliqué gold stars. This last evening-gown was made for a Jewish New Yorker who had come to Berlin for the Olympics Games, who was pleased to be able to indicate ironic solidarity with government opposition, whilst also paying carnal attention to the youngest member of the United States High Jump team who was a Jewish Yale scholar with a great deal of money.
A second tailor in Magdeburg, admiring the audacity of the Berlin Yellow-Star anarchists, ran up underwear, vests, petticoats, brassieres, underpants, bloomers, garter-belts, and stockings decorated with yellow stars, which was bought, and perhaps worn, by several society ladies in Lutherstadt Wittenberg, to excite their husbands into acts of sadism. Several prostitutes in Luckenwalde are reported to have borrowed the idea; one of them, the Jewish Marlene Lubben, becoming wealthy, and eventually marrying Guston Blitzer, the realist writer and Communist sympathiser from Rostock, who was known for a time as the Crimson Shipyard-Poet. Lubben was notoriously unfaithful to Blitzer. On one occasion, she arranged to have Blitzer locked up on a charge of blasphemy, whilst she masturbated a Ukrainian ice-hockey team in an Italian restaurant in the Berlin Tiergarten, eventually pouring the sauce-boat of Soviet semen over Blitzer’s head whilst she was wearing her Star of David knickers. She was certainly aware that many Communists were as anti-semitic as their enemies. It may be no accident that Guston Blitzer was later to write a roman de clef called the Starry Incitement, where the humiliations anguished over were regarded as more political than sexual.
When the Olympic Games were over and the foreign guests had departed, the draconian anti-Jewish enthusiasms practised by the Third Reich were permitted to again have a public face. The Jewish writer was arrested and his American mistress was driven to Hamburg to board a P & O liner bound for Southampton and then New York. The Jewish writer had an international reputation and the authorities felt obliged to move slowly on his case. This was not the situation with his uncle, the Babelsburg tailor. His shop was burnt down on a Sabbath evening, and his body, tied to a heavy treadle Singer sewing-machine, was found in the ashes. There was a cryptic item in the Tailor’s Gazette that suggested German sewing machines were more efficient and lighter in weight than their equivalent American imports. The tailor’s bank accounts were seized, and his gold valuables, discovered in a safe deposit box, were compulsorily presented to the Charity of the National Socialist Society for Widows of Soldiers of The Great War. To make a demonstrable gift, the gold trinkets were smelted down and consolidated into a 1000 gram gold-bar and dye-stamped with the Charity’s initials, and placed in a glass-case for the impressed to marvel at the beneficence of National Socialism. It was not long before such an expensive and publicly exhibited object disappeared, stolen, it is believed, by thieves sophisticated enough to organise their burglary at night and with gloves, but ignorant enough to have paid no attention to more expensive and valuable items contained in the same showcase. The Charity-stamped gold bar was however too hot to handle and it was soon in the possession of the Dresden Bank, whose representatives curiously did not return it to the National Socialist Society for Widows, but sent it to their branch in Baden-Baden, whose managers did have some sensitivity in the matter. They got rid of it, contriving to sell the bar to the Deutsche Bank in the same city, where it joined other gold bars of a similar but not so august pedigree, and from where Lieutenant Gustav Ivan Harpsch’s sergeant, Hans Dopplemann, had it collected and packaged by his corporal, to travel to Bolzano where they cannot cook a good spaghetti.
A trunk of theatrical costumes from a German travelling theatre group of the 1940s was recently auctioned in Vilnius and bought by the local history museum. It contained costumes made of black satin material meticulously sewn with yellow stars to make twelve different items, namely, three suits, a pair of pyjamas, an overall, a night-gown, a top-coat, a set of female underwear, a set of male underwear, a swimming-costume, a bride’s dress and a shroud. The one-time celebrated Jewish writer was living in Lithuania after the war, having escaped innumerable terrors (a great many of them brought on by his own arrogance) by being sheltered by a succession of devoted lovers who had the means to keep him protected. As an elderly man surviving on his royalties, he had invested money in a small Lithuanian theatre to put on a play he had recently written called The Stellar Tailor.
A costume specialist at the local history museum had discovered that behind each star had been sewn a piece of card on which, in a black indelible ink, a name had been hand-written. Most of the names had been bleached away by repeated washings and cleanings, but sufficient writing evidence remained, including the name Greta Nairobi, to presume that here was a collection of the names of all the writer’s lovers, male and female. The costume specialist counted 67 names on the twelve sets of garments, 33 of them readable and 12 of them identifiable. It can be presumed that most of the names were Jewish, and that their owners had perished in the camps. One name was Lida Baarova, the Czech film actress, which sets up a series of particular resonances, because she was, for a time, Goebbels’ mistress. It would be curious to imagine the reaction of the radically anti-Semitic Goebbels to the fact that he was sleeping with a woman who was, or had been, the mistress of the Jewish writer who had scorned, mocked and ridiculed his policy of forcing all Jews to wear a yellow star.
GOLD
7 – The biscuit-tin
Three widowed sisters kept their late 18th century golden heirlooms in a biscuit-tin under crumbling English biscuits bought at Fortnum and Masons from before the war when their husbands were alive and shopped in Piccadilly.
An Anglophile German officer called Helmut Buttlitzer was billeted in the sisters’ large house which was gloomily overshadowed with horse chestnut trees in the southern suburbs of Potsdam near the zoo. They ate well and frequently. Most nights the menu included rabbit stew or rabbit soup or rabbit goulash. The rabbits were freshly killed. The sisters kept a rabbit run in the garden.
Buttlitzer’s knowledge of English snobbery soon attracted him to the identifiable biscuit container. With a polite smile he ate the mouldy Bath Olivers, and with an even politer smile, admired the Marie Antoinette bracelet, the pearl and gold necklaces that might have belonged to Madame de Stael, the gold Louis XVI watch fob and chain, the golden hair-pins of Madame Despins, the Charlottenburg brooch that had belonged to Amedea Rosenfeld, and the ebony and gold filigree butterfly book marker that had once lodged in a purple passage in the Talmud belonging to Rabbi Nicodemus Zabben. The sisters were proud of their historical inheritance made very much in association with their Jewish ancestors’ ability to lend money to the gentile royalty of Europe. The sisters talked eagerly, interrupting one another, knowing their listener was an intelligent man interested in such things. Whilst they blushingly discussed what the possible purple passage in the Talmud might have been, Buttlitzer slowly and  methodically wrapped the items discussed, in three table napkins, and put them carefully inside his uniform pockets, buttoning down the flaps and patting his chest to feel the snug proximity of the valuables to his heart.
After dinner, Buttlitzer took a turn in the large, tree-shadowed garden, leaving the sisters silently staring at one another in the house. He could see them through the French windows gripping their coffee-cups with white knuckles. Buttlitzer watched the rabbits. There were a great many of them, gambolling, nibbling, defecating, burrowing, copulating. As Buttlitzer stood there listening to the distant roar of the hungry, underfed lions in the Potsdam Zoo, he was attacked by a hungry intruder who had climbed the garden wall in search of material to make rabbit-pie. Taking a much unexpected bonus, the intruder robbed Buttlitzer of his recently acquired historical souvenirs.
The valuable items were quickly fenced by an ignorant non-connoisseur and reconstituted as separate piles of pearls, diamonds, enamel, ebony splinters and high-class gold. The gold watch cogs and watch wheels, the rings and chain-links, the naked pins and the bent and twisted filigree, already unidentifiable to the father and son gold smelters whose job indeed was to make the items even more unrecognisable, were melted down at 1947.52 degrees Fahrenheit, and re-reconstituted as gold bar HUI 707. With all the other gold-bars, this bar was on the back seat of the smashed Mercedes car found by police Chief Arturo Gaetano and US Sergeant William Bell on the outskirts of Bolzano, a city which has occasionally striven in the past to reconstitute a reputation for serving good spaghetti to travellers, because it seems to be unable to serve good spaghetti to its local inhabitants.
After his assault in the dark by the rabbit-catcher, Helmut Buttlitzer brushed himself down, re-entered the house and had the three sisters put butter on the bruise on his head, and no more was said. He took one more cup of coffee, bowed politely to the three women and went upstairs to bed. In the morning, he thought it prudent to make an application for a change of billet. His excuse was that the garden of the house was too gloomy and made him feel melancholy. The billeting office found him new accommodation closer to the zoo where the roar of the hungry lions was very loud and getting louder.
Buttlitzer contemplated feeding rabbits to the lions, and he knew the whereabouts of a useful source.
 

GOLD
8 – The naked jockey
Three brooches of great value were discovered in the back of a plate camera with which the Jewish photographer Gertrude Magy-Holst had been taking photographs of her nude husband, the jockey Corki Helmt. The brooches, holding a ruby and two diamonds set in cushions of gold were appropriated, the stones separated out from the gold, and the settings smelted down eventually at Baden-Baden.  Gertrude Magy-Holst had taken celebrated portrait photographs of all the members of the Weimar government, so the police looked for evidence of one kind or another of possible sedition, or sabotage, or general lack of enthusiasm for the National Socialist State. They had the photographs that were found in the camera, developed and printed. They had laughed at the husband’s nudity, but with a certain sheepishness for Corki Helmt was very handsome, his body, though small and slight, as was fitting for a jockey, was very neat and well proportioned, and his genitals, the obvious centre of interest in a photograph of a nude, were profoundly attractive and dignified. Indeed even his feet were handsome.
The gold filigree cushions of the splendid brooches were melted down in the furnace blast like cobwebs before a storm, and their original identity vanished as the liquid gold mingled with gold from Serbian rings, Dutch coins bearing the face of a popular queen who had escaped to England, Swedish crosses and an Italian golden rosary. The gold was poured into a 60 ounce mould and stamped with the date of the last full moon, and the letters BB g7iK.
Lieutenant Harpsch, working with two bribed members of the Third Reich military, commandeered the gold bar along with 99 others, and 92 of them pended up in a crashed Mercedes outside Bolzano, the one place in Italy where good spaghetti was a rarity.
It was said that the police-officers examining the case of the naked jockey, were much taken by the idea of having their own portraits taken nude. In two cases, wives were coerced into becoming instant photographers, but, by all accounts the results were not a success. Because of this, or because he was suspected of being a gypsy, for all good horse-handlers were accused of having gypsy blood by National Socialist enthusiasts, Corki Helmt was arrested.
Gertrude slept most of the rest of the war away in a darkened bedroom in an apartment in Darmstadt. Her doctor kept her supplied with strong sedatives because she never overcame her grief and pain at the loss of her jockey who was hideously tortured to death for being so small and neat and sexually perfect.  In a strange way Gertrude had been responsible for his death by making perfect photos of his perfect body.
 

GOLD
9 – The burnt elephant
A small circus run by two gypsy families returned every August to Ljubljana Castle. Their prize attractions were an albino African elephant that stood on its hind legs and whistled through its trunk, and a fifteen year old trapeze artist called Tana whose activities in the air made an audience feel giddy. The elephant was owned by Frederica Goeherly, and Tana was the adopted daughter of Wilhemina Katakis. Frederica and Wilhemina were cousins united in blood through their great grandparents who had been born in Baghdad. As long as the takings were regular, the family feuds were contained, and the cousins could organise their combined family business with finesse. They sewed their valuables into their best and their worst clothing. They left no strewn rubbish, no parched earth, no unhappy tradesmen, no unbribed police, and they stayed in one place only long enough to be a novelty to everyone. As soon as local star-struck daughters wanted to run off with the strong man, and rebellious sons wanted to ride the white circus horses, Frederica and Wilhemina knew it was time to leave. And they always left silently at night. By dawn they were thirty kilometres along the road, out of reach save for the most desperately in love or the most determinedly vindictive.
In September 1941, German National Socialism declared gypsies undesirable. The citizens of Ljubljana had never considered Frederica and Wilhemina to be gypsies. The two women wore civilised clothing, ate and drank in good restaurants and they paid their bills. But Tana, the fifteen year old trapeze artist, fell in love with a Nazi officer, and the whistling white elephant ate flowering bindweed and ran amuck. SS directives forbade the former because he was a German and she was a gypsy, and objected to the latter, because elephants were too obscure in Germany to warrant a license number. Paper work in the Gestapo Office seemed to regard both events, delirious love and
uncontrollable animals, under the same heading. The gypsy community had methods to deal with undesirable love and sick elephants, and so did the Gestapo. The Gestapo put its brash actions into operation before the gypsies. The lovesick Nazi officer was sent to Trieste under armed guard and soldiers armed with shotguns chased the elephant. The officer escaped and the elephant went into the forest; the gypsies in both cases being surreptitiously instrumental in making these events happen.
The citizens of Ljubljana turned out to watch the possibility of a double capture.  But neither lover or elephant were caught and the Gestapo took revenge for their double humiliation by burning down the circus and arresting Frederica and Wilhemina. The two women insisted on wearing their best clothing to the police station. They were stripped and their gold was soon discovered sewn into the lining of an ermine tippet, a silk embroidered bodice, a fox-fur hat, built-up shoes and woollen stocking-tops. It was much too hot to wear winter clothes in August. The locals pillaged what was left of the circus caravans. They taunted the animals, and they set dogs to sniff elephant dung and pursue its one-time owner into the forest from where they flushed it out into the cobbled streets, splashing it with petrol and setting it alight by throwing bales of lit petrol-soaked straw in its path. The white elephant eventually found its way to the river that runs through the city, and, unable to cool its scorched trunk, died of heart attack sitting in the water. Its carcass was later sliced up for trophies and dog-meat.
There was no law about sleeping with gypsy women before the time of the Ljubljana elephant. There was after. The male relatives of Frederica and Wilhemina, even including the underage male children, were accused of sleeping with women anciently related to the Jewish race, and they were deported to Poland, Baghdad being regarded as too far away. The gold resulting from ten thousand circus tickets sold to watch albino elephants and high trapeze artists too young to fall in love, was sent to Munich. The Deutsche Bank wagon visited the smelter before delivering its load of gold bars to Vault Three in Baden-Baden, to the future treasure-chest of Lieutenant Gustav Harpsch, a soldier who believed he could find his small daughter amongst the tens of thousands of Europe’s dispossessed and buy her freedom.
The Gestapo never thought to search the worst clothing of Frederica  and Wilhemina, which consisted of several pairs of overalls, three pairs of leather boots, a ripped scarf with a plaid lining, a battered straw-hat and several pairs of heavily patched underwear. And as a  consequence they never found twice as much valuable material as they had discovered in the two lady’s very best police-visiting outfits.
 

GOLD
10 – Peter the Great
A Jewish family in Rostov whose ancestors had been Dutch were keen to try to emulate the activities of Peter the Great of Russia when he had stayed in Holland. Through his example, they lathed ivory, made buckets, studied dentistry, wrote the letter R backwards and learnt to inscribe gold with a diamond. Every piece of the family’s golden hoard had been inscribed, rings, bracelets, teething-rings, lockets, brooches, table-napkin rings, spoons, cigarette-cases, fountain-pens, hub-caps and bath-taps. And then it had all been confiscated by invading German soldiers. It was taken to Munich where, for a time, out of curiosity, it was kept together as a collection. But eventually the itemised gold trinkets were separated from one another. The more august pieces found there way back to Leningrad, but some eighteen smaller items started to travel in and out of the hands of middlemen and fences until they arrived in Mainz and then the smelting works at Baden-Baden. From there they temporarily, and in another golden state, fell into the hands of Lieutenant Gustav Harpsch and arrived at Bolzano, the worst place in Italy to taste a good spaghetti.
In his enthusiasm for all things non-Russian in Europe, Peter the Great had thought of making spaghetti an important contribution to Russian cuisine. He had tasted it as cooked by the servants of Venetian silk merchants in the Amsterdam shipyards. In the event he took back the secrets of making silk to St Petersburg and not the secrets of making good spaghetti. Commentators, determined to make Peter wiser and more prophetic than he could possibly have been, deliberated on Italy, silk and spaghetti and found the correct connection in noodles which is certainly manufactured in strands like silk, was probably taken back from China, like silk, by Marco Polo, and was most certainly introduced into Italy, like silk, via Venice. These were the commentators who were not slow to support Peter’s suggestion that St Petersburg was Russia’s Venice. They endeavoured to import Chinese cooks into Western Russia, but these unhappy exiles despaired of cooking good noodles, took up washing instead, and set up a St Petersburg Imperial laundry. The British are credited with being the first to invent, build and run concentration-camps at the time of the Boer War to imprison Dutch farmers whose ancestors may have taught Peter diamond-inscribing. But Peter had predated their initiative. He himself had kept a primitive concentration-camp at Novogorod, harbouring recalcitrant Cossacks who vehemently hated Peter’s foreign enthusiasms, especially those learnt in the Netherlands, a land, they thought was populated by people with webbed feet who ate tulip bulbs and would rather ride in a boat than on a horse.
 

GOLD
11 –  The Colosseum Jews
The Americans arrived on the outskirts of Rome on 18 July 1943. A family of Jews living near the Colosseum celebrated too early, too loudly and too exuberantly. Their excuse was that they wished to express immediate solidarity with their relatives in Philadelphia, in Massachusetts, in the cellars of Carnegie Hall, and in the tenements of the Bowery where you pick gold up off the streets for the effort of bending over. The family lit the candles of a seven-branched candle-stick in their window overlooking the Colosseum, and they stood in the street looking up at the pink and tangerine sky for the three stars that would permit them license to start an evening service.
Three German soldiers were awaiting trial for raping an Austrian journalist in the Belvedere. The journalist was the niece of their commanding officer, and each of the infantrymen had a very low expectation of seeing Berlin again. Drunk on black market gin, they commandeered the military police vehicle taking them to the barracks in Trastevere, and crashed it on the corner of Via St Laurenzio and Via Lineo Posti where the Jewish family were celebrating. They vented their bitterness, frustration, anger and resentment in a way that satisfied their dim memories of the purposes of the Colosseum turned around to persecute Jews instead of Christians. They themselves were theoretical Christians. Between them they had Irish Catholic parents, Jehovah Witness grandparents, Mormon antecedents and and an Alabama Baptist great grandfather lynch-mobbed by sadists at Little Italy, Alabama. The soldiers dragged Alfredo and his two sons Caspio and Luigi and his three daughters, Laura, Margarita and Spitzi across the road and into the Colosseum arena and they stoned them. Alfredo was killed with a blow to his left eye. Caspio had the effrontery to throw stones back.
Three hours later US servicemen drove around and around the Colosseum, hooting, shouting, and waving small paper flags, their headlamps blazing. Two of the three German soldiers were still abusing Margarita and Spitzi, having tied them up like Christian sacrificial martyrs. They were shot.
The third soldier had returned to the Jewish apartment in search of booty and had found gold. With his pockets jingling with ancient Jewish coins, he had left Rome on a retreating auxiliary medical truck carrying war-wounded to the Apennines. He lost his Jewish Colosseum treasure in a poker game, to a corporal who went to relieve himself over a cliff-top to be shot by a sniper, from which side it was not clear. The corporal’s body fell into a deep ravine where the night silence for four hours was broken by his sobbing that sometimes sounded like the trickling of fresh water in a hidden stream and sometimes like the singing of a melancholic bird. And then he died. His body was found by partisans who took the gold from the chamois-leather bag he wore around his belly under his trouser-belt, and they sold it to buy rifles to kill more Germans.
The gold coins arrived in Turin and for a time were in the possession of Giovanni Triborius Daley who knew their value as Hebrew treasure and sold five to a Sicilian antiquarian which are now in the Museum of Roman Archaeology in Taormina. The remainder he hid in a clothes-trunk. They would be good collateral for post-war survival. War prices for historical artefacts was more likely to be based on their current metal price not their artistry or age, besides they were Jewish and automatically tainted. Triborius Daley was killed in a train-crash near Cologne, and his daughter sold his assets to the Dresden bank in a bid to buy her passage to America.
The gold had now left the public domain. It became anonymous and the coins were smelted down and stamped and shipped and trafficked about from branch to branch of the Deutsche bank until three months before the end of the war they arrived in  Baden-Baden as gold bar FG780P.
Baden-Baden was an unfamiliar city to Lieutenant Gustav Harpsch and his corporal and his sergeant who drove into town in a transport with a diplomatic flag on its bonnet indicating some amalgam of VIP, military police, and SS. Whilst Gustav Harpsch used his credentials and charm and some threats to commandeer a black Mercedes from the bank garage, the corporal and the sergeant requisitioned the 100 gold bars from Vault Three with an order-paper signed by the Deutche bank manger, Harpsch’s brother-in-law, and packed them into two large black suitcases and placed them on the back seat of the car. Ninety-two of these gold bars were all set for the crash and disappointment in Bolzano, that city in North Italy where they cannot cook a good spaghetti, and where the Romans, as in most cities they conquered in the Mediterranean, had built a small amphitheatre to amuse pagans with involuntary Christian entertainers, in the days before the marauding German tribes from the North came down to lay waste.
 

GOLD
12 – The violin suitcase
In Prague, a music teacher was forbidden to teach music because of his Jewishness. He kept his valuables in his violin. If the violin could not play music it could be well used as a safe to house a meagre inheritance for his children, three girls and two little boys and a baby.
Their mother had died of puerperal fever.
On a house search, drunken fascist authorities demanded to be entertained. They pulled up five chairs and a sofa and sat with the music-teacher’s children on their laps. The lack of resonance in the violin disappointed them. It was a case of bad violinist or bad violin. They could not be bothered to find out. They played a game with the violin teacher. He and his violin could have the privilege of being cremated together or buried together. Bad music was not permissible in a former capital of the German-speaking Austro-Hungarian Empire. With the children now clustered around his knees, the violinist chose to be buried with his violin. That way his children might possibly have a slight chance of one day recovering their meagre inheritance. The authorities were disappointed at the violinist’s calm acceptance of his fate and they seized his youngest child and made her part of the bargain. What did he prize most, his tired violin or his frightened baby? The violinist was silent. They built a pyre in the buttercup field opposite the violinist’s small house and gave him a choice which should be burnt first, his baby or his violin; which was the greatest treasure, his music or his youngest child? The music teacher came out of his frozen trance in horror that such a suggestion could pass through a human imagination. He threw himself at the monster who had suggested such a thing. The violin-teacher was shot, and he was burnt on the pyre with his violin whilst his children watched. When the ashes cooled they went in search of their inheritance which to them was not the contents of the violin but their father’s charred bones.
The imperishable contents of the violin case were discovered some months later when they came to cut the grass of the buttercup field. There was not so very much in gold but enough to collect, sieve from the wood-ash, and smelt with other Jewish Prague booty and take to a centre collecting-point in Vienna, and then distribute to National Socialist accounts in the Deutsche Bank, including the branch in Baden-Baden managed by Lieutenant’s Harpsch’s brother-in-law. Lieutenant Harpsch collected the bar that contained the meagre inheritance of the violinist’s children, and tried to make that inheritance part of the inheritance of his own child. But he failed because of a white horse.
 
 
 
 

GOLD
13 – The sausageman
The sausageman in Weisel-on-the-Rhine had a brightly lit stall on the corner of Glopperstrasse and Hockstandradplatz. He was a fence. By way of the sausageman activities, practically anything saleable could be bought or sold at his stall. And if you had nothing to sell that was portable, he would make an offer for your body for a frankfurter with a little mustard and some sauerkraut. His offer stood for men, women and boys. He would not touch little girls. The saucepans at the back of the stove were full of cold grease and jewels. Their lids were tied on with string. He violated women with frankfurters. His notoriety was so familiar and so apparently untouched by restrictions from authority, he could have put up a notice saying “I buy and I sell. Sausages for gold, sausages for sex”.
A husband, a sheet-metal worker, with an unaccustomed full belly realised with horror why his guts had stopped rumbling, and why his wife had locked herself in the bedroom. He took his three brothers and his two brother-in-laws and turned over the sausage stall, sending its ovens and saucepans sprawling in the street. He popped all the brightly coloured lights with the heel of his boot. He scalded the sausageman from crown to heel, paying especial attention to his private parts. The evening commotion alerted the police who regularly received bribes from the sausageman in sausages, gold and rejected little girls. They fired on the sheet-metal worker and his relatives. They killed two and wounded a third. The husband and his youngest brother were ordered to clean up the mess, except that they should not touch the saucepans with the lids tied down with string. Those pans heavy with white grease were to be delivered to the police-station. The jewels-for-sausages were boiled free and bartered for money. The collected sausage-gold was smelted down into a thick “Indian Runner” bar and eventually left Weisel on the Rhine to travel to Vault Three of the Baden-Baden Deutche Bank. Lieutenant Harpsch collected this gold and took it to Bolzano to be redistributed, thanks to his inattention in crashing a car, to the Swiss financial community.
A new sausage stall was paid for. Business continued much the same as before, but with a new sausageman. The old proprietor lay in hospital for three years, never likely to walk or talk or use his prick again. His urine was persuaded to leave his body by an unaccustomed route. Then his burns bed was needed for more deserving war-wounded. He did not survive the move to a humble cot in a hospital corner. He died unmourned.
There was one new feature for the Weisel-on-the-Rhine sausage-stall on the corner of Glopperstrasse and Hockstandradplatz.  Mussolini had been rescued from his Belvolio captivity in a daring raid, and to celebrate a fresh solidarity with the Italian Fascists, the new sausageman started a tentative side-line in Italian food, pizza and spaghetti, served on paper-trays, with tomato sauce and sauerkraut. Discerning Italians might not have been so enthusiastic about this addition to the menu, save perhaps those Italians in Bolzano who probably would not have known the difference between good Italian spaghetti cooked in Naples and indifferent spaghetti cooked in Weisel-on-the-Rhine on the corner of Glopperstrasse and Hockstandradplatz.
 
 
 
 

GOLD
14 – The goose girl
A goose-girl in Lorraine kept forty geese to make pate, a prized delicacy in a world whose palate was losing its subtlety. She tended geese who could lay golden profits. She had Jewish friends and wanted to help them. She had a plan. She force-fed selected geese with Jewish gold trinkets. Holding the goose tightly between her plump knees, she placed a long-necked funnel deep into their throats and ground in hazel-nuts mixed with a little gold - small objects, thin anniversary rings, slender chains, finely wrought golden studs for a small child’s ear - massaging the long geese necks with her thick white fingers to help the birds swallow the booty. The pink and purple goose livers swelled. You could see a cut slice of mauve and pink goose liver lying on a white plate with a sprig of parsely and a golden chain like a precious fossil curled in a serpentine rhythm along a urinary conduit.
Jealous gentiles informed the police who killed off the flock, ripping open the goose bellies to find the valuables that were not for eating.
They left the goose-girl weeping, the white feathers around her bruised body blowing on the green grass. White and green. She painted the feathers gold for Christmas, but she died of cold and starvation, for who wanted gold feathers when they once dreamed of gold eggs? White and green and gold.
The goose-gold was smelted and arrived quietly as a glistening golden bar in the Deutsche Bank in Baden-Baden. And Lieutenant Gustav Harpsch commandeered it with all the rest of his gold bars and drove it in his black Mercedes to Bolzano hoping to buy back his daughter from a Swiss Red Cross sanatorium. White and green and gold and red.
 

GOLD
15 – Danae
Rosamunda Blasco, a Jewish Portuguese hairdresser from the Carmen Miranda Salon in Lisbon slept with her jewels in her bed. She sometimes slept with her gold held between her thighs and against her belly. Her boyfriend, Eduardo Tedesco Bolinar, called her Dana after the Greek heroine who was ravished by a shower of gold, another Jupiter disguise.
Rosamunda was imaginative. She had seen the relevant films. She was frightened of cat burglars and nocturnal thieves. She knew they could quietly scramble up a drainpipe, noiselessly break a window, move silently through her kitchen and into her bedroom and steal her valuables and then depart, and she would not know that her jewellery had been stolen until she woke up the next morning. She was having none of that. She would make sure the burglar would have to wake her to find her jewellery. That way she could at least put up a fight. That way she could at least see her assailant’s face. Rosamunda possessed a golden rosary, a wrist chain of gold Tarot charms, and a pair of gold earrings in the shape of leaping fish. Her mother had given Rosamunda three wedding-rings, the proof of her mother’s three marriages, the third unregistered, all three wrapped together in a chamois leather bag. Rosamunda also possessed two gold necklaces, a gold-strapped wristwatch and a golden image of the Virgin Mary standing on a slither of rock from Golgotha that had been sold at Lourdes and blessed by the Bishop of Armagh. The Virgin could be unscrewed from her Golgotha. She slept in Rosamunda’s lap; the rock occupied an ashtray on the bedside table.
One Thursday in May 1940, Rosamunda went to lunch with a rich English woman who wanted her hair cut to look like Merle Oberon in the film of Wuthering Heights. Rosamunda loved the smell of the English woman’s perfume, it was called Catherine. Rosamunda became pleasantly addicted to mayonnaise made with avocado and frothed egg-yolk; it was called an Emerald Serpent on account of the way it was laid on your plate. She frequented the rich woman’s car, and the rich woman’s summerhouse on the garden roof of the Capra Hotel. She liked to sit in the rich woman’s special Radio-Room where she listened to Somerset Maughan and Ivor Novello tell stories about the English in Rangoon and on the Cote D’Azur. She never knew who these people were or where those places might be. Rosamunda enjoyed taking a bath in the rich English woman’s bathroom and she enjoyed stretching out on the rich English woman’s bed, and she enjoyed spending afternoons watching American Romances in expensive seats at the Sunset Boulevard Cinema. Rosamunda’s boss, Hermione Picaro, at the Carmen Miranda Salon, encouraged her in all these things. The rich English woman was the wife of a minister in Salazar’s government and she gave very big tips indeed, like a new device called a Refrigerator, which was like a big ice-box but it had a door instead of a lid, trays for making Pink Gin ice-cubes, and a light that went on when you opened it up. The light worked on some sort of magnetic principle. Or a car radio, a radio that you could actually put in your car and, except for when you drove under a bridge or in a tunnel, it would play you American music. This car radio apparently also worked on some sort of magnetic principle.
With just a little prompting, Rosamunda would draw a moustache with mascara on her upper lip to imitate Laurence Olivier playing Heathcliff, and with extra white make-up and thick black lipstick she would imitate Merle Oberon in a black and white film playing Catherine. It satisfied the rich woman who stroked Rosamunda’s hair and her breasts and kissed her knees, and gave her a cocktail-shaker-set with six small glasses, six large glasses, a bottle of rum, a bottle of absinthe and a bottle of Pernod, and two aluminium shakers with red plastic screw-on tops, a bottle of maraschino cherries and an ice-bucket, and ten swizzle-sticks in the shape of miniature umbrellas which actually opened and shut.
Eduardo Tedesco Bolinar was jealous. He stole money from the cash-register at the Carmen Miranda Salon and contrived to get Rosamunda blamed. She was arrested and accused of unnatural practices, whether on account of impersonating Merle Oberon or Laurence Oliver is not reported. Eduardo’s uncle, Ferdinando Belize, was a police clerk, and could arrange to fictionalise all written reports, which he did as a matter of honour wishing to be a script-writer in Hollywood. He hoped a film producer would one day read his police reports and sign him up for imaginative writing. Eduardo’s uncle sent two policemen around to Rosamunda’s apartment. They could not get in or break the door down, such were Rosmunda’s anti-burglar precautions, so they had to help one another climb a drain-pipe, noisily break three windows and climb across various hazards in the kitchen before they could get to the bedroom and find the jewels in Rosamunda’s bed. If Rosamunda had been in bed, she certainly would have been woken by all the noise and disturbance. She certainly would have seen their sweaty, ugly faces.
The golden trinkets were impounded as circumstantial evidence, to be considered as probable bribes or likely gifts received as a result of sexual blackmail. They were carefully itemised in case the rich English woman should take an interest in Rosamunda’s case and arrange bail.
Rosamunda was bored at the police-station. She volunteered to cut hair to make the time pass more quickly. She accepted requests. A Ramon Novarro, an Errol Flynn, a John Gilbert, several Rudolf Valentinos, and a Bela Lugosi, though she had to flick through several film magazines before she could find a good enough picture of Bela as Dracula to make a decent copy of his hair-style; she even did an Adolf Hitler though no-one could remember having seen Adolf in an American Romance. Retrospectively Adolf as Dracula could have been engaging.
Meanwhile Rosmunda’s valuables moved around the police-stations of Lisbon. The Virgin Mary statue was taken home on loan for three days by a police-chief’s wife, who hoped to make an impression on a visiting Irish bishop. The three wedding-rings disappeared. Eduardo was given the empty chamois leather bag out of which he made himself a jockstrap. He was now seeing the rich English woman and spending the afternoons at expensive seats in the cinema, chain-smoking long black cigarillos which made him cough until his eyes watered. Eduardo’s uncle collected 14,000 escudos in dirty untraceable notes from a judge’s clerk, proceeds probably from selling the golden rosary.
On the occasion of a police clean-up, with sundry other items, the remains of the Rosamunda collection were quickly shifted across the border to Madrid, out of the way of a supervision that might get too close and create accusations of corruption. The trinkets subsequently travelled to Salamanca where they were stolen with comparative ease from a police truck by a trader in tourist trinkets called Enrico Solstice, who used them to enlarge his gold collection to negotiate for an early period Joan Miro, sold at the back door of the Portuguese National Gallery Collection to pay for restoration of the gallery’s cooling system. It was a painting of a rabbit and three fish, an image that was later made popular by being reproduced on the menu cover of the restaurant at the Joan Miro Museum in Barcelona in the 1990s. Enrico had been a little impatient. He had hoped to buy an El Greco from the same source one day, perhaps ostensibly to help them out with the gallery’s security alarm system, but that would have needed five times as much bullion.
Rosamunda’s gold, now almost as good as invisible in the eight metal cases of valuables sent to Medrun on the French-Spanish border, was in the hands of Portuguese fascists determined to help their friends in France. Addressed to Suzanne Creaux, the niece of Pierre Laval, official Vichy negotiator, the consignment was intercepted by the maquis somewhere near Roux, and broken down into small collections that could easily be spirited away. One of these collections was itemised by a young clerk called Jacques de la Lune, and contained a golden Virgin Mary standing on a sliver of black rock, which surely once belonged to Rosamunda Blasco. This clerk may have been a turncoat, for the Virgin arrived in Vichy, its original intended arrival destination, in the summer of 1944, and was subsequently sent to Colmar and then Baden-Baden where it was unscrewed from its contact with Golgotha and smelted down without any sentimental or religious anxieties. Lieutenant Gustav Harpsch in the end got his hands on Blasco’s legacy, and as a fugitive Nazi, fearfully running away from persecution and hopefully running towards his three-year old daughter, involuntarily dumped it in a spectacular car-crash on a highroad near Bolzano, a place in Italy that had earnt a reputation for not being able to cook a good spaghetti.
What of all the characters in this story?  Well, Rosamunda Blasco made no other known mark on European documentary history, neither did Eduardo Tedesco Bolinar or Hermione Picaro, Ferdinando Belize, Enrico Solstice, Suzanne Creaux or Jacques de la Lune, but it is known that Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, one time dictator of Portugal, died in his bed, scarcely mourned. Merle Oberon was discovered by Alexanda Korda, had four husbands, and caused the collapse of the film I Claudius by a near fatal car crash. Laurence Olivier earnt a reputation on the British stage, making at least two films that have since become classic adaptations of Shakespearean plays. He marryied two contrasting English women, Vivien Leigh, who drank herself to death, and Joan Plowright who is still alive at the time of writing and continues to play dippy English grandmothers with hearts of gold.
Ivor Novello was an effete English songwriter and sometime actor, following both professions with some entertaining camp wit. Somerset Maughan was a novelist famously painted by Graham Sutherland against a yellow wall, who lived the life of a professional English exile in places much warmer than London. Ramon Novarro was murdered in a motel-room by hooligans who may or may not have known his identity, and were possibly over-excited at Novarro’s sexual appetite. Errol Flynn supposedly had a sexual organ that encouraged him never to wear short trousers in public, John Gilbert star of passionate romances, was rumoured at one time to be Garbo’s lover, failed to make it into the talkies and died of drink aged forty-one. Rudolf Valentino, the archetypal cliched Latin lover, was repeatedly and badly imitated, most famously in a photograph by Cartier-Bresson, and engendered one of the world’s first huge fan-clubs, conveniently dying at a young age to help his continuing fame. Bela Lugosi was a Hungarian actor who reputedly never spoke more than five words of English. He famously played Count Dracula, parodied in the cartoon series Sesame Street by a puppet who announced himself as “I am Count Dracula, I count”. Adolf Hitler was a dictator who kept no written records of his responsibilities in the murder of millions and successfully entered into a suicide pact with his two-day old wife, Eva Braun, in an underground bunker in Berlin. Joan Miro made himself a fortune and a huge Spanish reputation, trying to fill Picasso’s shoes by repeating his same tedious set of motifs for forty years. And El Greco, the Greek, was a 17th century Spanish painter with an astigmation of the eye and a liver complaint that caused him to paint long etiolated figures that look as though they have just come out of seclusion in damp earth like crocus bulbs in February.
It might be possible to fill in a little with some of the other names in this short story, to provide you, for example, with a little information about Danae and Jupiter, Emily Bronte, Carmen Miranda, Pernod, Eva Braun, Shakespeare, Picasso, Graham Sutherland, Cartier-Bresson, and even the Virgin Mary, but the danger is that yet more names would inevitably arise and we would be here all night.
You may have noticed that one name is missing, the name of the rich English woman who created the circumstances to engender this story in the first place. But we cannot supply her name. She is still alive and is determined to remain anonymous, if only to protect the privacy of her five illegitimate children by Eduardo Tedesco Bolinar.
 

GOLD
16 – Love of dentistry
A supply of gold kept in a glass-fronted cabinet by a Dutch Jewish dentist in Eindhoven was stolen and taken to the mint at Saarbrucken by a Dutch woman from Maastricht whose husband was a Russian prisoner-of-war. She traded her body to a young Belgian smelter who insisted on a contract of an hour of her time for an ounce of his smelting. She was generous and they ended up married, having to suffer the consequences of the possible return of her husband at the end of the war. They were lucky. Her Dutch prisoner-of-war husband from Maastricht had been a slave labourer on a Russian Collective Farm, coerced into sleeping with a Polish farmer’s blind daughter who had eventually nursed him through diptheria, cholera and influenza, and had married him.
 
No-one reported the two bigamists from Maastricht to any authority, Dutch, German, Russian, Belgian or Polish.
In Holland, the dentist’s smelted gold, now constituting gold bar FG890P, was sold and the proceeds bought the smelter and his new wife a large apartment. They still live together happily in an old people’s home in Potsdam. Their daughter is a dentist practising in Dresden.
In Novgorod, the prisoner-of-war and his blind Polish wife worked on a Collective Farm but also rented an allotment where their cabbages and eggs brought them enough local prosperity to help them take their daughter through medical school. She now teaches dentistry in Kracow, her mother’s home-town.
Gold bar FG890P was in Vault Three in Baden-Baden in 1944, and picked up by Gustav Harpsch on his abortive attempt to find and buy back his infant daughter from the Swiss. He never discovered his daughter, having been involved in a car crash which displayed all his stolen gold to the eyes of an American Occupational Force Sergeant, William Bell, on the outskirts of Bolzano in North Italy where spaghetti is rarely cooked with any accomplishment. It so happened that this American sergeant’s daughter was a dentist practising in Ottawa. Who knows, perhaps Harpsch’s daughter, associated by inference with all these coincidences, might one day develop a trauma with teeth.
 

GOLD
17 –  The Left-Biased Steering-Wheel
Maxima Fortunelli was a Roman-born Jew of Sicilian origin, orphaned at 10, brought up by a Jewish family that shared no blood with her. She was stern and no-one knew she had lovers who were not Jewish, that included a short-sighted German of Dutch parents who wouldn’t wear glasses and who sometimes lived in Trieste. Maxima sold paintings and antiques, and she was supposed to be a secretary, and indeed did put several hours into a publishing-house that erratically published art magazines that favoured Spanish art and Italian Mannerism, and loved Velasquez, Altdorfer and Caravaggio, the first for his brush-strokes, the second for his thorns and the third for his boys. Maxima’s friends saw the connections in all this; dark, tenebrist, moody, dangerous, a little masochistic, erotic. The point of declaring this character background for Maxima Fortunelli is to indicate her love of secrets and danger, and to go someway to explain her actions.
It was known that she kept her valuables in strange places, in a cobra head in a hotel safe in Modena, in a Gladstone bag in a Scottish hospital run by a great grandchild of Cavour, in her nursery rocking-horse, in a ceramic pipe under a swimming-pool in Luxembourg, in the steering-wheel of her car, a dark green Austin.  She used her car a great deal, going backwards and forwards between Sorrento and Paestum in Southern Italy, and Mestre and Trieste in Northern Italy. All four places were littered with her erotic escapades. She regularly met an English lover by the women’s bath-house in the ruined city of Herculaneum, where she wore a thin print dress and no underwear, her buttocks on the cold marble with her lover on her lap. She wore red dresses in Ravello and deliberately took her amusements without love, in a bamboo garden beside a deep tank occupied by giant toads. She frequently took a cabin in the regular ferryboat to Capri. She sat in a pony and trap by the beach-road outside Paestum. She did boats in Mestre and trams in Trieste. Sometimes the meetings were for business only, but most times she combined business with her pleasure.
In September 1941 she fenced gold for Jews who wished to escape to Israel, and she had secured a family fortune in her steering wheel. She was not watching what she was doing on the Via Emilia just after the Ferrara turn-off and she bumped heavily into a hay-wagon, breaking her front passenger side-window and causing her hollow steering-wheel to rattle with loose rings every time she took a sharp left turn. Outside Padua at ten o’clock in the evening, she was stopped at a road-block, and forced to give a lift to a German officer who had severe stomach cramps and urgently needed to see his Austrian doctor. Uncharacteristically fearful of her rattling steering-wheel, she refused to turn left to the appointed place of her Jewish contact, and instead, drove straight on until the complaining officer fainted and Maxima tipped him out onto the highway in the middle of the night somewhere near Avventura. She drove on to Ferrovia before realising that she was being followed, whereupon she accelerated, momentarily lost concentration, braked, swerved and hit a tree. With Maxima unconscious from a bump on her head, her car ran driverless on into a dark wood, miraculously just  missing fifty tree-trunks until it came to a natural stop on an incline of pine needles, its headlights spiking the misty darkness. Maxima came to, found the engine dead, changed her shoes and ran off into the night. Her car remained alone in the wood until discovered by two teenage lovers who used the brown leather back seat as a snug refuge. A week later the girl remembered the car lost among the trees and phoned her brother who owned a garage. He went searching and found the silent car. He was obliged to cut down several pine trees, being unable to find the path that the car had used to reach its resting-place, and he finally winched it onto the back of his pick-up truck. He spent a day patching the car’s front bumpers and repairing a flat tire and he sold it to a solicitor’s son, who drove it for a week before his patience at the steering-wheel rattling every time it turned to the left, persuaded him to take the car back to the garage to get the steering fixed. The garage mechanic discovered the gold hoard, but kept the find to himself, showing the solicitor’s son only scraps of loose metal filings as being the cause of the rattling. The mechanic split his findings into three parts and sold the first part to a bank clerk who kept them in his bank strong-box to be discovered when he was sacked for irregularities. The gold was sent to Baden-Baden and smelted into a single gold bar, which, with 91 other gold bars, was discovered in a black Mercedes, license plate number TL9246 abandoned at the road-side at Bolzano, the one place in Italy where they could not make good spaghetti.
Working forwards in this story, the bank-clerk became the manager of the Central Bundes-bank in Vienna, the mechanic bought a string of garages along the Via Emilia, and the solicitor’s son, after performing valuable work at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials, assisted in rewriting the Geneva Code for the Protection of Victims of War and officiated as a European High Court Judge in the Hague and then in Jerusalem on the occasion of the Eichmann trails. The German officer who was suffering from appendicitis was later exonerated by the Americans and went to Salt Lake City as a military adviser, to later become a member of Kennedy’s staff at the time of the Bay of Pigs, and to travel in Nixon’s entourage to China. Maxima organised a Miro exhibition at the Guggenheim in Venice in 1960, was transferred to the New York Guggenheim when the Frank Lloyd Wright Building opened, married an executive of Sotheby's and now lives as a rich happy widow in the Dakota Buildings on the West side of Central Park. There is a Dali, two Braques and an early Renoir hanging in her dining-room and untold surprises, it is said, in her dressing room. Some say she has a Velaquez in her toilet, an Altdorfer in her bathroom and a Caravaggio still-life of grapes in her bank-vault. The Velasquez was uncharacteristic and therefore did not attract attention, Altdorfer is a painter whose works are not that widely recognised and Maxima took a risk on a guest recognising its value. The Caravaggio was immediately identifiable and therefore she did not dare to hang it even in a public private space like her bed-room. Denial of these facts of ownership is said to be a smokescreen to avoid the snoopings of thieves and the inland revenue.
 
 
 

GOLD
18 – The haystack story
At the approach of the Fifth Army marching to Poland, three Catholic farmer families collected their valuables together and hid them in a haystack with their thirteen children. The farmers were persuaded to entertain Nazi soldiers and bring their best schnapps out of the cellar to celebrate Hitler’s birthday. The children, thinking to delight and surprise their parents and their guests, came out of hiding festooned in the familys’ jewellery collection. The children, the jewels and five cows were confiscated. The gold was stripped from the jewellery collection and eventually arrived in Munich, where, it was refashioned into convenient gold bars. One of these travelled to Baden-Baden labelled perishable goods and arrived in Lieutenant Harpsch’s possession to be discovered with 91 other gold bars in a crashed black Mercedes, license plate number TL9246, at the road-side near Bolzano, the one place in Italy where they cannot make good spaghetti.
This event was tragedy enough, but the drama was curiously compounded. One child and one gold necklace were never found. The families searched the haystack over and over again. In their desperation, they dismantled it, scattering the hay across the farmyard.  But they never found the child or the necklace. The child’s name was Hyka and the necklace was worth 300,000 marks. The Catholic families never saw child or necklace again.
One week after the Fifth Army had passed by and tens of thousands of Jewish Polish families had been liquidated and Great Britain had declared war on Germany, one of the farmers’ Jewish neighbours obtained passports to England, bought new suitcases and emigrated to Lancaster to work in the linen factories. They took with them an orphan who was delighted by her new name, Adovisher, which in Eastern Silesia is Yiddish for needle.
 

GOLD
19 – The ring collector
Albert Albers gave receipts for the wedding-rings he coerced off the women in his family, thirty-seven pieces of pink paper signed with his initials in blue ink. He said they could get the rings back after the war with fifty per cent interest relevant to the newly Viktorious German global gold-standard to be recognised in London, Berlin, Tokyo and New York. It sounded official and optimistic and sort of impressive. He said their wedding-rings were needed to help buy Japanese bonds to support the war effort against the British in Singapore. The pink receipts could be used in Kelsterbach near Wiesbaden as credit notes for food of a non-perishable nature at the local grocers. The women needed to feed hungry mouths and they agreed to Albert’s unlikely promises. In return for acknowledging the pink receipts, Albert had promised the Kelsterbach grocers war-credit based on forcibly selling pork to rabbis to encourage them to become gentiles. Albert argued that a pork-eating rabbi would have to become a gentile since his ethical credit would be valueless among his own people. He discussed his plans with the Jewish community, asking for their co-operation, and offering as an inducement, funds to rebuild their synaogogues after crystal-night by way of auctioneering re-cycled bricks bought at knock-down prices from a dismantled gas-factory in the Wiesbaden suburbs. Albert was a schemer with innumerable exciting financial plans.
After the war, not only were there no rabbis in the Wiesbaden area to demand a refund, but there were no grocer’s shops left standing and, at the end of Albert’s financial chain, not a single wedding-ring could be returned. Albert was consequently ostracised by the women in his family, by his sisters, his sisters-in-law, his grandmothers, his aunts and his female cousins. The women despised him. He was ignored at christenings and cold-shouldered at birthdays. He was not invited to funerals. Even his wife began to sleep downstairs, in a single bed under the window. He was exasperated. He loved women and he wanted to be well thought of by them. He spent two years dreaming up schemes to earn money to pay them back for living so long without their wedding-rings. He worked hard to return into the bosom of their favour.
Finally, the drama for Albert ended a little like that Maupassant short story of the woman who borrowed a pearl necklace to wear at a grand ball, lost it, spent twenty years of her life scrubbing floors and taking in laundry to afford to replace it, only to find the necklace had been made of paste pearls and was virtually worthless. Most of the wedding- rings in the Albers family were nearly worthless but Albers was never made aware he had been tricked, though trickery was not really in the minds of his female relatives, the currency associated with their wedding-rings was in sentiment not riches.
As to the wedding-rings - what had happened to them? It is a truism that most people in the world do not own gold, now or then. But if they do own gold it is most likely to be in the form of a wedding-ring. A golden wedding-ring is like a talisman. There is of course something significant in associating fidelity for eternity with the most precious of metals. It suggests confidence. Which is perhaps curious because gold is so valued for itself, that almost inevitably it will be melted down from its present condition and turned into something else. This of course is what happened to the wedding-rings belonging to the women in Albert’s life.
It could be said that wedding-rings at certain times of the war and in certain places, became for a time a semi-official currency. Twenty wedding rings in Mannheim in April 1943 could buy you a passport to America. The going rate for a petrol-filled English car in Delitzsch near Leipzig in the autumn of 1944 might be thirty wedding-rings. But, considering their symbolic value, it was often unwise to meddle with wedding-rings. They could so easily have a negative value. A passport purchased with wedding-rings was bound to be fake, a car purchased with wedding-rings was bound to crash. It was just too much an unlucky bargain.
From the German gentile point-of-view, playing with wedding-rings as a currency was unlucky for the Albers family. The wedding-rings  became part of a gold bar. And this gold bar wrapped up in a newspaper announcing the bombing of Pearl harbour travelled to Baden-Baden on a slow train. These thirty-seven wedding-rings of the Albers family were thus associated with the entry of America into the war which marked the definitive beginning of the end for Germany. For four days, the Albers wedding-rings constituted one sixth of one gold bar out of the 92 gold-bars that eventually arrived in Bolzano. They contributed in a very small way to a possible happiness for him. Now there indeed is a worthwhile currency, a currency of happiness. But a currency of happiness is difficult to convert or change or transfer. Harpsch could not hold on to it, bank it or buy anything with it. He lost it all in a car crash on the outskirts of Bolzano where locally-cooked spaghetti could certainly not be recognised as a profitable commodity.
 
 
 

GOLD
20 – Hot water valuables
This is the story of a collection of gold jewellery that had been stuffed into hot water pipes where the constantly boiling running water discouraged  investigation. A Jewish owner of a block of apartments in Potsdam had done this service for his tenants who feared their valuables would soon be the property of the police. The landlord  made sure the water was kept at a scalding temperature, day and night, summer and winter, and he had re-arranged the plumbing in the block of some forty apartments to make identification of the source and the routing of the boiling water exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to find. It must be said that the valuables would also be inaccessible to their individual owners, who were not unaware of this but their trust in one of their own kind was greater than their trust in one of the police kind. In cold weather plumes of excess steam billowed from the chimney pots, and at night the walls burbled with the restless hot water. The building became a haven for cats, rats and tramps, and those who lived for bathing and showering and washing their cold hands twenty times a day.
Then the landlord died of a heart attack whilst sitting in a public toilet straining to empty his constipated intestines. His own piping was not as efficient as the piping of his property. The water in the apartment building cooled. Some of that gold had been immersed in boiling water for four years. The boiling point of water is 100 degrees Centigrade. The boiling point of gold is 1064.18 degrees Centigrade.
On a piece of whispered advice that the apartment block was a goldmine, now that the powerful landlord was dead, the apartment blocks were cleared of Jews and the building’s secret places ravaged and wrecked. The entire plumbing system was ripped from the walls, unearthed from under the floorboards and pulled down from the ceilings. The golden treasury, little the worse for its constant scalding, was discovered and put on display in the police-station to indicate the ingenuity of the greedy Jewish imagination. Subsequently it was boxed up and driven to Stuttgart and from there to Baden-Baden where it was smelted to make six golden bars, one of which eventually was appropriated by Lieutenant Harpsch, the unhappy father of an abducted baby girl.  Assisted by his sergeant and a corporal, he had persuaded his brother-in-law, the manager of the Deutche Bank in Baden-Baden that he knew of a secret place to make a stash of gold to assist them and their families after the war. Lieutenant Harpsch had suggested 100 gold bars would be just enough, sufficiently portable in a crisis. Harpsch had lied of course. The money was to find and pay, if necessary, for his daughter’s release from custody whatever that might be. He had heard many rumours of where she might be. One was that she was held for safety’s sake with a bourgeois family in Besancon, her mother’s home town. Another rumour suggested Basle where the child’s grandmother had once been a nanny of Swiss children. Harpsch’s greatest conviction was that his daughter was held in Switzerland, in a Swiss sanatorium across the border from the north Italian town called Bolzano, or Bozan by the Germans. He was prepared to buy back his daughter at whatever price it cost from the greedy Swiss. They could add his stolen Jewish gold to their vaults in Zurich or Geneva, or they could return it to the Jews or give it to the Americans, anything, as long as they returned his daughter.
Harpsch had succeeded in setting off on his circuitous journey with 100 gold bars packed tightly into his two black suitcases. Only 92 of the gold bars arrived in Bolzano. One of the original 100 gold bars had gone to his sergeant to ensure his complicity, another seven had been exchanged for petrol, food, alcohol, maps, hotel beds, a bath, free passage and a new tyre. And cigarettes. Harpsch was a great smoker. He was probably smoking when he crashed the Mercedes into a white horse in the moonlight one kilometre outside Bolzano where they had trouble cooking a good spaghetti. Perhaps the cooks of Bolzano never learnt that scalding water was a perquisite for the cooking of good spaghetti.
GOLD
21 – The golden weathercock
The weathercock on the church of St Peter and St Ursula in Bannesdorf on the island of Fehmarn in Holstein on the Baltic was rumoured to be made of gold. It certainly shone brightly, perched very high on the tall spire of the small and otherwise very modest building. It was a doubly significant symbol; an ostentatious signal of the church’s wealth, and a demonstration of how to put wealth out of reach. To climb the tower of St Peter and St Ursula in Bannesdorf in order to test the rumour of gold would have been a considerable feat, to do so in secret extremely difficult. The weathercock was fashioned in the shape of a cockerel sitting in a boat, a combination, it was said, of the cockerel that crowed three times before Peter acknowledged Christ, and the boat that conveyed St Ursula and her three thousand virgins across the Baltic to the Holstein coast. Ursula’s presence in the Baltic can be disputed, though she did have some supposed connections with Cologne, the seat of the original benefactors of Bannesdorf in the 13th century. The actual association of Peter and Ursula remain obscure. Inevitably local wits created stories of a sexual nature heavy with cocks and virgins.
Six German infantry soldiers in May 1940 , fortified with alcohol, attempted to test the weathercock’s golden substance. They raised ladders, two short and one long, roped, tied and fastened to a drain-pipe, various gutterings, a clerestory window, broken shingle supports and a wall sun-dial, and they began to climb up, like thieves in the moonlight, one behind the other, each not wishing the others to be alone in the investigation.
One soldier, Kurt, had climbed as far as the base of the golden boat, and had one hand on the arrow that pointed East and had the crook of his left leg over the bar that supported the arrow that pointed to the South, when the long, rotten wooden ladder strapped to the shingled tower came loose, and in a graceful slow motion curve began to arc backwards away from the spire in the direction of the graves in the churchyard cemetery.  Kurt at the very top of the ladder, travelled the furthest of the six companions, perhaps as much as 23 metres. He came down in a sitting position on a square limestone tomb and broke his spine. He died instantly. He was eighteen. Hans was next. He lost his grip on the ladder and brushed down the side of a yew tree, snapping the branches as he fell; the branches ripped open his belly and his chest, and his plump body settled heavily on the rusty spikes of a child’s grave, a fleur de lys decoration lodged in his throat. He died instantly. He was twenty-one. Pieter was next. He had just reached the level of the spire’s base and, as the ladder began to arc backwards, he made a grab for the guttering which broke in his hand; he took it with him, falling to the ground some fourteen metres from the base of the tower, smashing his head on a path made of small flints, his skull splintering like a cheap light-bulb. He could be said to have buried himself in wooden rungs and guttering ends. He died instantly. He was eighteen.
Tomas was at a point where the toppling ladder splintered in one of  its long shafts, spiking him in the groin before gracefully spiralling a little, making Tomas pirouette in the air, to land in the outstretched arms of a limestone angel offering a stone wreath to the empty night air. He died instantly. He was nineteen.
Christian had climbed up as far as the clerestorey window, and he was resting, his leg twisted around the back of the ladder so as to free his hands to better hold a whisky bottle. He ultimately fell on the bottle, its neck penetrating his belly though his navel, though the smashing of his face on a wooden cross was the cause of death. His father had difficulty in recognising him and official acknowledgement of his identity was through dental records and buckle scars on his buttocks. He was twenty.
Helmut was the closest to the ground, some 12 metres above the earth. He had been the most drunk and he was the slowest climber. His spine was broken near the coccyx on the ridge line of the Saint Ursula chapel. He did not die instantaneously. He  lived for three days in a coma dreaming of smoking a pipe where the smoke came out of every orifice in his body, smelling of a mixture of apple wood bonfires that he remembered from his boyhood in Silesia, and Cheepstoke Mild, a tobacco from Virginia which he had experienced in the lounge bar of a hotel in the Unter den Linden after watching Fricka Hansler sing dirty words to the Blue Danube Waltz in the White Bear Bar. He was seventeen.
Six drunken soldiers trying to steal a bogus gold weathercock from a church dedicated to St Peter’s Denial of Christ and St Ursula’s Virginity was bad publicity. The Third Reich was antagonistic to Church authority, but this adventure could not be seen as an iconoclastic gesture. A different turn of events had to be invented.
The villagers of Bannesdorf had assassinated six young infantrymen whilst they were on curfew duty. Many of the villagers were of Danish origin. The troubled Danish-German history of Schleswig-Holstein was invoked. Reprisals were necessary. The spire of the church was blown up with infantry explosives and the weathercock of gold painted cast-iron dragged from the wreckage and weighed. It was heavy. 247 pounds. With the cast iron letters, the complete phenomenon weighed 341 pounds, so 341 pounds of gold had to be extracted from the villagers of Bannesdorf as compensation for their murder of six young infantry soldiers who were all posthumously promoted and buried as heroes in Cologne Cathedral. The village was given three days to come up with the necessary compensation, or one person would be shot for every unaccounted pound. It was a story of impossible tasks and sadistic cruelty expected of the first collection of the Brothers Grimm. But then Wilhelm Grimm had lived for a year on Fehmarn collecting stories and he had been invalided with meningitis in Niendorf which is the next village to Bannesdorf.
Alongside their account of the six infantrymen, the Holstein District newspaper printed the Grimm story of Rumpelstiltskin, the Widow of Petacki, and the Cobbler’s Holiday.  In the first story a female prisoner had to spin straw into gold, in the second a prince had to empty a lake with a teaspoon, and in the third, two brothers were obliged to cut down a forest with a pair of sewing scissors. All three stories ended satisfactorily, good was rewarded, revenge satisfied and all victims received a large quotient of happiness. It is not recorded what the Bannesdorf village readership thought of the publication of these stories at such a time, but it is certain that they would not have ignored the inferences.  The ending of the Bannesdorf Weathercock story was not happy for them. In the event 110 men, 15 women and 3 children were shot, and 71 pounds of gold in the shape of family rosaries, wedding rings, earrings, cuff-links, candlesticks, crucifixes, a monstrance, a ceremonial golden shovel, a paper-knife, a gold watch, several gold teeth and a gold spectacle frame were taken and weighed and sent to Cologne where they were exhibited in the cathedral as evidence of a town’s gratitude for the heroism of the young soldiers of the German army.
When Cologne was bombed by the Allied forces, this golden hoard was removed to a bank. Eight weeks later it was taken in a truck to Karlsruhe and then to Baden-Baden where it was smelted and added as three “biscuit” gold bars to the collection in the Deutche Bank.  Two of the bars were used to pay off a blackmailer certain to incriminate the manager and two clerks for homosexual activities, the third became part of the Harpsch collection that found its way to Bolzano in Northern Italy where it is reputed spaghetti cannot be cooked with honour and the cathedral has a weathercock dedicated to St Peter in the shape of two giant keys. One of these keys is rumoured to open the door to Heaven for the Good, and the other key is rumoured to open the door to Hell for the Wicked.  Nobody has yet tried to climb the spire to borrow these keys to see if the rumour is true.

GOLD
22 – Twelve days of Christmas
On a Friday evening a few days after Christmas 1939, Hans and Sophie Himmel, ironically known as the turtle-doves because of their mutual devotion, sat down after dinner in their second floor apartment in the Biestricht District of Dresden and wrapped five gold rings in a sheet of the morning’s newspaper that had printed a photograph of their dead son. He had been awarded the Iron Cross after being shot in the back of the neck fighting for Germany in Poland. Hans and Sophie ironically imagined that the iron cross was public substitute jewellery for what they now decided privately to hide. They put the twist of newspaper in a brass spectacles-case that they wrapped in a cocoa-tin that they placed inside a leather satchel that they buried under the pear tree in their backyard. They lined the floor of the canary cage with a second sheet of the newspaper, threw a cloth over the cage and they went to bed. They had heard that neighbourhood Nazi youths ironically nicknamed The Broken Hearts were looking for Jewish gold to pay fashionable prostitutes in the Pernickenstrasse to commit sodomy with pigs.  There was much irony in Dresden. The Jews don’t eat pigs.
The first hidden gold ring was a wedding-ring that had belonged to Hans’s grandfather, the second gold ring was an engagement-ring that had belonged to Sophie’s grandmother, the third gold ring was a wedding-ring that had been worn for forty years by Hans’s father, the fourth gold ring belonged to Hans himself and he had worn it twenty-five years, and the fifth gold ring belonged to Sophie and she had chosen it on a short holiday she and Hans  had taken together in Danzig at her aunt’s seaside villa. Five gold rings. Various widths, various heavinesses, worn on various fingers for a total of 137 years.
Corporal Kettle saw at once that a newspaper photograph of Goering lined the bottom of the Himmel canary-cage. He opened the cage and the birds flew out the broken backdoor. He took Hans and Sophie at gunpoint into the backyard.  It was raining and whilst the corporal stood in the shelter of the porch jabbing his rifle under Sophie’s lifted skirt at the bare flesh of her belly, Hans, hatless, coatless, trouserless, began to sneeze and shiver and his shifty glances at the pear-tree created suspicion. Very shortly the grainy, indistinct newspaper photograph of a young man who had been awarded the Iron Cross for bravery in Poland became damp in the steady rain and began to disintegrate, and a small and modest golden Jewish heritage lay in a Nazi swag-bag.
Hans died three weeks later at Boutenberg, choking on his vomit in a railway siding chicken-run. He was a long time dying. When the hens finally sat down on his face, it could be said that he was dead. Sophie died three months later in Treboggan in a small forest clearing, among silver birch trees that belong to the German military leader called Werner von Blomberg, who reserved the woods to shoot pheasants and partridges. Sophie was naked, the caesarean scar that indicated her hero-son’s entry into the world was plain to be seen by her torturers who jibed at her inability to give birth through the right exit. Sophia died with another disfigurement on her corpse, a hole at the back of her neck. Thus two scars united her to her son, a birth scar and a death scar.
Five gold rings, four calling birds, three French hens, two turtle-doves and a partridge in a pear tree. The list of the Christmas song was complete. The five gold rings, with about six hundred others, went by truck to Gotenberg, then to a smelting factory at Holstein where they became part of the substance of a gold bar that was to be stamped HS 56ExH 42.  H stood for Holstein, and S stood for Smeltering-works, though H was also the initial for Hans and S was the initial for Sophie and 56 was a batch number and also their ages. Ex stood for executor but also the Latin for plural departure.  H stood for Holdtstatter, but also Himmel. 1942 was the year of the gold bar’s manufacture and also the year of the Himmels’ death.
The gold bar, with many other gold-bars, all packed in green baize bags with red tie-strings, was driven eventually to Munich. It subsequently and for various reasons, travelled to Vienna, Bern, Baden-Baden, and finally with 91 other gold bars, was discovered in a black Mercedes, license plate number TL9246, abandoned at the road-side at Bolzano, the one place in Italy where they could not cook a good spaghetti.
 

GOLD
23 – The gold pistol
A ballroom dancer had a small decorative pistol fashioned in gold for his mistress, a twenty-year old shop-girl called Petra who had blonde hair, small breasts, and an ambitious and possessive father. She worked in a haberdashery on Dortmundstrasse, Magdeburg. The shopgirl was approached by her boss on Ash Wednesday 1938, enjoyed his flatteries and soon confronted her dancer-lover with her infidelity. Whilst she used the bathroom in a run-down hotel on Falkensteinplatz, the dancer rummaged in Petra’s handbag, found the pistol, and shot her in the belly. Attempting to shoot himself with the gold pistol, after hurriedly reloading it with a wrong calibre bullet, it  exploded and the  barrel lodged in his  throat. In great pain, he threw himself down the hotel stair-well, the fractured gold pistol-grip, the trigger-guard and trigger clattering down the stairs in three separate pieces with him to land on the cellar steps where they were found by Claus, the caretaker’s son.
Claus played with these gold items for a while after the police had come and gone, and after Petra’s father had smashed up the toilet, assaulted the hotel-keeper and bled four pints of blood into the hotel welcome mat after being struck by the police-chief for causing a commotion in a quiet neighbourhood.  Claus painted his three gold finds  green with a can of enamel he found in the dustbin belonging to Frau Decker in Room Sixteen, and then abandoned them because the enamel would not dry. The sticky green-painted gold pistol pieces  were later swept up by the caretaker, and handed over to Herr Mussil, who had a stall for scrap metal at 17A Heiderstrasse. Frederick Mussil recognised them for what they were, cleaned them up with spirits of turpentine and included them in a collection of gold trinkets stolen from the pillaged house of his neighbour, a kosher butcher, and deposited them with a fence who sold them on the black market to a bank clerk of the Darmstadt bank who laundered them with his bank manager and together they had them smelted when the manager went on his weekly trip to Leipzig. The golden pistol fragments helped to constitute Gold Bar Lei98, which, sometime in 1940, travelled to Baden-Baden, where it lay untouched in a vault that used to be a convent cellar until Harpsch’s sergeant and corporal  picked it up with 99 other gold bars in May 1945, and they all began their journey to Bolzano where spaghetti could be described as a foreign delicacy.
 

GOLD
24 – Photographic Evidence
At a Nazi party in Danzig, three prostitutes, one underage, were encouraged with bribes and threats, to wear on their naked bodies the jewellery stolen from the city’s Jewish community. The jewellery was to be auctioned to  raise money to buy a private Rolls Royce for a retiring general, and the most generous bidder was to be rewarded with time spent in the company of the whore of his choice. The three women paraded on a stage used the night before to award posthumous medals to forty sea-cadet victims of a submarine disaster, and they walked and pirouetted and cavorted before a large photograph of the stricken submarine to the rhythm of an orchestra playing the Blue Danube too fast, and they were photographed. The photographs were to be sold to the party-goers to assist in increasing the funds available for the departing general. To make the photographs attractive enough to purchase for large sums of money, the prostitutes were encouraged to assist in their erotic content.
After the war these photographs were used to identify the missing jewelery items in a bid to attempt to return them to their owners. Identification was in several circumstances very possible. The jewellery items not auctioned at the party were collected in two champagne buckets which were hidden under a napkin beneath a table. They subsequently disappeared, and we do not know of their fate.  But nineteen of the photographically identifiable items had a different adventure.
It is said that Archibald Klemperer, the main contributing bidder at the party was too drunk to make full use of his winner’s prize, and that she had beaten him over the head with a silver candlestick,
possibly with the  help of a confederate who had been a waiter at the party, and the auctioned gold items had been removed from Klemperer’s apartment, fenced, transported, and after seven days in the hull of a ship moored off the coast of Malmo in Sweden, taken to Baden-Baden and smelted down to make gold bar BB890/36.  This bar was wrapped in green felt and ended up in Harpsch’s Mercedes in a car-crash in Bolzano, the one Italian town where it is reputed the local citizens cannot cook good spaghetti, and cannot find it in themselves to laugh at this short-coming.
The majority of the representatives of the fourteen Jewish families who had been invited by the auction-house of Christie in Geneva to examine the photographs taken in 1941 of the three whores cavorting with Jewish treasures, were able to put a positive identification on the property of their fathers and grandfathers. Those that had arrived with great expectations and had been disappointed, were compensated by being given a copy of each of the original photographs, whose contents, a Christie representative  is reported to have said, could be seen to be  rewarding in other ways.
The Klemperer story might have been concocted to hide  the desire of the original party organisers, three SS generals, to increase the retiring general’s prize from an expensive English car to a small French aircraft with an English engine, in which they intended to place explosives  to make the general  fall out of the sky over the English Channel. In the event the retiring general apparently abandoned his prize and eventually reached Venezuela unharmed, accompanied by the underage prostitute who had posed as his daughter. Their second child became Cultural Minister for the Arts in Venezuela in 1978.
 

GOLD
25 – In threes
In Budapest in November 1944 they were throwing the Jews off the bridges in threes. Roped together with the heaviest Jew in the middle. Maybe they would shoot the one in the middle. To wound but not to kill. In the spine, perhaps to paralyse the legs. The water was icy. The current was swift. The river was deep. The time allotted to die was not calculable. Many factors were present but we can say that death was not always so quick.  One thing that was dependable was the roping together in threes.  It had an almost superstitious regularity.
There were wits among the executioners. They played with names as they played with people.
“Mesach, Shadrach and Abnego”.
“The Three Wisemen”.
“God the father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost”.
“Put the Ghost in the middle”.
“They all look like ghosts”.
“Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill”.
“The fat man should be in the middle”.
“They are all fat men”.
“Roosevelt‘s not so fat, but he’s a cripple, we could be accurate”.
“Put Roosevelt in the middle. That way the Americans will bring the   Russians down on the left and the British down on the right”. “Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford”.
“The Yankee rich kids”.
“Isn’t Chaplin a Jew?”
“With the Fuhrer’s moustache, Churchill’s bowler hat and Roosevelt’s walking stick”
They slashed Charlie Chaplin’s upper lip to give him a moustache, they hacked off Roosevelt’s leg to make him a cripple, they gave Churchill a bloody crown to make him wish he had worn his bowler hat.
Some nights Raoul Wallenberg came along to the bridge.
“Here comes the nightwatchman, nightwatching for the Jews”.
They kept the most pathetic cases for Raoul. A bottle of whisky for a blind old man. Four hundred florints for a woman, six hundred if she was pretty, a thousand if she was pregnant. A diamond for a child perhaps.
“What on earth does Raoul do with these people?”
The rescued Jews climbed into the back of Raoul Wallenberg’s Swedish diplomatic car, and the driver whisked them away.
“The Swedish Embassy bedrooms are probably crammed with Jews”.
“Jews in the toilet”.
“Jews in the bathroom”
“Jews up the chimneys”.
“Jews in the cupboards”.
“Jews under the stairs”.
“Where does Raoul get the money, the whisky and the diamonds?”
Sometimes as many as seven people got into that diplomatic car. With the driver, that meant eight. Four in the back, two in the front sitting on one another’s laps, one in the boot. Raoul had to walk back home, trudging off down the bridge with his collar turned up and his breath condensing on the cold night air.
There were film buffs among the part-time executioners.
“Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Dovzenko”.
“The sun and the moon and the stars”.
“Tinker, tailor, soldier”.
“The three whores from Kracow”.
“Antony, Crassus and Pompey”.
The river was full of allegorical figures, Russian film directors, Roman celebrities, Hollywood film-stars.  All floating downstream practising various forms of dying, but mostly just drowning.
The executioners began asking Raoul for gold.
“No more whisky, florins and diamonds. You can get drunk on anything, money just flies away, and who the hell wants diamonds?”  “How can you get rid of diamonds?”
“Wine, women and song”,
“Schnapps, little boys and a wind-up gramophone”.
“Heaven, Hell and Paradise”.
Raoul began to bring gold. Crucifixes, little gold crucifixes.
“Where the hell does he get them from?”
What was this transfer commodity? Jews for crucifixes? Is it a joke?
“The pope would crap in his knickers”.
“I’ll take crucifixes. I need post-war insurance. So I can go to Yalta and see where the big three sat on their fat arses carving up Europe in the name of Jewry”.
“The three virgins”.
“The Three Priests of Popacatapetal”.
”Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh”.
“Melchior, Caspar and Balthasar ”.
Sandor Novotny, expert at throwing Jews into the Danube in threes and giving them symbolic names, stashed the gold crucifixes he had bargained from Raoul Wallenberg behind a loose brick in the Padorovski Cemetery underneath a memorial to Bela Kiraly, an obscure Hungarian poet who had died of tuberculosis in 1848, the European Year of Revolutions, all of them suppressed. Sandor had three women in his life; his mother-in-law, his wife and his married daughter. The first woman and the last woman had been widowed by the combined forces of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill. The woman in the middle was symbolically widowed, because Sandor had joined the Arrow Cross Hungarian Nazi party essentially to get out of the house, and Sandor Novotny and Nadia Novotny had not slept together for five years, four months and two weeks. Sandor kept careful count. But he did have sex near his stash of gold under the loose brick on top of a gravestone to Jozsef Oczel, an obscure Hungarian composer who died in 1871, the year the Germans occupied France and took over Alsace and Lorraine.  Sandor had illegal sex with married Jewish women, then he roped them to strangers on the bridge and threw them over. He probably arranged these things both to spite his wife and also to do himself some kind of macho honour. He hoped eventually to rope three of the women he had dishonoured and cast them all together into the waters. He has some idea it would be a biblical gesture, like the Old Testament casting of stones at prostitutes, afterall they were both Jewesses and adulterers.
Raoul Wallenberg, had, over the months since Christmas, bought a number of Sandor’s Jewish women, though after being with Sandor, at least three of them did not want to be bought, and preferred the river. They seemed to actually want to welcome the freezing embrace of the Danube.
Sandor was followed one night to the Padorovski Cemetery by his wife’s brother who watched his wild adultery, all flailing legs and wild grunts, and saw where he kept his crucifixes. Sandor’s wife’s brother hit Sandor over the head with the loose brick out of the wall. He took the Raoul gold, and shoved his brother-in-law’s body into an open stone tomb-memorial to Elemer Paschek, an obscure Hungarian painter who specialised in painting dead nudes in the years immediately before the First World War when Europe became restless again for violence.
So there you have it. Three obscure Hungarian cultural heroes, Bela Kiraly, Jozsef Oczel, and Elemer Paschek, three witnesses to Sandor Novotny’s money, sex and death.
Sandor’s wife’s brother tried t