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dam
and away from Antwerp a week before the German legions swept through
toward Dunkerque. On the night he heard of the approach of the Germans
toward Paris he gathered up all his stocks and piled them (together
with his wife) into a taxicab and started toward Bordeaux; then he
shifted and went to the Riviera; then, as the march of the Germans—like
the steady, distant thump-thump, of Dun-sany's Gods of the Mountains—came
ever closer, he fled to Lisbon. All this entailed the outlay of huge
sums of money. But he had it—he had diamonds, you see. From Lisbon he
fled to South America and from there, after some time of waiting, he
finally obtained a visa and was able to enter the United States.
He
was safer than many of the others of Paris who, thinking that the
Maginot Line was impregnable, were suddenly surrounded by Nazis,
seized, thrown into concentration camps or stripped of all their
wealth. He was luckier than the thousands of others who thronged into
Lisbon waiting for any kind of passage to America.
In
the meantime, back in Amsterdam, business was continuing on a
near-normal basis even when the Nazi divisions were on the edge of The
Netherlands, waiting to pounce on their next victim. The holiday of
Whitsunday was at hand—May 12, 1940. Saturday and Monday were declared
to be holidays also. On Friday night the diamond-cutting firms
deposited more than $2,500,000 worth of cut and uncut stones in the
vault of the Amsterdamsche Bank, as was their custom each night.
With
so much money at stake daily, the closing of the door to the vault had
become a little ceremony. The manager, one Pieter Devrees,
superintended the opening of the heavy steel door while the dealers
chatted and discussed where they were going to spend the week end. In
the dark
(120)
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