Nazi Hunters continued

Well, continuing with the Klarsfelds hit a stumbling block as my hard drive died. A painful drawn out death - a reaction to the heat in NY, the British trains or French voltage...who knows. But the photos I wanted to post are in process, crossing fingers, of data recovery. Beth mentioned in her comment about Beate Klarsfeld's role in Klaus Barbie's extradition and case.

I'll have more on that but Monsieur Klarsfeld also graciously introduced me to Annette Zaidman, a woman who's the general secretary and on the board of L'Association des fils et filles des déportes Juifs de France since 1979 who he knew would have the DVD of Terroristes en Retraite - Terrorists in Retirement. A hard to come by film that was banned by French Television and took years before it was shown. I'd seen portions of it on French TV...was mesmerized about this little know story and glad my friend Sarah's father had made a VHS copy. Well, that VHS tape died, yes we still have old machines in our house, and I seem to be talking about the death of machines a lot, but now armed with introduction and her phone number from Monsieur Klarsfeld I made a date. She was busy, oh so busy as French people always are or getting bronzage on the Cote d'Azur...never in between.

But lo and behold the egg on my face when I sipped coffee at her spotless apartment and she told me yes, quite busy as she was gtting the Chevalier d'honneur medal next week with Monsieur Klarsfeld in attendance at the Mairie in the 11th arrondissement. She'd lived nearby since she was a child and her parents were taken during the war. And would I come? A ceremony in honor of all her work in establishing the organization and her tireless effort on behalf of young children orphaned, like herself, during the round ups.
Did I want to move heaven, change the Eurostar reservations and delay the British library tour...yes, but I couldn't. I'm forever honored at the inviatation. And the gift of her book...Mémoire d'une enfance volée Memoirs of a stolen childhood.
Cara - Tuesday

Vice and Virtue

A couple of recent developments in Thailand, while certainly not indicating that the societal rift there is coming to an end any time soon, at least feel more like the Thailand those of us who crossed the Pacific and passed through the looking glass know and (used to) love.

First is the re-entry into politics of Chuwit Kamolvisit, the former "massage parlor king," pictured above in what was his natural environment until he decided he had a mission to serve the country.  (On a completely irrelevant note, as an old Thai hand, I would bet a substantial quantity of good money that two of the women posing with Chuwit didn't start out that way.)


In 2003, Chuwit wiped off the soap bubbles and ran for the governorship of Bangkok on an anti-corruption ticket.  Who knew more about corruption, he asked publicly, than a guy who paid the cops US $300,000 a month to keep them from busting his places of business?  He flashed around a Rolodex thicker than Remembrance of Things Past, claiming that it contained the names of corrupt officials at all levels of government, officials whom he would expose once elected.  He claimed further that only a copy of the Rolodex, hidden somewhere really crafty, kept him from being assassinated by the cops.

As it turned out, the cops left him alone but the voters assassinated him.   Believing that he'd lost because people still thought of him as the Tycoon of Touch (understandable for a man who estimates that he's employed more than 20,000 women), he decided on a grand gesture to sever ties with his past.  In 2005 he had a jacuzzi bathtub hauled onto the pavement in front of the National Assembly and smashed it to pieces with a sledge hammer.  Allow me to note that this is a tactic unlikely to be employed by a politician in any other country in the world.  Ever. Hard as it may be to believe, Chuwit lost again in 2008.

Now, boasting a more serious -- not to say frenzied -- image and a more frivolous political party name, "Love Thailand" (Chuwit is the only member), he's tilting at the Big Windmill again.  And I for one am glad to see him back.  He talks like Jerry Lewis on helium and he's probably the only candidate for a major political office in the last 20 years who decked a television reporter on-camera, a tactic I think would be more effective in the US than smashing a jacuzzi.

Welcome back, Chuwit.  You're a breath of -- well, maybe not fresh air. But you know those scented cardboard pine trees some taxi drivers hang on their rear-view mirrors?  A breath of that.


The other person I'm happy to see in the news is a small girl with a large name, Lapassarada Mung-Opas.  Lapassarada, who is only four, won a contest to name the new baby koala at the Chiang Mai zoo.  With literally thousands of entrants, Lapassarada won in a walk with -- no tittering in the balcony -- "Prong-dong," which means "Reconciliation."


And as sweet as the koala is, and as touching as its new name is, what I'm most taken with about this story is that when the Associated Press called Lapassarada at home to ask how it felt to have won the contest and where the name came from -- and all the other condescending drivel a reporter would ask a child in that situation -- Lapassarada said she didn't want to talk because she was watching cartoons, and she hung up the phone.

That's my Thailand.

This week's Guest Blogger - Anne Zouroudi

It is a great pleasure to introduce this week’s guest blogger, Anne Zouroudi. Anne is the author of the Greek Detective mysteries, based on the Seven Deadly Sins and set in the beautiful islands of modern Greece. With an enigmatic PI often likened to Hercule Poirot, her books combine mystery with travelogue, mythology and even a touch of metaphysics. Her first novel, The Messenger of Athens, was shortlisted for ITV3's Crime/Thriller awards, and is published in the US in July. Her fourth novel in the series, The Lady of Sorrows, has just been published in the UK, and was described by Alexander McCall-Smith as 'a gorgeous treat'.

To those that have yet to read Anne’s books – what are you waiting for? Go get them - but in the meantime enjoy the below:

On Fact Being Stranger Than Fiction
I’m a sucker for quirky news-stories – the ‘And finally...’ kind that newscasters finish up with on slow news days: dogs who swim oceans to get home to families in Cowdenbeath, babies who swallow razor-blades and live to tell the tale. (My son ate most of a Marmite jar once, but that’s another story). There was a story I made a note of recently, where some poor boy was lost in the New York subway system for eleven days. He survived, apparently, on a diet of news-stand confectionery and snacks. And if there isn’t a novel in that little snippet, I’ll eat my hat.

My attention was recently grabbed by a ghoulish tale from the Italian city of Naples, where unscrupulous foragers had been raiding local cemeteries for coffin wood, and selling it to Naples’s restaurants as fuel for pizza ovens. Now that would definitely put me off my Quattro Stagioni. Or a sad story from Athens, where, in the course of the demolition of an apartment building, a man’s mummified body was found in a bedroom. He was reckoned to have been dead for over a decade – and the twist in the tale was, that beside him in the bedroom were share certificates and cash that made the deceased worth millions. Money can’t buy me love, indeed – but what a gift that story is to a writer of fiction.

In truth, I’ve yet to build a book on one of these intriguing true-life accounts, though I do have, fermenting in the back of my brain, a story that came to mind as I was on a tour of Leeds’s Armley jail (a terrible place: within half an hour, I was suffering horrible claustrophobia, but the tour lasted three hours, and – guess what? – you can’t see yourself out). But it seems to me, if I ever ran out of ideas from my own (happily fertile) imagination, I wouldn’t have far to look for real-life plotlines which might, quite frankly, stretch readers’ credulity. If I were writing cut-and-slash crime, for example, would anyone believe in a second Yorkshire Ripper stalking the streets of Bradford? Too unlikely, surely. Yet just last week, lo and behold, Bradford saw again – for real - the horror of a prostitute-murdering serial killer.

So, is it legitimate to ‘steal’ a real-life idea, and turn it into fiction? Well, of course it is. Writers have been doing so for centuries. The trick, though, is to take the germ of an idea, and work magic on it, put flesh on the bones to create a unique and memorable story. And I have definitely been guilty of using incidents from my own life in my books – with the names changed to protect the innocent, of course. Any writer worth his salt takes notes – either mentally, or in one of those ubiquitous notebooks we all have – of those little happenings which are all around us, in day-to-day life. If you keep your eyes open (and if you have a writer’s – frankly nosy – disposition), you can’t go wrong.

I was on a crowded train once, and seated across from me was a blind man with a guide dog. As we pulled into Birmingham New Street station, the blind man – and half the carriage with him – was preparing to disembark. The blind man wanted his suitcase, which was somewhere in a great stack of luggage near the carriage door, and he asked a man to pass it to him.

“Of course,” said the man. “What does it look like?”

And the blind man said, “I don’t know.”

Boy, did my ears prick up! There followed a fascinating ten minutes whilst various disembarking passengers and the train’s guard tried to help the blind man find his suitcase. Was it tartan? He didn’t know. Did it have a label on it? Bless him, he didn’t know that either. So then they started asking him what was inside it, and opening up the bags on the rack. Eventually they identified his suitcase from medicines packed inside. Or did they?

For me, the possibilities for stories from that one incident are myriad. Did the blind man end up with his own suitcase, or someone else’s? What might he have taken that he shouldn’t have? What might the guard have found, opening up random bags off the rack? And was the blind man really blind, or playing games? Let your imagination run, and you’ve a plot before you know it.

My favourite train story, though, is dear to me because train travel – which I enjoy, mainly for its people-watching potential - is so often marred, these days, by idiots on mobile phones. My friend’s father struck very unlucky once, and ended up ensconced with three strangers at a second-class table, with one of the strangers – a businessman - determined to spend the whole lengthy journey shouting into his mobile. My friend’s father – and his fellow-travellers – were subjected to the businessman’s loud bonhomie and bragging for over an hour, until somewhere outside Burton-on-Trent, the businessman needed the toilet. And – poor fool! - he left his mobile on the table.

Quick as a flash, the elderly woman sitting opposite the businessman (she had been quietly knitting up to this point) stood up, slid open the window, dropped the businessman’s phone out of the moving train, and sat down. When the businessman returned to his seat, that wonderful, wicked woman was back at her knitting, and my friend’s father was apparently absorbed in his newspaper. The businessman spent several minutes searching for his phone, before sitting down to finish his journey in baffled silence.

Great story, no? And it’s one of those you just couldn’t make up.

Anne Zouroudi - Saturday

The Dead Beat

Hands up who loves reading obituaries? I have to admit I'm a shameless wallower in short biogs of the recently departed. As a national newspaper hack a few years ago, often left in charge of the newsdesk after everyone had a) gone home or b) gone to the pub, I used to have a surreptitious glance in the file where the obituaries of The Queen Mother, now gone but then still fuelled by cigarettes and gin, the Queen and a few other notaries were held, ready to go when they went. Sometimes obituaries end up print by accident, when the subject isn't even dead. My favourite story is Dave Swarbrick, the folk musician, who was reported to have died of a chest infection in the Midlands. In fact he was alive and well enough to joke that, 'It wasn't the first time I've died in Coventry.'

The best obituaries over here appear in The Daily Telegraph. The house paper of retired colonels in the shires, firm believers in our duty to Queen and country, what, it features all kinds of folk other newspapers wouldn't touch, mainly ex-military men  who became embroiled in all kinds of derring-do that we fiction writers would dismiss as too fantastical. Almost supernaturally politically incorrect figures such as Lieutenant Colonel John Malcolm Thorpe Fleming 'Mad Jack' Churchill who, during World War II, while bombs and bullets rained and reigned, was prone to 'charging up beaches dressed only in a kilt while brandishing a dirk, killing with a bow and arrow, and playing the bagpipes at moments of extreme peril.' It's fair to say he struggled to adapt to life in peacetime after that, and took to surfing for kicks, and was often heard pining for more conflict: 'If it wasn't for those damn Yanks, we could have kept the war going another 10 years!' was a frequent complaint of his, as he caught another pipe.

I was reminded of the wonder of obituaries when I read recently of John Shepherd-Barron. Not a household name. However, most if not of all us will have used his most famous invention - the ATM machine (or hole-in-the-wall to us Brits.) Like all the best ideas it came to him in the bath (I often wonder how much inspiration I miss out on by taking showers...). He'd been to the bank on a Saturday to cash a cheque back in the 1960s, when banks closed at lunchtime on a Saturday. He arrived one minute late to find there was no chance of him getting his cash. Much aggrieved, he sloped off to home to scratch his head (and wash his back). He came up with the idea of a vending machine that issued cash rather than  chocolate bars.

The Telegraph described him with beautiful simplicity as 'quite the ideas man.'  Shepherd-Barron envisaged a six-digit PIN number but, on the advice of his wife, who said most people could not remember so many numbers, this was reduced to four. (God bless you Mrs S-B.) He pitched the idea a senior executive of Barclays Bank to listen to his pitch. According to Shepherd-Barron, 'I asked him for 90 seconds of his time to share the new idea I had. His reply came after 85 seconds. He said, 'If you can make this device you are speaking about, I will buy it right now.''  The deal was done, and the first cash dispenser appeared in Enfield in north London in June 1967.

A Barclays executive who was supposed to make the first ceremonial withdrawal had trouble mastering the PIN system, making him the prototype for many of us, so for the benefit of the watching media the transaction had be faked.  'We finally bogused it from behind,' Shepherd-Barron said later. He had a way with words, too.

His eyes turned to the US and big money. However, the US regarded it as 'a wacky European idea that wouldn't sell in America.' But then the Bank of Pennsylvania placed an order for six machines, and the idea went global. There's now an ATM in Antarctica. Shepherd- Barron once said: 'In northern Thailand I saw a man get off his ox cart, go and get money out of the wall and then get back on his cart. It really brought home to me that I had come up with a worldwide idea.'

The device was never patented. Doing so would have involved disclosing the coding system. Apparently - and this is the sort of great thing you learn from obituaries - the machines have a high level of security but are not perfect and have been targeted by many a criminal. In Ireland, for example, gangs regularly stage smash-and-grab raids, using the unsubtle but often effective method of using industrial diggers to rip entire machines out of the wall.

His money made, Shepherd-Barron retired to Scotland, where he continued to dabble in the ideas game, with lesser success. A snail farming project and a fish farm both ran into problems, the latter when voracious seals preyed on his salmon.

Ingenious to the last, he came up with a device which emitted the sound of killer whales to drive the seals away. The seals were undeterred. He described them thus: 'They're clever scoundrels – it's only ended up attracting them more.'

cheers

Dan - Friday

Noble Rot

Tim’s post about intrinsic beauty got me thinking about situations where things that appear far from beautiful – indeed may be extremely dangerous or unpleasant – may produce something that we regard as gorgeous. There are plenty of examples. I chose one that appeals to me, not least because the name itself reflects the dichotomy – Noble Rot.

"Noble rot" is the term used – in certain circumstances – for the fungus Botrytis cinerea. The name derives from “grapes like ashes”. It’s a mould which attacks a variety of plants and most of the time it is a pest destroying the beauty and health of flowers and fruit. In the case of grapes, persistent damp conditions may cause the spread of the infection, and the fungus attacks and rots the grapes producing a condition called “grey rot” which is exactly as bad as it sounds. No beauty here. Just the opposite. But if the conditions are right, something else happens. If the fungus attacks the grapes but then dries out during the day, the fungus sucks the moisture from the berries and shrinks and shrivels them, concentrating acids, sugars and other solids. Such grapes carefully picked – in some cases one by one rather than bunch by bunch – produce an intense sweet but acid-rich wine with wonderful flavours of marmalade, peaches, apricots and an intense nose hinting of the botrytis itself. Gorgeous. Surprising. Beautiful.

Grapes heavily infested with Botrytis cinerea

Ideally the vineyards should grow in areas where mist comes from a lake or river allowing the infection to develop, but where the sun lifts the damp and the grapes dry. The great botrytis wine growing regions are Sauternes in France, Tokaji in Hungary and the Rheingau in Germany. But other areas produce wonderful examples, particularly Alsace and – yes, you guessed – South Africa.

Given the look of the infected grapes, one has to wonder who could have thought of making wine from them rather than discarding them along with their "grey rot" cousins.

Chateau d’Yquem, the queen of Sauternes estates, claims to have discovered the benefits of noble rot in the middle of the nineteenth century. Since grapes have been grown there since the twelfth century, it did take them a while to cotton on. There are appealing but probably apocryphal tales from other wine areas. According to the Tokaji region, the discovery was due to an invasion of Turks in 1650. Every man was rushed into defence leaving the vineyards to their own devices. In desperation, the affected grapes were harvested and fermented separately so as not to spoil the unaffected ones but in the hope of recovering some of the lost harvest. The results were very satisfactory. The Germans have a similar but less exciting story of a lost messenger carrying approval for the harvest to go ahead. But the same results.

  Nederburg

In South Africa we can be more certain of the backstory. It was a German who introduced botrytis wines. Günter Brözel – first winemaker at modern Nederburg - used chenin blanc grapes affected with the mould to make a wine he called Nederburg Edelkeur. It remains South Africa’s premier example of the art. Stanley and I had the pleasure of sharing a bottle with friends from Eichborn publishers in Frankfurt at a delightful dinner there last Thursday. Although being on the doorstep of the Rheingau, they found it quite acceptable.

Nederburg Winemakers - Razvan Macici and Günter Brözel

Michael – Thursday

Agnes and Friðrik

I am not a fan of capital punishment although I am not completely blind to the reasoning of those who agree with it. Thankfully this is very seldom in the forefront of public discussion here as we have no such punishment in our judicial system. It is only brought to our attention when extreme cases catch the media’s eyes, when obvious horrors of justice are about to take place. This usually involves scheduled executions of persons of diminished mental capacity, young offenders, people who consistently maintain their innocence or those who are trying to amend their antisocial ways and have repented. We also hear of executions in countries where trials are a mirage at best and the accused has no opportunity of appealing their sentence which might even be carried out before the person has had the time to register what has happened. This is disgusting and I cannot imagine that many condone such a process. On the opposing side, many crimes are horrid and merciless and at times I am sure it would seem justified to show no mercy to those who have none to spare. I am also sure that more guilty people are executed through the various justice systems of the world than innocent, but still. The inconsistency of death sentences will continue to fuel my dislike of them, not only are the wrong people at times executed but the sentence is not meted out equally, one’s social standing, political beliefs or luck in choosing a defense lawyer most often plays a role, which is completely unacceptable.

The last executions conducted in Iceland took place in 1830 although capital punishment was not removed from our criminal code until 1928. Trailing the line of hapless souls deemed to make the world a better place by losing their lives were a woman of 33 named Agnes and a young man of 18 named Friðrik. A third accomplice, a 16 year old girl named Sigríður had also been sentenced to death but was pardoned by the Danish king and made serve life under hard labor in a prison camp in Denmark as she was perceived as being “simple”.

The crime was murder, double at that. Friðrik killed a farmer named Natan who employed both Agnes and Sigríður, for the purpose of robbing him, as well as ending the life of a man visiting Natan. Friðrik then set the farmhouse on fire to make the deaths look like an accident, but multiple stab wounds on the charred bodies were his undoing. Agnes and Sigríður aided in the murders by hiding Friðrik in a barn until nightfall and Agnes also conspired in the whole scenario. It is considered highly likely that she planted the idea in Friðrik’s mind and egged him on, thus being the instigator of the murders. She had been Natan’s lover until his attention shifted to the younger Sigríður – whom Friðrik loved. A complicated love circumstance, involving sad people from the lower echelons of life at the time.

There are countless executions of less deserving culprits than Agnes and Friðrik in our history. Despite this their plight has lived with us, because of the way the execution was conducted and later occurrences which further fuelled interest in the story. I will attempt to briefly explain both.

At the time anyone sentenced to death was usually sent abroad to be executed and no one had been executed on Icelandic soil for 40 years. The Icelandic people were not fond of executions and preferred them conducted out of sight. But two things contributed to the process being carried out here in the case of Agnes and Friðrik. For one it was a lot cheaper not to have to send the pair by boat to Denmark or Norway and secondly, local authorities believed crime on the rise and they wanted to set an example. To make sure people would sit up and notice, every farmer in the area was obliged to show up or send a representative in his place. As a result one hundred and fifty people witnessed the act which is a very high number considering the sparsely populated area where the events occurred. An execution block was erected and this included a man-made mound that still exists, the added elevation ensuring everyone present had a good view. The execution block itself had to be imported from Denmark, as did the axe as neither was available within the country. Once everything was set up, Agnes and Friðrik were led up on to the mound and their heads unceremoniously chopped off by the brother of the murdered Natan. No one wanted to act as executioner and it even required a lot of persuasion to get the next of kin to brand the axe.

To get the most out of the example being set, the heads of Agnes and Friðrik were then poised on stakes placed prominently for all to see. It is unclear how long they were to stand there as there was no tradition to go by. However, this never became an issue as the heads were stolen the very same night of the execution. The unconfirmed story goes that a warmhearted woman from one of the few large estates in the district had one of her farmhands remove the heads when darkness had fallen and bury them secretly in a nearby graveyard. This last bit became part of what everyone believed true although the records of the time only mention: “The heads disappeared during the night”.

Now fast forward 102 years to 1932. A woman named Sesselja from Reykjavík begins to experience involuntary writing involving messages from Agnes, instructing her to find the bodies and the heads, dig them out and provide her and Friðrik a proper burial in hallowed ground. The locations of the caskets containing the bodies and the location of the heads were provided, as was a description of a piece of wood from the stake lodged in Agnes’ skull. According to the messages the heads were not in the graveyard at all as everyone believed. The writing stated that the farmhand had not wanted to carry the heads the full distance to the cemetery and that he had instead buried them near the stakes. For two years the woman was besieged with this weird note taking before finally overcoming her reluctance to make a fool of herself and going to the police. The church became involved and a team was sent north to search for the caskets and the heads which incredibly enough were exactly where the written notes described. In addition, Agnes’ skull was pierced through the crown with a 10 cm long piece of wood as the messages had mentioned. But through this strange channel, Anges and Friðrik ended up receiving their proper burial.

One of the many sad facts of this story is the one regarding the fancy brooch found in the casket containing Agnes’ bones. This type of brooch was used at the time as a button in the traditional dressy female clothing, showing that Agnes dressed up for the occasion of her own execution. Makes me wonder what I or anyone else would do under the same circumstances. Not that today’s executed prisoners are allowed this last attempt at dignity.

Yrsa - Wednesday

P.S. We did not come close to winning Eurovision and it has now been agreed that this is because we sang in English. This is not a mistake we will repeat. Another follow up on previous posts regards the municipal elections of Saturday: The Best Party is now officially the largest political party in Reykjavík and our new mayor will be comedian Jón Gnarr, guaranteeing interesting times ahead.

Today (Thursday 03 June) all Icelanders have been asked to spread via e-mail or other means the below video made by our Tourist Board. It is supposed to entice people to visit (by all means do) as the eruption has had a very negative impact on our tourism industry. Beign a loyal citizen I cannot resist the temptation to post it - it would be interesting to hear what you think of it as opinions here are mixed.

Inspired by Iceland Video from Inspired By Iceland on Vimeo.

Nazi Hunters I have met

This is Serge Klarsfeld's desk in his office contained in his family apartment on rue de la Boetie in Paris. The apartment is less than two blocks away from the Ministry of Interior's infamous back entrance on rue des Saussais infamous for the torture cells used by the Gestapo and visible today the graffiti of tortured victims.



Here's Monsieur Klarsfeld who as an eight year old hiding with his family in Nice saw his father taken away. His father who hid the family behind a false panel to make sure only he was taken, never returned from Auschwitz. Serge's mother and sister survived.
I think he'd prefer to be known for his work finding and documenting the children and all who were taken during the Occupation.



Monsieur Klarsfeld's files. Graciously he met with me and fitting me in his busy schedule - he's a practicing attorney, husband and doting grandfather - provided me with historical documentation from his many files and his upcoming book further documenting those rounded up in Paris and deported. His information, sadly, comes from the Police Archives who inked in the Jews who were required to register with the Police.

His wife Beate Klarsfeld, born in Germany, who I spoke with on the phone is more well known perhaps as bringing Klaus Barbie, the butcher of Lyon - after ten years of extradition battles - back to France for trial.


"You have an amazing wife, Monsieur Klarsfeld," I said.

He nodded. "I know." Paused. "Today's the anniversary of when we met, years ago on the platform at Gare du Nord. Also..." He shook his head..."the day Eichmann was caught in South America."

Serge and Beate Klarsfeld are an amazing couple...more next Tuesday.

Cara - Tuesday