I puzzle over the potential acuteness of looking, how we can really observe the most microscopic details at times. Taking in the tracery of veins on the underside of a leaf. Waiting for a friend in a crowded square and being able to recognise them hundreds of yards away, long before their face becomes visible. It must be the subconscious awareness of the way that she swings her arms when she walks. The thousand minute details we register when we love somebody, or when we are curious. But do we look as keenly at the city?
I don’t have any difficulties distinguishing a beech tree from an oak, or identifying a barn owl’s moth-like, flapping flight at dusk, but can I name the streets in London where the hedge funds are based? Or do I know what really happens in the Futures Exchange, or the difference between arbitrage, convergence trading and derivatives? All aspects of the financial world which have an enormous impact on our lives, yet which many of us have little real knowledge of at all.
Some years ago, on my way home, I got off the bus at Liverpool Street. I was trying to find a place that might repair my leather rucksack, an old-fashioned kiosk somewhere, and I thought of the little covered arcade that runs between Liverpool Street itself and Broad Street. There was a key-cutting place but they didn’t do repairs and suggested somewhere else. I then walked across the ‘Plaza’ as it’s rather grandly called – the concrete square outside the front of the station, bordered on one side by an American burger chain. And suddenly I stopped, because a small monument had been installed there. The figure was a girl of around ten years old, a headband, sandals, standing awkwardly, a disconcerting stare, and around her in a glass case fragments of a life left behind – notes in a diary, an empty spectacles case, small black-and-white photographs showing grandparents, brothers. In this place of rushing for trains it seemed incongruous, an intervention of intimacy into a zone of speed and commerce. I searched for a title, an explanation, and eventually found a small plaque on the wall of the station behind:
FÜR DAS KIND [‘FOR THE CHILD’]
BY FLOR KENT
IN DEEP GRATITUDE TO THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED KINGDOM FOR SAVING THE LIVES OF 10,000 CHILDREN WHO FLED TO THIS COUNTRY FROM NAZI PERSECUTION ON THE KINDERTRANSPORTS IN 1938–39
‘WHOSOEVER RESCUES A SINGLE SOUL IS CREDITED AS THOUGH THEY HAD SAVED THE WHOLE WORLD’
DEDICATED BY THE CENTRAL BRITISH FUND FOR WORLD JEWISH RELIEF
16 SEPTEMBER 2003
And reading this I remembered the epiphany that the elderly Jacques Austerlitz has in the old waiting room at Liverpool Street station:
And for the first time in as far back as I can remember I recollected myself as a small child, at the moment when I realised that it must have been to this same waiting room I had come on my arrival in England over half a century ago … I felt something rending within me, and a sense of shame and sorrow, or perhaps something quite different, something inexpressible because we have no words for it, just as I had no words all those years ago when the two strangers came over to me speaking a language I did not understand. All I do know is that when I saw the boy sitting on the bench I became aware … of the destructive effect on me of my desolation through all those past years, and a terrible weariness overcame me at the idea that I had never really been alive … I have no idea how long I stood in the waiting room … I realised then … how little practice I had in using my memory, and conversely, how hard I must always have tried to recollect as little as possible, avoiding everything which related in any way to my unknown past.
I looked at every detail of the memorial – trying to decipher the writing in the notebooks, take in every element of the photographs. I was very moved by the reality of these objects, far from the usual style of generic representation in such things.fn1 And, possibly because of this, I sat down by the memorial, and it was only then that I noticed the logo of the Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) looming on a building behind. I walked over and found that it was UBS’s European headquarters, an unremarkable office block put up in the major redevelopment at Broadgate in the late 1980s. UBS, despite its problems since the financial crash of 2008, is still one of Europe’s largest banks, with its most recent quarterly profits putting it in the top dozen European banking corporations. But what intrigued me most was the proximity of the Kindertransport memorial to the UBS headquarters, because, some years earlier, a security guard in Switzerland had made a startling discovery …
*
On 8 January 1997, Christoph Meili, a twenty-eight-year-old security guard, begins his evening shift at UBS’s Swiss headquarters at Bahnhofstrasse 45 in Zurich. He’s worked there for the previous eighteen months, and he’s got to know the building very well. He starts his rounds that evening and notices something very curious, which he hasn’t seen before, in the shredding room. There are two trolleys filled, in fact overflowing, with very old documents and books awaiting shredding. For a few minutes he continues his rounds, but he’s still thinking about what he’s seen, something troubles him, an instinct that makes him pause. There’s been much recent discussion in the news about how victims of Nazism have been unable to claim back assets in Switzerland because of financial records being ‘lost’. So he decides to return to the shredding room to look at these books in more detail. This is what he finds:
I saw two thick black-bound books, about A3 size, which had debit and credit columns. The years 1945–1965 was written on the cover. I opened one of the books and saw entries starting February 1945. Many German chemical companies. At that point, I recognized immediately that the entries starting February 1945 were still during World War II since there were many German firms, I looked at some of the entries more closely. I saw companies with names like: Lack und Farbenfabriken (IG Farben) Seifenfabriken, Bayerische Sodafabrik (BASF), etc…. I found many entries in the real estate column for 1930–1945. Additional entries were made there regarding bankruptcy auctions. The above books were divided in about five different categories: bonds, stocks, miscellaneous, real estate. Because of the sensitive dates, I ripped out the entire real estate part from both books. I replaced the books so that no one would notice anything. I brought the real estate pages and a book dated 1920–1926 to my locker in two trips. Finished my job dutifully and took the real estate pages home with me. There I inspected them with great curiosity.fn2
Meili lays out the pages on his kitchen table when he gets home. He wakes his wife Giuseppina, who is also knowledgeable about history. And the more they study the papers, the more they realise the importance of these documents. Some are holding accounts for German companies which had worked hand-in-hand with Nazism, some even directly profiting from slave labour and extermination (such as IG Farben, Degussa and Degesch). Towards the end of the war corporate assets had been transferred to Swiss banks in an attempt to evade Allied confiscation. Other documents relate to the forced sale of real estate in Berlin – after the Nazis came to power they compelled Jews to sell property and other assets at well below the market rate. And here, in black and white, handwritten in fountain pen, in UBS bank ledgers, is evidence of all of these crimes. Meili and his wife are both aware that only a few weeks earlier the Swiss government had established a historical commission to investigate Swiss collusion with Nazism,fn3 and the legislation included an order specifically forbidding destruction of any documents from this period. Christoph and Giuseppina need time to think. They take the dog for a walk, and consider their options. Competing voices fight in their heads – ‘It’s not your responsibility, this is serious, take them back’ – but another one, a stronger voice, prevails, compelling them to make these documents public.