Memories Of Victor
Lazlo-With The 75th Anniversary Of Ingrid Bergman And Humphrey
Bogart’s “Casablanca” In Mind
By Bradley Davis
[For those in America
who do not know, or have forgotten, the name Victor Lazlo who died on January
20, 1989 he was a living legend during World War II as the key leader of the
armed civilian resistance to the Nazi juggernaut that tried to permanently roll
over Europe. First in his native Czechoslovakia where he stood in the main
square attempting to rally Czech resistance as the Germans crossed the border
to “claim” what they saw as their historic hinterlands. Hardly the first crew
to run that argument to the ground before the wrath of the risen people put
paid to that notion. Later after the Germans had captured Lazlo and put him in
concentration camps he became one of the last hopes in those dark days for the
average occupied European when he repeatedly escaped from the Nazi barbed wire
enclaves to fight another day. That despite repeated German High Command
announcements complete with photographs that the brave man was dead. Only to
appear again and again until even the Germans saw it was useless to make an
example of Lazlo once he made his way to Casablanca along with a very much
younger woman companion, Ilsa, to forge a working resistance underground
network to jam up the Germans as best they could.
Strangely Lazlo came
from a very well-to- do family who had done well in the munitions business
(which the Nazis took over with every hand once they crushed benighted
Czechoslovakia) and could have easily gotten out of Prague and into London or
Paris before all hell broke loose. But the times demanded “no heads in the
sand” and so some layers of society whom one would not expect to dirty their
hands with the work usually left to the plebian masses found a calling. For a
short time after World War II there were several statues dedicated to Lazlo’s
service in Prague and other Czech towns, a few in other grateful liberated
countries too, which were taken down during the Soviet period. They were
eventually restored well after 1989 too late for Lazlo to bask in his
well-deserved accolades.
Lazlo’s death prompted
some of those of his comrades still alive, a dwindling number as the actuarial
tables grind away, to write about their heroic leader. One whose article I had
seen in the New York Gazette I
contacted at the time through a friend who worked at the paper. His name
Christian Berger, Danish by birth and subsequently a naturalized American
citizen. He had been part of Lazlo’s underground operation and had actually
helped get Lazlo and Ilsa out of Casablanca to continue his work without having
to look over his shoulder every minute for some dastardly pro-Nazi assassin
looking to get a name for himself.
This Casablanca period
in Lazlo’s exploits has been the subject of some differences among those who
have written extensively about the armed civilian resistance during the war.
About those who fought the Nazis and their various national indigenous allies
as best they could. The main bone of contention in the matter is who actually
set the wheels in motion to get Lazlo out of Casablanca. During the war it was
always, correctly it seems, assumed that the local branch of Lazlo’s
operation-the Knights Templar- got him out.
Immediately after the
war though an American ex-patriate, Rick Blaine, who during the war and for
many years after ran a gin joint in the Casbah, Rick’s Café Americian, claimed
that as a gesture of love for Ilsa, who was actually Lazlo’s wife which they
were keeping quiet for security reasons and to protect Ilsa if the Germans found
out their real relationship, gave the couple a pair of “letters of transit” to
get on the nightly midnight plane to neutral Lisbon. No such documents were
ever found in any archive or file. The failure to not find the missing
documents would not have been conclusive since in wartime all kinds of regular
business are churned up and lost in movements and withdrawals but would have
helped Blaine’s case immensely. For years after the war Lazlo, long after Ilsa
had left him for an English nobleman and a country estate and not having seen
Rick since 1941, insisted that there were no letters of transit and while not
calling Rick Blaine a liar he always claimed the local Knight Templars were the
agents through which he escaped.
Since Lazlo’s death the
Rick allegations have resurfaced and have had some champions, romantic fools
mostly, who have bought into that long ago gesture of love business. The
following is Christian Berger’s take on the matter from his perspective as the
leader of the local ex-pat resistance which found itself stranded in Casablanca
during those troubled times. Bradley Davis]
*******
Sure I knew Victor
Lazlo, the great Czech World War II anti-fascist liberation leader, who passed
away the other day at 91, the day George H.W. Bush was sworn in as President of
the United States here in America. I first met him in Casablanca, down in
Morocco, the part that the French, the Vichy French, had control of not the
Spanish part. In those days, the days when one scourge Adolph Hitler, his
minions, and his tanks were making mincemeat of Europe I, Christian Berger,
having barely escaped with my life from my native Denmark got to Casablanca
through the underground network that Victor Lazlo was the key man setting up
once the night of the long knives set in over the benighted continent.
I have been a life-long
working man, a dock-worker, a union man with the ILA in Copenhagen and Newark,
New Jersey here in America who had been then a part of a small socialist
resistance unit who had as the Nazis came waltzing into Denmark blown up as
many tunnels and other impediments as possible to slow down their inevitable
march. My, our, escape was a close thing since I, we, had to get through
France, the southern part that was controlled by Vichy, by those damned French
collaborators with the Nazi Germany regime which had set itself up in fallen
Paris with papers that were not too good. Papers that claimed I was from the
Ukraine since Russia was in some kind of devil’s pact with Hitler at the time.
The customs officers at Marseilles had a hard time believing I was a Slav what
with me looking like the map of Copenhagen and talking like some Nordic skier
seen in the movies in one of those sports films in the mountains which dealt
mainly with love interests back in the 1930s. I got through okay, took a
derelict freighter across the Mediterranean through Algiers (again with papers
problems but since I had been stamped by French officials in Marseilles less
so) and down to Casablanca where I was to await orders to either head to
America via the midnight plane to Lisbon, the only safe neutral spot at that
point, and then across the Atlantic to
raise funds from among the Scandinavians sprouted throughout the Midwest or
head back to Vichy France with some others stranded in Casablanca and join the
French resistance which was beginning to be organized (mainly then by loosely
affiliated individuals and later by the Communists after Hitler turned the
tables on “Uncle Joe” Stalin and did a massive invasion of Russia).
My
cover strange as it seemed given my real background in Casablanca was as a
jeweler since we needed to be able to move money without having the fucking
French, fucking Louie the corrupt Captain of the [A1] [A2] [A3] [A4] [A5] coppers
looking over our shoulders every minute. An out of the suitcase seller was my
cover but mostly I was a buyer of high-priced gems at a fraction of the price
since anybody who made it to that sullen town needed plenty of dough to not be
condemned to die in the damn place. I was looked at as either a bastard for
robbing the unfortunates who wound up there or a savior for giving that last
bit of money they needed to make arrangements to get out of that hellhole. That
made me look like the real thing as people either enjoyed my company or avoided
me like some dreaded medieval plague.
I
was in those days just hanging out in Casablanca awaiting orders about which
way I was heading, hanging out mostly at Rick’s Café Americian where every
transient exile went to do any kind of transaction, legal or illegal, or just
to get the sand out of their mouths with some of Rick’s high-end liquor which
he obtained on the international black market which had its heyday then for
quality goods. I did a little work in that market as well to strengthen my
cover and met some strange guys, a guy like Santo Diaz who would have stolen
the shirt off your back and sold it back to you for twice what you paid for if
the weather was too hot or too cold to go bare-chested but who had so many
connections that I would have paid the price if he had taken my shirt. Some of
the more bewildered and younger transients came just to dance and listen to a
guy, a black guy everybody called Sam but whose real name was Dooley something,
sorry I forgot his last name, play all the current Tin Pan Alley tunes on his
piano (accompanied by a pretty good back-up band). Everybody went crazy over
his rendition of If I Didn’t Care
although Rick would make sure he played I’ll
Get By every set although he once told me he hated the damn song thought it
was pretty corny and not well-written ne but Rick was the boss and so the damn
thing got played every set (the customers apparently once they got a load on
didn’t know he played the song three times a night. As least I never heard
anybody complain on the matter).
I
will mention this Rick, Rick Blaine, originally from New York City in America I
believe he said when I asked one time when he offered to buy me a drink after
buying some jewels from one of his lady friends, Rita, a luscious redhead, whom
he had picked up in Senor Ferrara’s whorehouse in the Casbah where he stocked
plenty of loose European women for the local wealthy trade who seemed to have
tired of their own kind and whom he
wished to get rid of on the next flight to Lisbon. (The jewels which he had bought from me in the
first place when his love was in fresh bloom as he expressed it to me upon
purchase and which I had gotten on the black market and given him a good price
on to help establish myself as a regular at Ricks’. Tiring of redhead and
blondes, brunettes too was a luxury that Rick could afford with the proceeds
from his gambling racket and letting his place be used by a guy named Frenchie for
his pimping transactions. Yeah, Rick was that kind of guy even then.)
Right now though I want
to mention the first news I had heard that made me think we might win against
that bastard Hitler and his henchmen like General Petain who was running Vichy
France. Like I said I belonged to the same resistance organization that Victor
Lazlo had set up after the Germans occupied Czechoslovakia-The Knight Templars
was our code name and an old time Celtic cross our means of identifying each
other. Mine I had placed in a ring that I would take out occasionally and look
at as my own possession, so people, so the local Vichy cops, the swine, would
not think to look there. Lazlo was so much the public face of the organization
that when the Germans captured him the morale of the organization sank like a
stone. Then we would hear that he had escaped, usually with the help of local
Knights Templars.
A few times the Germans
claimed they had killed him and then he would be sighted again. A real old-time
romantic revolutionary, old school no question even though he had been brought
up in a very upper middle class bourgeois family. The last time we heard he was
killed we thought that really was the end. Then one day out of the blue we got
news that Lazlo was not only not dead but had escaped again and was heading to
Casablanca. Elated we prepared for his arrival. That meant that the local
organization that I had put together would have to insure that Victor Lazlo was
able to get out of Casablanca and get to Lisbon and head to London or New York
depending on what we could do for him.
One night bold as we
figured him to be Lazlo walked into Rick’s, walked in with the Nordic goddess,
a Swede from her looks, a woman who I would later find out whose name was Ilsa,
Ilsa Lund, whom he was either married to (privately) or was shacked up with. In
any case a good looking dame although quite a bit younger that Lazlo. Lazlo by
the way was a tall, kind of thin good-looking guy who always dressed like he
had just come out of a men’s magazine. Everything about him spoke of coolness
under pressure and strong nerves. I would not say that he was a lady’s man,
more of a man’s man but not a few femmes in Casablanca threw glances his way so
he must have appealed to a certain kind of woman. Frankly this Ilsa didn’t seem
his type but she must have had her charms and some kind of unknown back story
to be attached to his arm coming half way across Europe hunted in every
quarter.
Now Rick’s was not only
the favorite of the transients looking for something but also the favorite
watering hole of the Germans assigned to watch over the local Vichy government
and the Vichy cops and bureaucrats, especially Louie, everybody called him
Louie except his men, the Captain of the cops. Cool as a cucumber Lazlo walked
in, sat at a ringside table ordered a couple of drinks, martinis I think, for
himself and his lady friend and checked things out. I knew at once he was
looking for me. Although we had never met I knew he would have known that the
local organization existed and that somebody would contact him once he was
safely in Casablanca. Once I spotted him I went over and showed him my ring. We
were in business, the business of getting him to Lisbon and whatever future
work would come his way. Our relationship for the short time we were together
then was cordial and he displayed no class superiority like some of the
unattached intellectual French resistance fighters did. (Lazlo and I met a few
times after the war when he came to America after Ilsa had left him from that
British title and estate and after the fall of Czechoslovakia to pro-Soviet
elements who had given him the options-exile or jail.)
I have read different
stories over time about how some so-called letters of transit were what got
Lazlo and his Ilsa out of Casablanca in a nick of time. I have heard that Rick,
Rick Blaine, a guy who stuck his neck out for nobody somehow was holding them
for a little two-bit con man named Peter Lorre who got caught and Rick was
going to use them himself but gave them to Lazlo for him and Ilsa to get out of
town as a gesture to love. Bullshit, excuse my Danish-etched English. Never
happened, somebody must have been at the hashish pipe too long. But the story,
stories, have persisted to this day and even the New York Times in its obituary for Lazlo mentioned that hoary tale
as if it was the real deal. So it is worth going into before I tell what really
got Lazlo and Ilsa out of Casablanca and allowed him to lead the freedom
fighters of Europe against the night-takers.
According to the
stories, I will use the story the Times
used since in its particulars it gives most of the current view that has been
going around forever. Rick, who passed away in the mid-1970s still stuck in
Casablanca selling hashish to the locals in collaboration with a couple of
unsavory characters in the Casbah when Rick’s Café went to seed after the war,
knew this Ilsa, this Ilsa Lund who was travelling with Lazlo, in Paris before
the war started. The stories mainly agree that they had some kind of torrent
affair, some serious time under the sheets after Rick had escaped from Spain
once Madrid fell in 1939.
Supposedly Rick had been
at one time in the International Brigades helping the Loyalists defend the
Republic against the military machine of General Franco who was aided in no
small way by the Germans. Later when the Brigades were withdrawn he stayed on
as a free agent until Madrid fell. I had
a chance later after the war to check out what Rick had done exactly in Spain,
or if he had even been there with some guys I met from the Abraham Lincoln
Battalion of the 15th Brigade, the American section. I could never
get anything to prove he was, or was not, there but since everybody used
aliases anyway I let it ride. I will say that Rick never let anybody believe
otherwise than that he had been with the good guys but he didn’t talk about it
much one way or the other. Ran his saloon business he called it and never let
on about this torrid affair with Ilsa as the cause of his brooding many nights
from what his head waiter, Charles, told me. Drank by himself stupid alone or
with some whore or princess who needed dough to flee to Lisbon. Always
discarded them or shipped them off to Louie when he was done with them.
Everything changed when
Ilsa came walking in hand and hand with Lazlo. You could feel the tension in
the air when Rick spotted her after being told Lazlo was in the café. Even
sitting at the bar later waiting for Lazlo to come and get the low-down on the
local situation from me I could see that Ilsa and Rick had had a big thing in Paris.
Could see too that it was not Rick who walked away from her. But I could also
see, knowing Scandinavian women a little that Ilsa would not be found wanting
for company, would always find a safe haven even hanging around with a guy like
Victor Lazlo. I won’t say she was a whore, although in a tight spot she might
have been a high class call girl to make ends meet. But that look, that pasted
innocent look which certain jaded women can put on or take off like their daily
make-up told of a few dark secrets that somebody less worldly than Lazlo (or
Rick for that matter) would have gone screaming into the night over. But all of
that is sheer speculation on my part about her past and it may have all come to
being nothing like that. She didn’t need that, need to play the virgin whore since
guys would be more than happy to give her whatever she wanted for a little
attention, maybe a little loyalty too. But I insist to this day her rose-petal
pure and simple young woman was a façade, was a game she played to insure her
own future. Whatever had broken up her and Rick in Paris didn’t seem to have
touched her at all. Just another affair and move on. That’s the best way that I
can explain it.
You would have had to
have been there to see her effect on men, tough men like Rick and Lazlo to get
a real feel for what was driving everybody crazy. (I will admit that one time
when she was waiting at the bar for Lazlo to show after a meeting and I was
sitting a few seats down that her wayward smile my way and that scent she wore,
gardenia, something like that had me going too since I had left my Danja back
in Denmark and had not been with a woman for a while.) All I know for sure was
that she was not leaving Casablanca alone and without resources.
That part was real
enough. What was not real and nobody ever to my knowledge ever produced any
documents which would pass muster, would not fool even a gullible U.S. customs
inspector were those so-called letters of transit. Of course if they had
existed then many things would have made sense, or more sense. You have to
understand how desperate people were who were able to get to Casablanca in
those days and who either by lack of resources or no luck looked like they were
never going to get out of there, were going to as Rick once said to Charles as
I overheard a conversation between them “die” there. (There is a certain irony
in the fact that he did die there pretty wealthy from what I heard about his
take on the drug trade and a little off-hand pimping of the local Casbah girls).
To hear about “no hassle” just sign your name documents fired many an
imagination. Made people believe in what was nothing but thin air.
The whole thing was a
concoction made up by this Peter Lorre, a two-bit con man, a German ex-pat of
some sort, probably saw no benefit to himself to stay in Germany after 1933
since while Hitler had an assortment of hangers-on, flaks, devotees, and
bone-crushers two-bit non-ideological con men were being run out of town and
fast. Hell he could hardly pay his bar
tab never mind his rent. Borrowed money off of me (with interest which I never
got as it turned out nor payment one on the loan) to get some stuff out of
hock. He took advantage of the news, the real news, that two German officers
had been killed on their way to Casablanca and figured that he could make a
“killing” maybe several, by getting money upfront from those desperate people stranded
and running out of hope by saying he had some fool-proof documents which real
letters of transit would be no question about that. Of course this idea fizzled
when Louie to impress the German officers watching the henhouse decided that
Lorre was the perfect guy to take the fall for the killing of the two Germans.
He staged a big raid at Rick’s one night for just that purpose, just to impress
this bigwig Major Strasser nothing but a strutting fool if you asked me. They
found Lorre out in the sand about twenty kilometers from the Casbah a few weeks
later with two slugs to the head.
Funny Lorre just before
the end in the café had passed a couple of crude documents that he called the
letters of transit to Rick from what I heard for safekeeping. Those documents
were of the crudest sort that even a half-wit would have been able to see that
they were nothing but forgeries and bad ones at that. Would make the possessor
who tried to use them prime bait for the concentration camps the Germans were
setting up all over occupied Europe.
Rick was slick though,
or maybe better love sick since he never let on at the time that Lorre had
conveyed the “documents” to him or that he knew that they were crudely forged
documents. So as far as anybody in Casablanca knew, or wanted to know, like I
said they were still around town. Somehow Lazlo found out that Rick had these
documents, or some documents and tried to bargain Ilsa, or rather Ilsa’s safe
passage out of Casablanca for some sum of dough to be forwarded later. No sale
even though while they were discussing the matter Rick let on about the torrid
affair in Paris and Lazlo, eternally a European sophisticate, brushed it off as
so much collateral damage of war. Lazlo probably knew better than anybody the
slightly sluttish side of Ilsa when she wanted something so he probably went to
Rick first before she made her charge at the love sick guy.
Which came the next
night while Victor and seemingly half the foreigners in town, including me were
at a meeting to plan his escape and our tasks after he left. (I was to go to
Europe to join the resistance and did not get to America until a few years
after the war when I married an American citizen whom I met in Paris right
after Liberation day. I never saw Danja again after I fled Denmark and so do
not know what happened to her after the fall).
Ilsa must have really
given Rick the business, the whole pitch since when she left his room all
disheveled she had made a promise to go away with Rick and forget about Lazlo. Yes,
I think I was right that she knew all the arts, probably gave him a blow job to
seal the deal since most guys will buckle under if they have some gal “play the
flute” for them. Since he had nothing to get out of Casablanca with Rick
stalled her as long as he could until the Germans, using Louie as a front man,
were ready to grab Lazlo. It was a close thing. When Rick came up empty he
would wind up spending many lonely nights thinking about Paris and that last
night up in his room with her because Ilsa was back in Victor’s fold when
things were getting dicey. So much for the Rick legend which he pursued
mercilessly I understand after the war when he claimed that that without him and
those so-called letters of transit Lazlo would have been a goner, and by
implication that Europe would still be under the Nazi boot heel.
The real story which I
can tell now that Victor Lazlo is in his honored grave, Rick is long gone to
his rather shabby grave and Ilsa ever since a couple of years after the war is
the Countess of Kent and not bothered by anything these days since she suffers
from a series of mysterious diseases. The long and short of it was when that
bastard Major Strasser ordered Louie to round up Lazlo with or without Ilsa we,
the local branch of the Knights Templar, kidnapped the Major and executed him
out in the desert not far from where Lorre had been found earlier. We then held
Louie at gunpoint while we ordered him to clear the airport and allow Lazlo and
Ilsa to board the late night plane to Lisbon. No big mystery just what
freedom-fighters did when they had to face the facts of life at any given
moment. The rest is so much thin air. RIP, Victor Lazlo, RIP.
