Legacy of War by Smith Wilbur & Churchill David

Author:Smith, Wilbur & Churchill, David [Smith, Wilbur & Churchill, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical, Adventure, thriller
ISBN: 9781838772253
Amazon: B08DRMGZW9
Goodreads: 54789380
Publisher: Zaffre
Published: 2021-04-15T07:00:00+00:00

In his role as the businessman Michel Schultz, von Meerbach did not turn away customers he suspected of being Jewish. That would only arouse suspicion. But he made a point of not dealing with them personally. When he heard that a Dr Jonathan Goldsmith had brought a Jaguar XK120 drophead coupé in for a tune-up and had asked to speak to him personally about improvements that might be made to the car’s performance, von Meerbach was cautious. ‘Goldsmith’ was an English word. But it could easily be an Anglicisation of the Jewish surname ‘Goldschmidt’.

‘Where is he?’ he asked the mechanic who had delivered the message.

The mechanic led von Meerbach to the window, from which his upstairs office looked down on his works’ shop floor. He pointed and said, ‘That one.’

Von Meerbach saw a tall blond man in his early thirties, wearing flannel trousers and a tweed jacket, with a silk cravat around his neck, tucked into a pale blue shirt. He was standing beside a long, low, open-topped sports car, painted in British racing green. He did not look like any Jew von Meerbach had ever met. But he did look exactly like an English gentleman.

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Tell him I will be down in two minutes.’

Von Meerbach was correct in part of his assessment. Jonathan Goldsmith carried a British passport. He spoke the King’s English in the manner he had acquired at Rugby, one of the country’s most eminent public boarding schools, where the game of rugby football, so beloved by South Africa’s Afrikaner populations, had been invented. He had studied medicine at Cambridge University before qualifying as a doctor at Barts Hospital and had come to work as a surgeon at Cape Town’s Groote Schuur Hospital because, as he blithely put it, ‘I thought I’d work better with a bit of sunshine on my skin and some decent food inside me.’

The SS, as an institution, had regarded the British as racial equals, even if they had made the regrettable decision to be enemies of the Reich. The Führer greatly admired the way the British Empire had been won and maintained, despite its masters being outnumbered by the lesser races they ruled. Von Meerbach was therefore content to introduce himself to Dr Goldsmith and have an agreeable conversation with him about the various enhancements that could be made to the Jaguar’s engine, suspension and brakes to improve its already impressive capabilities.

What von Meerbach did not know was that his fears were justified. Dr Goldsmith had indeed been born Yonatan Goldschmidt in Vienna. His family, like many upper-class Austrian Jews, had intermarried with their Christian equivalents over the centuries, which accounted for Yonatan’s colouring. His father, who was a psychiatrist, had seen which way the wind was blowing and in 1932 had taken his family from Vienna to London, swiftly establishing a successful practice in the North London suburb of Hampstead. The family had made both their family and given names more English. The children were sent to good schools and emerged entirely assimilated into the culture of their new land.

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