PJ: Did any of those lives particularly impress you?
AKD: Most of the thirteen women’s biographies I chose ended in tragedy – in the Holocaust and the Second World War. But, for example, one character I discovered was Jeanette Suchestow, the beautiful Jewish lover of Prince Rudy Radziwiłł. She was mentioned in the pre-war and even in the international press, but never in connection with Bruno Schulz. Thanks to my intuition and research, she turned out to have been closely related to him and his family. This case proved that it’s worth following your intuition and, like a detective, investigating, rummaging, poking around, and then finally tying up strands that seemed utterly unrelated at first.
Why do I mention her? When I came across her, she intrigued me. It was as if her attitude, appearance, and the exquisite, elegant outfits that I saw in the surviving press photographs were straight out of Bruno Schulz’s drawings and graphic work, so I wondered if she had inspired him. Jeanette’s biography was unusually interesting and complex. The Jewish wife of a Drohobych millionaire – an oil magnate with several major businesses across Europe, said to be the richest man in Galicia – was later involved in a torrid affair with the elderly Radziwiłł, which was covered by the media and gutter press. He was a hell-raiser, famous for a string of failed relationships, but a prince, nonetheless. Regardless of public opinion, she was christened in a Polish Catholic ceremony to marry him, which was wholly unacceptable to the Radziwiłł family, of course. After all, it was unthinkable that a baptised Jewish divorcée from Drohobych, with a Jewish son, could become a grand duchess. But the Warsaw elite never objected to Jeanette attending international banquets with Radziwiłł – who had moved into politics – since she sparkled with intelligence, charm, impeccable German, and dazzled them with the fortune of her kind-hearted ex-husband, Benjamin Suchestow, related to Bruno Schulz.
The lovers are known to have gone hunting in their native Białowieża Forest, including during visits by German diplomatic delegations. That was where Jeanette met the hunting ace and future war criminal Hermann Göring. During the occupation, a photograph of Jeanette hunting with Göring saved her life many times. Even in Auschwitz, the Germans didn’t know what to make of it. Not that fate was kind to Jeanette, however, she had to play all her cards in order to survive, but it didn’t help her ex-husband or beloved son. Jeanette was an intriguing, tragic figure who was allegedly the subject of a screenplay to be optioned by a Hollywood film studio. Even before the Second World War, the tabloids pruriently wrote up her affair with the prince, comparing it to the mésalliance of King Edward VIII and his American wife, Wallis Simpson.