Heroine of her times
Alastair Forbes
THE BERLIN DIARIES, 1940-1945, OF MARIE `MISSIE' VASSILTCHIKOV edited by Georgi Vassiltchikov Chatto & Windus, £12.95 When at Christmastime, completely bowled over by the candour and courage uncovered in these fascinating war diaries kept by a fascinating Russian emigree with charm and looks to match her bravery and goodness, I urged Spectator readers to buy or borrow them, I did not know that, owing to one of those errors of judgment that occur even in publishing houses where n. owadays the distaff side is uppermost, .its modest first printing would nowhere near satisfy demand. After my pioneering puff for what no less an authority than A. J. P. Taylor has hailed as 'a remarkable historical document of the first import- ance', other laudatory appreciations have come 'not single spies but in battalions'. Alas, as I learned from various friends in the trade, all this praise has for several months imposed upon booksellers the frus- trating duty of having to turn away custom- ers demanding the diaries with a 'Sorry, they're reprinting'. Now, from Georgi Vas- slltchikov, (the younger brother to whom, by the special wish of his sister Missie before her regrettable death from leukae- nu a in 1978, the editing of the hitherto hidden diaries was exclusively entrusted, a task he has admirably performed, adding to the pages from his own pen some invaluable interleaves of historical and Personal explanatory notes) the good news has at last reached me that the third unpression is in the course of distribution and my advice is to hurry, while fresh stocks last, to make the acquaintance of this pearl of a girl, a perfect one to be out With in all weathers, either tiger or Hitler- shooting. Some of Missie's family background will be familiar to readers of her self- confessedly very different, very much more cautious and conformist elder sister's care- fully crafted autobiography (Tatiana, by Pnncess Tatiana Metternich, published ten Years ago by Heinemann but oddly never kept in print or issued in paperback) with its memorable climactic chapters describ- ing her journey, across a ravaged Germany swarming with nearly 14 million homeless refugees mostly on foot with husband, household, a two-horse farm cart and six friendly homeward-bound French prisoners-of-war as escort, from Bohemia to the Rhineland.
Princess Missie could not remember the comfortable Panin mansion on St Peters- burg's Fontanka, with its three floors of 13 windows each fronting street and water, where she was born in the year of two revolutions and the last Tsar's abdication, and from which she was soon to be taken to greater safety in the Crimea, along with older brother and sisters, two nannies and a governess (all British natch and English the language of the nursery), a favourite Fin- nish nursemaid and assorted animals, some real and some cuddly toy ones.
Eventually they reached Paris, where many Russian émigrés were being called upon to display that most difficult of all outward proofs of true aristocracy, namely adaptability. Faberge eggs and other objets de vertu went up the spout and at least one of her cousins joined Paris's monstrous regiment of Russian taxi-drivers.
From her St-Germain lycee Missie herself was to emerge in due course not just as a tall, golden-haired, green-eyed perfectly- profiled beauty with a lovely singing voice and a wide repertory of songs in many languages, but also, unlike the majority of her English contemporaries, as a quite decently educated girl. By 1937, however, the glamour of Paris had to be exchanged for a modest existence in a flat in Kaunas, once and now once again Kovno, then the capital of the independent Republic of Lithuania. Be- fore its happy 20 years of freedom, Missie's father, a considerable landlord as well as the influential Marshal of the province's nobility (a very much larger class than the English translation of the word suggests) had won the liking and respect of its population and notables. In that much- maligned body the Duma he had been a supporter, colleague and friend of the enlightened reformer Stolypin, who, but for his murder, might well have succeeded in saving his countrymen from having to endure still unending decades of serfdom under the corrupt Nomenklatura of Stalin and his successors. Prince Illarion Vassilt- chikov had always striven for the rights of non-Russian minorities, whether Lithua- nian, Polish or Jewish. In this land of Chagall scenery and Chagall scenes, the grateful Jews of Kovno had even declared him an honorary 'one of us', so it was little wonder that early in her Berlin diary Missie had expressed her indignation at 'these monstrous anti-Jewish persecu- tions', though not until after the war did she discover what was meant by the 'ghet- toes in the east' by Hitler to which the nonsensically classified 'non-Aryans', who had in fact most loved and best served what they justifiably felt to be their fatherland, were being exiled, or what was to befall them there. As for the Lithuanians, their gratitude was expressed in measures that permitted Missie's father to continue to draw income from his local investments. These, howev- er, were not always of the wisest and Missie was forced to earn a living to make a contribution, first as a school-teacher and later, after learning typing and Pitman's shorthand, as secretary to the British Minister. Both Missie and her _ sister Tatiana had wanted to find jobs in London where they had cousins and friends, but no work-permits were forthcoming for hold- ers, as they were, of valid Lithuanian passports. A few miles across the border in Germany, as Hitler never ceased to remind, full employment had been achieved and 'Situations Vacant' ads were starting to appear, so when it emerged that Lithuania had been included in the Soviet share of the spoils from the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact of 1939, it was to Berlin, where they had already paid visits in the past, that they made their way at the end of that year. The American embassy where they first tried their luck had no vacancies and by the time it did, both girls had become temporary civil servants sworn to official secrecy, at about a hundred pounds a week in today's money after tax, in rather outlying, almost freebooting branches of German govern- ment, where English and French were spoken in and out of office hours, luckily for Missie, whose German, spoken, written and above all spelt was not yet up to snuff. Within a few months Tatiana had met and within a year after becoming a naturalised German citizen, married the half-Spanish Prince Paul Metternich, great-grandson of the famous Austrian chancellor.
At the Dahlem home of Christabel Bielenberg (that extraordinary sport of the Harmsworth family tree who nearly 20 years ago produced one of the most re- markable accounts to date of the war, as seen by an opponent of the regime from within Germany, in The Past is Myself) on a July evening just four years before the aborted plot that was to cost him his life and was nearly to cost her her own, Missie had first met Adam von Trott and immediately noted in her diary his indeed 'remarkable eyes'; a month later after a second meet- ing, she commented on his 'striking intensity' and 'fascinating looks' and, after a third, noted that 'there is something very special about him.'At the end of 1940, a week after an artless entry to the effect that Karajan, whom she has just heard conduct for the first time, 'certainly has genius but is not without conceit', she records Trott's sug- gestion that she become 'a kind of con- fidential factotum' to him in the depart- ment of the Foreign Ministry which this complex German patriot used, as Christ- opher Sykes so well showed in his admir- able biography of him (Troubled Loyalty, Collins, 1968 and essential reading for those seeking further background to these diaries), as cover for his multifarious schemes to rid his country of the psychopath-tyrant who, after some remar- kably effective political confidence tricks, was Pied Pipering his people eastward into outer darkness.
The lightning of Hitler's planned Bar- barossa Blitz on Russia failed to strike and instead there followed four years of thun- der and blood that were to send countless millions to their deaths before, full of bitter schadenfreude, he brought about his own with a cosy squeeze of his trigger finger. Neither before nor after the unleashing of Europe's second unnecessary war in a quarter-century had any British or Amer- ican government lifted a finger to help those Germans who sought, if necessary by tyrannicide, 'the establishment of a gov- ernment which would return to the stan- dards of civilised Europe', as one of Trott's memoranda to London on behalf of the plotters, (so reminiscent to my eyes of the despairing crLs-de-coeur from Berlin of Queen Victoria's eldest daughter, the Empress Frederick), had put it. 'All his thoughts and efforts' wrote Missie, perhaps a litte bit too shwarmischly, 'focus on things and values of a higher order, to which neither the mood of this country nor that of the Allies seem attuned. He belongs to a more civilised world — something, alas, neither side does.' Instead, the Allied leaders provided in the Casablanca de- mand for Unconditional Surrender what Goebbels, who had already in 1914 gloried in 'the end of the bourgeois era with its false notions of humaneness', declared to be a 'heaven-sent gift' and Missie rightly called a 'lunacy'.
'Britain can take it!' we had crowed here when Coventry's cathedral and 554 of its inhabitants were 1940 casualties, but three years later it turned out that Hamburg could take it too, with 50 times more casualties and a million homeless, all with- in a week. As for Berlin, Missie, having experienced the worst of the terror onslaughts and complained only of Bom- ber Command's failure to observe a Christ- ian truce on Christmas Eve, wrote that It looks as if these ghastly raids are intended to help Allied progress by breaking the Gemans' morale, but I do not think that much can be achieved that way. Indeed they are having the contrary effect . . . At such times the heroic side of human nature takes over and people are being extraordinarily friendly and helpful to each other — com- pagnons de malheur! . . . I want to remain where the action is and that, of course, is Berlin.
As Max Hastings well summed up two score years later, 'Berlin won. It was just too tough a nut to crack.'
Missie's courage under continual fire was the only sort worth writing home about, that which repeatedly calls for conquering spasms of cowardice in sto- mach and head.
Although I feel, theoretically, perfectly res- igned to dying under the bombs, when the droning of the planes and the crash of the explosions start, I feel physically paralysed with fright and with every raid this seems to increase
she confided to her diary. Yet after driving her home after a dinner at the Potsdam house of Gottfried Bismarck (one of the very few July plotters who was to survive trial and imprisonment) Trott could tell his wife Clarita in a letter that he was 'again astonished and impressed by her . . . she has something of a noble animal of legend about her, she has something free that enables her to soar far above everything and everyone.' She certainly, as she wrote, believed that 'After the frequent horrors of our daily life, every brief moment of relaxation and gaiety is a gift of the gods which one tries to enjoy to the utmost.' Some critics seem to have been prissily shocked that Missie and her friends should sometimes have eaten a dozen or two unrationed oysters. The bivalves were then, as now, cheaper in Germany and France than in England, where they were nonetheless guzzled whenever they were to be found.
Ten days before Stauffenberg's failed attempt, Missie and Trott dined together at the Adlon, 'speaking English to the head waiter, delighted to show he had not forgotten it'. Her 50 pages recounting the aftermath of the plot's failure (idiotically, no, criminally gloated over by Allied lead- ers and propagandists) in which she, together with her resourceful but some- times foolhardy friend, the disarming Prin- cess Loremarie von Sch6nburg (a cousin as well as a look-alike of the mother of columnist Taki's children), played a trulY heroic part, repeatedly risking Gestapo arrest in their attempts to help the impris- oned conspirators awaiting gruesome 'trial' and sadistic execution, read like the script of the movie, one hopes not too miscast, we may one day see (but not the statutorY Streep, please, for Missie or regulation Redford for Trott). But her adventures were not over. She got transferred to Vienna as a Luftwaffe hospital nurse and from there, after nar- rowly avoiding death in yet more horrible but brilliantly described day-and-night ter- ror raids, made a picaresque last-minute escape westward from the advancing Red Army, whose soldiers would have been unlikely to have paused to listen to the expressions of patriotic pride in their valour so frequently recorded in her di' aries and shared even by her stiffly widen regime mother. All through the war she had succeeded, being an old-fashioned girl, in fending off in the friendliest way ber countless 'beaux', even, after a short ride once hitched in a grimy railway engine, being propositioned by the driver with a 'What say we go to America together? I'M half in love with you already!' Instead, during the dotty days of non-fraternisation (Prince Philip, with three sisters thus kept 'off limits' to him, was a literal victim of that asinine policy) she was able to rneet and become engaged to a delightfully civil' ised American architect, Peter Hamden, t° whom she was married in a Gothic Catho- lic chapel in Kitzbiihel in an orthodox ceremony celebrated by a Russian priest who had fled the Soviet Union and man' aged not to be sent back there by Harold Macmillan or Anthony Eden. This haPPY marriage, which produced four handsonle children, lasted a quarter-century until Ha' den's death. Before, seven years later, succumbing to leukaemia, Missie was able to pay a visit to the house where she Was born in the city of Pushkin and Lermontosi._ (To the latter, in his fatal duel, an ancestor of hers had been second and reported hr.5 scornful fate-tempting last words: 'At suet' an idiot as that I shan't bother to firer)„ We must be very grateful to her to reconstituting before her death from •5 secret shorthand these enthralling dialies of an adorable Heroine of her Times. lie. well-chosen photographs bring to life no. only Missie's own captivating regard bln_ the very sympathetic faces of many of her colleagues and friends, not all of thein among the July plotters and several or_ whom, be it noted in the Street of Shaul! as well as at the north end of Kensingto' Palace, had been officers in the SS or S40, though, for all that, repentantly ready make a supreme sacrifice to ensure that at least part of Germany become what th Federal Republic is today, a free 'countrY'
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