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Editor's Note: Each paragraph has been numbered in sequential order for easy reference.
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Uncle Harry's Secret
By LUCRETIA BINGHAM
May 14,
2000
"Whomever saves one life saves the world entire."-- From the Talmud
(1-1) For fifty years, the package sat hidden in a dusty, cobwebbed linen closet tucked behind the center chimney of the family's crumbling pre-Revolutionary Connecticut house. The package held documents, passport photos, journals and letters of thanks, some from famous people such as Marc Chagall and Thomas Mann, others from unknown political and Jewish refugees Harry had saved from the Nazi Holocaust.
(1-2) My Uncle Harry, Hiram Bingham IV, had never talked of his heroic deeds.
(1-3) Not even his children knew the extent of his rescues nor that, by now, some 6,000 descendants of the original people he had rescued were alive because he was willing to disobey his superiors.
In an
extraordinary and rare old photograph from the private
collection of the Bingham family, Hiram Bingham reviews
visa documents in his office in Marseilles for Lion
Feuchtwanger and his wife, just released from a French
concentration camp. Feuchtwanger, a best-selling
anti-Nazi German author, and his wife, Marta, were among
the hundreds whom Bingham, in his role as vice consul in
Marseilles, helped escape to safety.
(1-4) For fifty years, his heroic deeds went not only unheralded,
but unacknowledged. Six years ago, after the death of both his
parents, my cousin Bill Bingham was poking around in that dark
closet behind the fireplace Surrounded by the detritus of a large
family - bits of old board games, scattered photographs, yellowing
drawings brought home by proud first-graders - Bill found that
cache of secret documents, tightly bound with hay baling wire and
tape.
(1-5) It was to start him on a journey of discovery about his father's heroic past. As the rest of us in the family began to accompany him on that journey, we were stunned to discover the extent of Harry's complicity in saving people from the Holocaust. I learned that this man I had loved, and who, because of his dogmatic views, had often infuriated me, was a hero.
(1-6) In 1987, the last year of his life, before I knew much about this buried history, I had an impulse to record a conversation with Uncle Harry. In the living room of his house in Salem, he sat in a tattered chair by the fireplace, behind which his secrets were hidden, and talked to me of many things. As always, even if the cuffs were threadbare, and the jacket screamed for dry-cleaning, he was formally dressed. His once athletic body was withered, his face thin and drawn, but his gaze still burned with intensity, his posture was erect, his legs were crossed with an elegant insouciance, and his finger poked the air with authority.
(1-7) He told me of how he was in the last stage of his life, the age of Pluto, where life no longer had the heat of the sun, and the dead began to beckon.
(1-8) He told me that he had fled the Foreign Service because he was passed over again and again for promotion. Around him, the house showed signs of a proud poverty. In an effort to contain the escaping horsehair, he had re-covered the chair in which he was sitting with a staple gun. It was a clumsy effort but perhaps his failing eyes did not see the large staples nor the dust balls in the corners or the fly-specked glass in the windows, nor the piles of papers scattered everywhere in the house as if a holocaust wind had spread them to the far corners of his domestic world.
(1-9) Behind him on the mantelpiece was a picture of his wife Rose as a young woman, dressed in the elegant satin gown in which she had been presented to the Queen of England. Forty years before, Harry and Rose had retreated to this Connecticut family homestead, a house surrounded by 3,000 acres of family land.
"Harry said he had
entered the last stage of his life, where life no longer
held the heat of the sun, and the dead had begun to
beckon."
(1-10) My parents lived two pastures away; another brother just
up through the woods; a third uncle up on a hill; and overlooking
the whole Bingham valley was the family retreat, the Camp, where
my Grandmother Alfreda held court in the summer. My Aunt Kath
often quipped that the valley should be rechristened "Wombsville."
There were 29 of us Bingham first cousins born to seven Bingham
sons. We are more a tribe than a family. And we all look alike
with long legs, high cheekbones and an intense manner. We are
often in the newspaper. My grandfather was a famous explorer. My
Uncle Jack was an influential congressman from the Bronx. My first
cousin David, one of Harry's children, has often run for political
office in Connecticut. My cousin Stevie became a political refugee
during the '70s, returning after 13 years in hiding to face and be
acquitted of murder charges.
(1-11) In 1946, it was back to Salem that Harry had fled to lick his wounds from, as he put it to me, his "humiliating" resignation from the foreign service.
(1-12) Instead of a hero's welcome, Harry and Rose became the brunt of jokes from gossiping sisters-in-law. Even Harry's own mother made patronizing comments about his "failure" in the state department. "Poor Harry!" she would shake her head and smile knowingly, in an indulgent but not altogether loving way. As a child, under strict orders to behave well during interminable teas with my grandmother and others, I squirmed when she made fun of Harry.
(1-13) Harry never defended himself. He always maintained a silent reserve on the subject, his dignity always intact. He never divulged the details of the clandestine escapes he had planned, and, in fact, rarely talked of what had led to his expulsion from the Foreign Service. The whole subject evoked such pain for both Harry and Rose that, according to their son John, it became "unmentionable."
(1-14) Harry's face always had a sad, almost frozen, quality that I never understood until I delved into this story.
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