Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War by Amanda Vaill Read Free Book Online Page A

money or cigarettes from acquaintances, shoplifting the occasional loaf of bread or tin of sardines, or making do with sugar dissolved in water, a trick he’d learned in his lean times in Berlin. That was when the Crédit Municipal pawnshop came in handy—he used to say he’d left his camera “chez ma tante”; when the money from his “aunt,” the pawnbroker, ran out he’d simply slip out of whatever cheap Left Bank hotel room he’d been calling home for the past few months (chronically behind on the rent, but with such charming excuses to the proprietor) and leave his few belongings behind, never to return.
    Despite his poverty, he was proud; even if he had to ask for a handout he did it as if it didn’t matter whether he got it or not. “Why work at little things that bring no money?” he’d say, scornfully. “Wait for the big things, the big moment you can sell.” When he did make money there would be drinks for everyone at the Dôme, at the crossroads of the Boulevard Montparnasse and the Boulevard Raspail—La Coupole, just down the street, was too expensive; or dinner at La Diamenterie, the Middle Eastern restaurant on the rue Lafayette. For by this time he had a group of pals, copains , that included the refugee Pole David Szymin, a chess-playing staff photographer for the Communist weekly paper Regards , whom everyone called Chim; his own boyhood friend from Budapest, Geza Korvin Karpathi; and Henri Cartier-Bresson, the son of a prosperous Normandy textile merchant, who’d started out to be a painter before being seduced by photography.
    Then, one day, there was Gerda, or Gerta, as she spelled it then: a petite green-eyed girl with artfully arched eyebrows and hennaed hair cut short like a boy’s and a sharp little face—“like a fox that is going to play a trick on you,” said a friend of his later. He’d met her through her roommate, a German secretary named Ruth Cerf, whom he’d asked to pose for some advertising photos he was shooting. Cerf, put off by his scruffy appearance— I’m not going anywhere alone with this guy , she told herself; he looks like a tramp —had brought Gerda with her as a chaperone; to Cerf’s surprise, the chaperone and the scruffy photographer hit it off immediately.
    They had nothing, and everything, in common. Like him, she was Jewish—but her father, a Pole named Heinrich Pohorylle, was a prosperous egg merchant in Stuttgart, not an improvident Hungarian dressmaker. She’d been expensively educated, following gymnasium with a fancy Swiss finishing school, where she learned French, English, and the art of making influential friends; then business college, where she took Spanish and typing. Smart, vivacious, ambitious, and chic—as a teenager she’d always worn high heels to her classes, even when on a field trip to Lake Constance—she was already skilled at keeping several men on a string simultaneously. While still in school she’d become engaged to a wealthy thirty-five-year-old cotton trader, then disengaged when she got involved with a charismatic Marxist medical student, Georg Kuritzkes, a member of the German Socialist Workers’ Party, or SAP (Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei). Kuritzkes introduced her to his crowd of committed young SAP activists, among them a strong-jawed youth named Herbert Frahm, who would later change his name to Willy Brandt; and one of the SAP boys—another medical student, Willi Chardack—also fell for her. “I just have to wiggle my little finger to have five or six guys after me,” she wrote to a friend, amusedly. “I’m continually amazed that it’s possible to be in love with two men at the same time—but I’d be an idiot to wonder why.”
    She and André Friedmann had both had brushes with the fascist police, too; and like him she’d refused to be cowed by the experience. Held in prison for two weeks after helping to write, edit, and distribute anti-Nazi leaflets before the 1933 German parliamentary elections,