Utz Read Free Page B

Beryl Parkinson, in a house of cats and cuckoo-clocks from which he would gaze at the turgid waves that broke across the pier.
    He did learn some English – not much! He also made a short trip to London, and came away with a vivid notion of how an English gentleman behaved, and how he dressed. He returned to Dresden in a racily-cut tweed jacket, and a pair of hand-made brogues.
    It was this same brown jacket, a little threadbare, a couple of sizes too small, and with leather patches sewn onto the elbows, that he would wear throughout the War – as an act of faith and defiance — whenever German officers were present.
    He wore it, too, his racial purity called into question, during the reign of Reinhard Heydrich, ‘The Butcher of Prague’: one afternoon, he confounded his interrogators by pulling from its pocket his father’s First War decoration. How dare they! he shouted, as he slapped the medal onto the table. How dare they insult the son of a great German soldier?
    It was a bold stroke, and it worked. They gave him no further trouble. He lay low at České Křížové and, for the first time in his life, took regular exercise: working with his foresters at the saw-mill. On February 16th 1945 news came that the Dresden house was flattened. His love of England vanished forever on hearing the B.B.C. announcer, ‘There is no china in Dresden today.’ He gave the jacket to a gipsy who had escaped the camps.
    A month after the surrender, when Germans and German-supporters were being hounded from their homes — or escorted to the frontier ‘in the clothes they stood up in’ – Utz succeeded in disavowing his German passport and obtaining Czech nationality. He had a harder time dispelling rumours that he had helped in the activities of Goering’s art squad.
    The rumours were true. He had collaborated. He had given information: a trickle of information as to the whereabouts of certain works of art — information available to anyone who knew how to use an art library. By doing so, he had been able to protect, even to hide, a number of his Jewish friends: among them the celebrated Hebraist, Zikmund Kraus. What, after all, was the value of a Titian or a Tiepolo if one human life could be saved?
    As for the Communists, once he realised the BeneÅ¡ Government would fall, he began to curry favour with the bosses-to-be. On learning that Klement Gottwald had installed himself in Prague Castle, ‘a worker on the throne of the Bohemian kings’, Utz’s reaction was to give his lands to a farming collective, and his own castle for use as an insane asylum.
    These measures gave him time: sufficient at least to evacuate the porcelains, without loss or breakage, before they were requisitioned by the canaille.
    His next move was to make a show of taking up Hebrew studies under the guidance of Dr Kraus: these were the years when pictures of Marx and Lenin used to hang in Israeli kibbutzes. He got a poorly paid job, as a cataloguer in the National Library. He installed himself in an inconspicuous flat in Židovské Město: its previous inhabitant having vanished in the Heydrichiada.
    Twice a week he went loyally to watch a Soviet film.
    When his friend Dr Orlík suggested they both flee to the West, Utz pointed to the ranks of Meissen figurines, six deep on the shelves, and said, ‘I cannot leave them.’

‘H ow did he get away with it?’
    â€˜With what?’
    â€˜The porcelain. How did he hang on to it?’
    â€˜He did a deal.’
    My friend the historian gave me an outline of the facts as he knew them. It seems that the Communist authorities — ever ready to assume a veneer of legality – had allowed Utz to keep the collection providing every piece was photographed and numbered. It was also agreed – although never put in writing – that, after his death, the State Museums would get the lot.
    Besides, Marxist-Leninism