11th of May 2008 /

Film reminds Rosson of German childhood

By Polina Olsen

When Marianne Rosson watched “The Rape of Europa,” the film brought back memories of her privileged life in pre-war Berlin and the turmoil that followed.

Sponsored by Hadassah on April 15 at the Rose Schnitzer Manor, the movie documents the Nazi’s systematic art theft. According to Greg Bradsher, director of the Holocaust-Era Assets Records Project, National Archives and Records Administration, Nazis looted 20 percent of Europe’s art. Rosson’s family collection was among those stolen.

“It’s been a roller-coaster life,” says Rosson, who lives in Portland. Born in 1921, she grew up in a luxurious Berlin villa with servants and a “very strict nanny.”

“My mother was a lady of society,” Rosson says. “She had six fur coats, and they had a party every week. I wasn’t allowed to look out of the window; little ladies didn’t do that. I had all my meals with Nanny and hardly came downstairs except to say hello to guests.”

Although Jewish by birth, the family never attended synagogue. In fact, Rosson went to Mass with Nanny every Sunday.

“We had a Christmas tree from the floor to the ceiling with real candles,” she said.

Rosson’s mother collected antique furniture including a divan once owned by Marie Antoinette. Her father collected 17th century Dutch and Flemish paintings. An internationally respected banker, his praise of American business during a 1909 trip to the United States made the New York Times. By 1917, Paul Hartog founded and owned his own bank in Berlin.

“I never was aware that things weren’t right,” Rosson reflects. Even when the Nazis confiscated her father’s bank, she “didn’t take anything seriously.” But, in 1938, her worried parents sent her to London as a mother’s helper. She carried a photo of her mother, a small Aubusson carpet, and an album with pictures of her home and the 31 paintings.

In 1939, homesick Rosson’s visit to Berlin proved to be a mistake. Suspicious British authorities imprisoned her as an enemy alien when she returned to London.

“I was in solitary confinement with a bed, table, chair and washstand,” Rosson says. “If you had to go to the bathroom, a guard would take you.”

In 1940, she transferred to a POW camp on the Isle of Man and stayed for two years.

“All of a sudden they let me out; I have no idea why,” she says.

She joined the British army and trained as an interpreter.

Rosson will never forget VE Day when she triumphantly marched to downtown London.

“There were so many people, you didn’t have room to faint,” she recalls. “We yelled ‘We want Winnie,’ and Churchill came out on the balcony.”

But tragic news waited at home that day.

Her parents died in concentration camps, her half-sister in Switzerland wrote.

“They found a man who offered to take them to the Swiss border. Instead he took them to the Gestapo headquarters,” Rosson later learned. Paul Hartog died in Theresienstadt in 1942; his wife, Gertrude, died two years later in Auschwitz.

After the war, Rosson went to Berlin with the British army. Her former home was bombed out and shattered. Later, Rosson worked for the United States Army Criminal Investigation Department where she met her American husband.

“They were trying to find Nazis—trying to prevent an uprising,” she said.

Today, Marianne Rosson and her son, Andy, stay in close contact with auction houses and Holocaust art registries.

“My mother’s nephew [now deceased] took this on as his life’s work,” says Andy Rosson, who lives in Portland.

When the nephew located a painting in the Denver Art Museum collection, they decommissioned and returned it. Today it hangs on Andy Rosson’s wall.

The family recovered a second painting when “River Landscape” by Theobald Michau came up for auction. Sotheby’s found it on their inventory of stolen art. The owners, who had bought it in good faith, agreed to turn profits over to Marianne Rosson.

“I am very strong. I’ve had great upsets, and somehow I inherited my mother’s sense of humor,” Rosson says.

As she watched “The Rape of Europa,” she noted that thousands of art objects were never recovered. “It’s amazing that we got two pictures back,” she said. “Amazing.”

Rosson has one son, four grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren. She treasures the photograph album and mementos she once brought to London. The Aubusson carpet hangs on her living-room wall; an oil painting made from her mother’s photo hangs over her bed. She sees its reflection in the mirror when she goes to sleep.