Overture of hope, p.1
Overture of Hope, page 1
For Nélida Piñón.
In memory of my friend Bill Ray, and my father, Afonso Costa Vicente.
A NOTE TO THE READER
This is a work of nonfiction. All language appearing between quotation marks is taken from original source documents—letters, telegrams, archives, interviews, newspapers, magazines, and books. Occasionally, I have placed the endnote number at the end of a long passage of dialogue for the sake of expediency.
Cherish romance! Any fool can be a realist!
—Nancy Spain, quoted by Ida Cook at a meeting of the Romance Novelists’ Association
PREFACE The Leaves
The stiff brown envelopes arrived on a librarian’s cart, each carefully weighed by an officious attendant who wore dust gloves and used a desktop scale. It was only after the weight was carefully recorded on duplicate research slips that I was permitted to take the envelopes—one at a time—and retreat to the little area I had carved out at a communal study table at the Victoria & Albert Archives at Blythe House in London where I sat for days sifting through the ephemera of two remarkable lives, shelved long ago and largely forgotten.
I eagerly opened one envelope after another, some stuffed with elaborately illustrated 1920s Royal Opera House programs from Covent Garden with their ads for Columbia New Process Records, Steinway grand pianos, and the Cliftophone—“the world’s best gramophone.” Other programs for the Salzburg Festival and opera in Berlin, Munich, and Vienna were in German, and some featured large swastikas on the covers with introductory remarks by Adolf Hitler on facing pages. There were faded black-and-white promotional photographs of stars in rich velvet tunics, adorned in brocade. “With sincere good wishes,” reads the autograph of the renowned American baritone Lawrence Tibbett “as Iago,” on his fan photo for the Metropolitan Opera’s 1937 production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello. Other envelopes yielded sheaves of handwritten correspondence from Vienna, Munich, Berlin, and New York.
One letter immediately intrigued me.
Written in a rapid, flowing hand on cream-colored stationery, embossed with “Sul Monte, N.Y.” at the top of the page, it contained three pressed maple leaves. They were brown with age, but otherwise perfectly preserved, even though the date on the letter was October 16, 1931.
There was something magical about finding those leaves in October 2017—eighty-six years after the letter was written, and on the first day of my research into the lives of Ida and Louise Cook, English sisters who risked their lives to bring twenty-nine Jewish refugees to safety on the eve of war.
The pressed leaves not only spoke to the romantic character of the letter writer—the great soprano Amelita Galli-Curci, who became a lifelong friend to Ida and Louise—but also to the sense of wonder and innocence of the sisters themselves.
Who were these women whose historical legacy includes pressed autumn leaves? How did they become “Two Against Hitler,” among the unlikeliest heroines of the Second World War?
I knew that part of the answer lay in their passion for opera and its stars. In appearance, Ida and Louise were unthreatening and forgettable. They were plain and anonymous civil-servant typists who lived quietly with their parents in south London. But they developed intense inner lives. They were clearly infatuated with Clemens Krauss, the dashing Austrian conductor—Hitler’s favorite—who along with his wife, the soprano Viorica Ursuleac, started them on their refugee work. The Cooks formed deep friendships with the performers and musicians who found themselves stuck in a real-life melodrama in Nazi Germany and Austria, immersed in desperate scenes punctuated by burning synagogues and helmeted Nazis wielding bayonets and rounding up women and children. Inspired by their operatic heroines, the sisters naively thrust themselves into this dark overture.
Yet they could scarcely have imagined what awaited them when they began queuing outside Covent Garden for cheap seats to performances as the Nazis began their rise to power in Germany. In the 1920s and early 1930s, the sisters innocently amassed a sizable collection of photographs that Ida took of their favorite stars and collected dozens of gramophone records. Ida, the more outgoing of the two, maintained a decades-long correspondence with her beloved prima donnas. In addition to Galli-Curci, she corresponded with Elisabeth Rethberg, and later Rosa Ponselle.
It was largely through Ida’s letters, most of them tightly typed on light-blue aerograms and scattered in the miscellaneous correspondence files of some of the world’s most celebrated sopranos (but also baritones and tenors) that I was able to piece together the story of these extraordinary ordinary sisters.
“My dear Ida,” began the letter in which Galli-Curci enclosed the leaves from Sul Monte, her lavish estate in the Catskill Mountains, where she would invite her “English girls” for visits. The sisters held on to those leaves into their old age—priceless tokens of their opera-world adventures that began after they met the Italian diva backstage at the Albert Hall in London—and naively vowed to save enough money to hear her sing at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. It would take them two years of going without lunches and walking most of the way to their secretarial jobs to manage to buy their third-class passage to sail to the city. They made the first of many trips to their beloved Manhattan in 1927 when Louise was twenty-five and Ida twenty-two.
The same pluck and determination that launched them in their passion for opera would propel them on their increasingly dangerous missions into the Third Reich. In fact, they used opera performances as a ruse to travel into Austria and Germany to meet their refugees. “We built ourselves a reputation. The men in customs used to chuckle, ‘Here come those two verruckt (crazy) English ladies. They are only poor office workers and they spend their money to come here to listen to German opera.’ ”1
They were too obvious to be suspicious.
When they returned to London after a weekend at the opera in Munich, Vienna, or Berlin, they did so laden with the glittering jewels, Swiss watches, and furs belonging to refugees who would otherwise have had to surrender their valuables to the Nazis upon their exit from the Reich. Boldly plastered on their Woolworth dresses, the sisters gambled that the expensive jewelry would surely look fake.
Their mission, the calling for which they would risk everything, was successful. And it would succeed again and again.
When I began my research, which took me on a three-year odyssey through archives in England, Italy, Germany, Austria, the United States, and Israel, I was convinced the Cook sisters must have been spies. After all, they engaged in dangerous undercover work, meeting clandestinely with Jewish refugees under the nose of the Nazi secret police. They worked with members of the resistance in Germany, sending coded messages and meeting at safe houses in Frankfurt and Berlin. Louise, the more studious and retiring of the sisters, taught herself German at lightning speed. They rented a flat in a central London complex frequented by British wartime spies. And, most intriguingly, Louise burned all their refugee files long after the war.
But as I delved deeper into their lives and spoke to surviving friends and even an old schoolmate, I came to realize that Ida and Louise had most likely acted on their own, at first at the behest of their beloved stars, and then when word of their relief work spread and desperate letters addressed simply to “Ida and Louise” began arriving at British consulates in the Third Reich, they were determined to help at any cost. In England, they established a small network of friends and strangers who came forward with offers of financial guarantees for the refugees. Others contributed in smaller ways. One friend walked halfway to her office every day and gave the Cooks the saved bus fares to buy the postage necessary for their work. Another friend cut her cigarette consumption in half and contributed the money towards the maintenance of one of their cases.
“We were simply moved by a sense of furious revolt against the brutality and injustice of it all and were willing to help any deserving case brought to our notice, to the limit of our small capacity,” explained Ida.2
Maybe it was as simple as that.
There are few remaining photographs of Ida and Louise. Of those carefully filed in the stiff envelopes at the Victoria & Albert Archives, I could clearly see the evolution of the sisters. In their twenties, they appear gawky and stiff, their posture tense in the homemade opera frocks that Ida fashioned from patterns she cut out of a popular women’s magazine on the eve of their first trip to America. In the posed studio portrait from 1926, Ida, thin and angular, wears a slinky, satin gown, while Louise, big-boned and handsome, sports a silk cloak trimmed with white fur at the collar, an oversized velvet bow pinned to her left hip. Another photo, taken after their wartime heroics, shows them as middle-aged women in comfortable shoes, gazing confidently into the camera, by then seasoned travelers standing on an airport tarmac after disembarking from a Trans World Airlines flight.
By the time this last photograph was taken, the two women had achieved some notoriety for their wartime exploits. Ida was also known to millions as Mary Burchell, a successful writer of light romance, who had also written We Followed Our Stars, a memoir about their opera-world adventures and their relief work.
In fact, I first stumbled on the Cook sisters’ story after reading Ida’s memoir, which had been reissued in 2008 as Safe Passage. More than sixty years after the end of the Second World War, there was suddenly renewed interest in Ida and Louise and a handful of other Britons who had helped save Jews from the Holocaust. Their stories were used as part of a campaign by the Holocaust Educational Trust, a British non-profit organization, to lobby for official government recognition of these largely forgotten heroes. The British Hero of the Holocaust Award was established by parliamentary decree, and in March 2010 the silver medallions inscribed with the words “In the Service of Humanity” were presented posthumously to the families of twenty-five individuals at a special ceremony at 10 Downing Street. Among the recipients were the families of Ida, Louise, and Major Frank Foley, a passport control officer for the British Embassy in Berlin who helped thousands of Jews escape after Kristallnacht.
For me, Ida’s book was frustratingly elliptical, glossing over opera-world scandals involving their beloved “stars” and the hardships faced by their refugees. What became of the musicians, scholars, and students whom the sisters risked their own lives to save, many of whom became lifelong friends? And what happened to the opera stars who defied the Nazis to save their Jewish colleagues? In Ida’s account, the sisters are modest and self-effacing, and their bravery is simply referred to in passing. But what had the Cooks really done, and how? And what happened to them after the war?
Ida, the writer, had clearly tried to capitalize on the sisters’ exploits. After their appearance on This is Your Life, a popular BBC television program that reunited them with some of their refugees more than a decade after the war, Ida tried her hand at a Hollywood script, encouraged by the enthusiasm of her friend Laurence Olivier (the famous actor) and producer Joshua Logan.
I found Ida’s long-forgotten film treatment at the Library of Congress in Washington, tucked into Logan’s correspondence, filed under C among letters to Truman Capote and Joan Crawford. Typed on carbon, it was difficult to read, and I often had to squint to make sense of the type, as shadows of sentences from previous pages crowded the lines of text.
Ida’s first line was characteristically self-defeating: “This is the story of two squares.” But in the hands of a good PR agent, those “two squares” were transformed into “Two Against Hitler,” the title of a series of lectures Ida delivered across Britain in the 1960s. The promotional flyer for those lectures tumbled out of an envelope at the Blythe House reading room. It featured a black-and-white photograph of a middle-aged Ida—stolid and matronly with a prominent wide nose and permed hair combed back in a conservative coif. Her skin was pale and free of makeup, her mouth slightly open in a pursed smile.
The sisters were eventually honored by Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, among the first women to receive the honor in the early 1960s, along with Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg and German industrialist Oskar Schindler.
But while these two men had become household names with documentaries and feature films commemorating their exploits, few remember the quiet heroism of the two English sisters. Perhaps they were too quiet, forgotten for the very reasons that made them successful: they were unglamorous, largely anonymous. Their greatest weapon was perhaps also their greatest impediment: they went undercover as themselves.
“We are scarcely James Bond ladies,” Ida told two American reporters.3 Risk averse and frugal, they were by Ida’s own admission, “a couple of nervous British spinsters” who wore Marks & Spencer dresses and Woolworth’s beads. At home, they were eminently practical. They saved slivers of soap and once told the American reporters that their only extravagance was custom-blended tea.4 But those plain, practical exteriors hid romantic souls—real-life heroines in the twentieth century’s darkest opera. Their faith in goodness—an unwavering belief—saw them rise beyond their mundane lives to accomplish something priceless.
Perhaps it was Rosa Ponselle who put it best in her telegram congratulating Ida on a triumphant television appearance: “Your life has been like a fairy tale, only we know it’s true.”
To which Ida quickly responded: “Honestly, Rosa, it was enchanting—and petrifying—like being in a book.”5
CHAPTER 1 The Albert Memorial
Ida and Louise would walk round the Albert Memorial in London thousands of times. “How I loved it,” declared Ida, recalling the trips the family took to the memorial in the years before the First World War.1 In those days, the memorial was the “limit of world wandering” for the Cooks, who in 1906 had temporarily settled in Barnes, a leafy suburb in south-west London on the River Thames. Commissioned by Queen Victoria as a shrine to her beloved husband after his death from typhoid fever in 1861, the towering Gothic Revival temple that shelters a seated-and-shiny gilt-covered bronze sculpture of the prince was to be the most elaborate public memorial that Britain had ever seen. It was Queen Victoria’s own Taj Mahal, a monument to her love for her Prince Consort and father of her nine children. But it was also a testament to Britain’s own romantic ideal of itself as a global force, “the empire on which the sun never sets”—a celebration of industry and ingenuity and a potent symbol of Britain’s leadership and superiority in the final decades of the nineteenth century.
The memorial was mocked by architecture and art critics for its sheer excess after its unveiling in 1872. But never by John Cook, a tax inspector, and his wife Mary Brown, proud subjects of the British Crown, who must have felt it was important to show their daughters the magnificence of their heritage, even if by then the Victorian era was already in the past. By the time Ida and Louise took in the statues and carvings, Victoria and Albert’s eldest son, Edward VII, had already been king for several years.
For Ida and Louise, the Albert Memorial was an important marker in their lives, largely because it embodied the “standard of personal integrity”2 set by their “incomparable” parents. “Without [their] loving and commonsense upbringing,” Ida believed, “we should never have been capable of doing the things” for which they would become known.3 Mary Cook embraced her role as a wife and mother. Their whole lives the girls never saw their mother cry, and on her deathbed Mary Cook told them that she never had anything to cry about. “I had a good husband…and good children. A good home and good health. No one must ask for anything else. Anything else is a bonus.”4
The dedication inscribed on the canopy surrounding the Albert Memorial was surely never lost on the sisters: “Queen Victoria and Her People” dedicated the memorial to Prince Albert “As a Tribute of Their Gratitude For a Life Devoted to Public Service.” But while it was dedicated to the greater good, the memorial was also a monument to love, romance, and adventure—elements that figured prominently throughout Ida and Louise’s childhoods in London and the north of England.
“I am a born romantic,” Ida boasted, “and I am sure I will never change.”5
* * *
Mary Louise was born on June 19, 1901, in Dorking, an hour south of London. Ida Cook, Mary and John Cook’s second child, was born on August 24, 1904, in Sunderland, a historic shipbuilding town in northern England. The Cooks lived a quiet life at 37 Croft Avenue in the old port town. Then, when Louise was five and Ida was two years old, the family packed up and moved to Barnes, on the outskirts of London where their father had been assigned. Their brother Bill was born there in 1910. “I don’t think I was quite so nice about being the displaced baby,” wrote Ida,6 who attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart school in the village along with Louise.
At school the Cook sisters hated Bible class, with Louise nearly traumatized for life after hearing the story of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. “I couldn’t believe that God had written it,” she thought. “It seemed so mean. I hated the picture of an angel with a sword forcing poor Adam and Eve out of the garden. They were all naked. I kept thinking how chilly they must have been.”7
While they were in Barnes, they discovered that their house was haunted. A murder had supposedly taken place there, and the victim had been stuffed into a nearby well. “I only saw the ghost once,” said Ida, whose belief in the paranormal and the spirit world would continue throughout her adult life. “He always appeared on the stairs, and one night when I was on my way to bed, I saw moonlight glinting off silver buttons on a man’s cutaway coat.”8 The six-year-old Ida stopped at the bottom of the stairs and considered running to her father in the sitting room. But she managed to calm down long enough to walk slowly up the stairs and then quickly dive under the covers once she got to her bedroom.
