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In Quest of an Errant Father
Susan Kennedy
IWENT TO VIENNA RECENTLY TO FILM MY father�s return there for the first time since 1938. Heinz Kuhe left on the Kindertransport on December 8, nine months after the Nazi Anschluss, three days after his 13th birthday and never saw any of his family again.
My sister and her husband were in Vienna too, with Felix, their 9-month-old son. You can imagine the scene. Loving daughters accompany elderly father, recording his memories, gently prompting him with questions. The father reflects on his life, the children experience his sense of loss. The family is brought closer and leaves with a sense of shared history.
I can imagine the scene too. It�s even partly correct. But this family saga is far more complicated than that, and doesn�t have such a happy ending. For years, ever since I was 8 and my sister 3, when my father, who had changed his name to Henry Kennedy, received a lengthy jail sentence for fraud, I�d hoped to get close enough to him to ask him about the course of his life -- and the events that shaped and continue to shape my life.
I�d asked my father the questions before, to no avail. I decided to make a documentary in the hope that it would prompt him to open up. In the unfamiliarity of post-war Vienna, and with the impersonality offered by hotel and camera, I was hoping we might finally be able to talk frankly. My father is 76; I reckoned this might be one of my last chances.
The questions were simple on the surface, but impossibly difficult in reality, especially for someone scared to be introspective: How was it that a boy from a loving Jewish family chose a life of crime over family life, earning notoriety among London�s East End criminal fraternity? Was it the Holocaust, the death of all those he loved? And what about us, my sister and me? Did we not compensate to a small extent for his terrible loss? Was he unable to love us for fear of losing us too? Why his need to appear rich, to surround himself with women half his age in need of a (diabetic) sugar daddy?
I�d been asking myself these questions for as long as I can remember. When my father jumped bail in 1982, and turned up on my doorstep in Munich, where I was studying German literature, with a beautiful black model in tow, I tried asking him too. It was about the first occasion in my adult life that my time with him wasn�t limited to a 15-minute prison visit in a smoky room where cheerful small talk was the only option. He didn�t answer.
When a month later he moved on to Marbella, the fashionable Spanish resort favored by British playboy fugitives, I again asked him. He was charming, laid-back, mellow, dapper, ever in control. But he always made sure he was too busy to think about those matters.
In Marbella my father spent his time entertaining his London friends -- East End murderers, gangsters and extortionists. Among them: film star Barbara Windsor�s ex-husband, Ronnie Knight, who robbed Security Express of �6 million in 1983, and Freddie Foreman, hitman for the notorious Kray twins. "Freddie might be a murderer, but he�s a decent man," my father said.
A large, athletic type, a consummate actor, my father would crack jokes, break open bottle after bottle of champagne, and find himself alone at dawn. After everyone had gone, he would settle down with the Economist or the Financial Times. This was how I liked seeing him most.
I could never understand how my father could change so dramatically. What was it that pushed him over the edge? When amendments to the extradition treaty with Spain put the "Costa del Crime" on the map, a Daily Mail journalist was sent out to interview him. Hiding his Jewish Viennese past as he always did, and adopting the Cockney persona that came so easily to him, Henry talked of his wheeling-dealing crimes. He was written up as another "East End gangster."
WHEN HE FLEW INTO VIENNA FROM HIS rented, local authority flat in London�s Camden Town, the return to his childhood home did indeed prompt a flow of early recollections. He is a wonderful storyteller.
He has learned seldom to show emotion. But now he couldn�t hold back the tears. Looking straight into the camera, he cried as he told us how his widowed mother, Lena, was forced onto her knees in front of her tobacconist�s shop to clean the pavement with a toothbrush, as the neighbors he knew as friends jeered. "I could never understand how people I thought were decent could sink so low," he said. The next month the Nazis took the shop away, and he was sent to England.
During the war, he recalled, he received letters from his mother via the Red Cross from Theresienstadt and then Auschwitz. The last one, written in 1943 in faint hand, read: "Heinzl Goldkind, sei ehrlich und brav" (Little Heinz, my golden child, be honest and good).
After arriving in England, Heinz spent the winter at a hostel in Dover, where "the water-bottles froze overnight," and was then transferred to Birmingham, where he chose to learn tailoring over carpentry. At 17 he volunteered to fight with the Jewish Brigade in Italy.
In 1945, fluent in German and English, he was recruited by British Intelligence to work in Germany. It was then that he threw off his Austrian name and identity and became Henry Kennedy. He learned how to use guile to track down a Swedish Nazi collaborator. The man, who was later tried and hanged, was coaxed into secretly taped confessions, elicited by Fraulein Knoblauch, an amorous double agent, and monitored by Lieutenant Kennedy.
Back in London, the suave and handsome British officer met Edith Arenz, herself a refugee from Vienna who had arrived in England in 1938 with her mother, while her father stayed behind to close the Vienna and Paris offices of the Kassel-Arenz bank. "I was impressed by her family and their wealth," he said. The two of them married. He was 23 and she 21.
He told me all this, to camera, in the glitzy breakfast room of Vienna�s Radisson Hotel. But then, as I prodded him with the questions I really wanted answering, about his womanizing and his descent into crime, he withdrew into himself-- just as he had done so often before. The story as I know it from here on is sketchy and, still, largely inexplicable.
To say the marriage was a failure isn�t to do either of them, or the institution, justice. Even before leaving the Register Office -- my mother�s choice, like the minimal catering -- my father real-ized his mistake. My mother was frugal and pessimistic. My father�s extravagance and optimism only made her worse.
By the end of 1961, when I was born, they had moved into their own home. My father�s tailoring business was doing well and he had opened a second shop in the shabby Elephant and Castle neighborhood south of the Thames. Incomprehensibly, it was at this stage that he started his shady business dealings.
I was always very close to my father, much more so than to my mother, who had never wanted children. My father sometimes took me with him to work. I loved sitting on his oak desk as he measured men for suits. Things changed though. Strange men started entering the shop. My father would take them into a back room, leaving me alone, and I would hear shouting. I didn�t see him making suits any longer. It was all talk and telephone calls and meetings in subterranean car parks or night clubs, an underground world which terrified me.
His fraud trial, at the Old Bailey, dragged on for months. When he was sentenced, my sister and I were told he�d be going away for a very long time and that he loved us. I don�t know if my parents really thought they were fooling us. I knew exactly what was going on.
He was in and out of jail for the next 20 years. The first time he came out, he and my mother fought terribly. He was penniless and desperate. It was not long before he was rearrested and sent to jail again. My sister and I were heartbroken. Meanwhile, my mother grew more violent and crazy, foraging for food in garbage bins, not washing or dressing. I spent most of my spare time in libraries, worked in a Cypriot-owned dress factory at weekends, and then went to study German at Bristol University.
I have never returned to the house in Wembley in which I grew up and where my mother still lives. After I went to university my sister was taken in by the headmaster of her school and lived with his family. We had been inseparable as children, choosing to sleep together in the same room, sometimes in the same bed.
My father wrote us letters. Not many, though before I left for university I found a plastic bag full of unopened letters addressed to us which my mother had hidden. As soon as I�d saved the money from my factory earnings to pay the fare, my sister and I visited my dad in jail. We were 7 and 12 respectively.
On our first visit we were allocated a "private" room -- four prison wardens and us. We crossed the interminably long room to where he was sitting at a table beside a radiator. It had been months since we�d seen him. He looked diminished in his striped clothes. As we sat down, he put his hands up to his face, without a sound or shudder, and I watched the tears trickle through his fingers. From that moment on, in the enormous room with the gurgling radiator, the years stretching ahead, my sister by my side, I felt my whole family depended on me alone.
IT WASN�T EASY IN VIENNA, WHERE WE VISITED MY father�s old home and his father�s leather-goods warehouse. Although he joked with waiters and our driver in perfect Viennese vernacular, he was neither bitter nor nostalgic. He was English, Jewish even, but no longer Austrian.
My father�s willingness to talk about his childhood, army days and marriage didn�t surprise me. These are safe topics that do not require self-analysis. It was almost as if he were hoping that these events would explain his later misdemeanors, that I would turn off the camera and breathe a sigh of relief. But they don�t.
He is a proud and loving grandfather. He dotes on Felix. Having become a father again in his mid-60s, he has a new daughter, my half-sister. I hope these relationships, by his admission the first meaningful relationships in his life, will lead to his feeling accepted and safe enough to allow us closer to him.
My father knows little about me. He knows I write, edit and live in Jerusalem. What he doesn�t know, and has never asked, is how I feel and why I do these things. The day he asks why I want to make a documentary about him is the day our relationship can begin in earnest.
(March 11, 2002)
Jewish World
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