ANDRE LOUIS-HIRSCH & OLGA MERAS
André Louis-Hirsch, son of Parisian banker Baron Hirsch, a member of the Rothschild dynasty, was a scientific prodigy, joining the French astronomical society, Société Astronomique de France aged just13.
Then as a 19-year-old in January, 1918, with World War One still raging throughout his country, he applied for a patent for a secret long-distance telegraphy technique using infrared radiation.
Andre’s growing reputation made him a close friend of French engineer Robert Esnault-Pelterie and together, on 26 December, 1927, they organised a dinner for several prominent French physicists at his mother’s home in Paris to discuss the future of the emerging science of space travel.
Among those present were Jean Baptiste Perrin (Nobel Prize in physics, 1926) and Charles Fabry, astronomers Ernest Esclangon and Henri Chrétien, director of the hydrological service of the French Navy and president of the French Astronomical Society, Eugène Fichot, General Gustave Ferrié, who had pioneered many applications of radiotelegraphy, and a science-fiction writer J.H. Rosny the elder.
The guests decided to establish an annual award in astronautics: the REP-Hirsch International Astronautics Prize, or Prix REP-Hirsch with Hirsch and Esnault-Pelterie providing 5,000 francs annually for three years, to the French Astronomical Society, and this scheme continued for many years.
Sadly the first winner of the award, Hermann Oberth, relocated to Germany during World War Two and joined Wernher von Braun in 1941 as an advisor at the Peenemünde rocket development centre, birthplace of the V2 rockets, which were to be aimed at Paris and London in 1944 with such devastating effect.
At that historic 1927 meeting in the Hirsch home, the guests had also discussed the name that should be given to the new science of spaceflight - the word astronautique (astronautics) proposed by Rosny, was adopted, although Andre’s alternative suggestion of cosmonautique (cosmonautics) was later to be preferred by the Soviet Union.
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Andre remained a strong sponsor for astronautics, advising another French pioneer, Alexandre Ananoff, when he started to promote the science in the 1930s,
Despite his busy life, Andre still found time to accompany his mother when she visited the salon of celebrated designer Jeanne Lanvin on the Rue du Faubourg in Paris and it was here that he first saw my mother’s cousin, Olga, as she modelled the latest fashions for the wealthy customers.
He was captivated by the dramatic looks and perfect figure of this tall beauty with a hint of sadness in her eyes and became a regular at the mannequin parades.
Olga had had a miserable childhood after the tragic death of her mother, Suzanne – the name I would have been blessed with had I been a girl.
My mother wrote: “Suzanne, who was a gifted artist, was sent to art school in Paris, where she met Sacha Kossarevsky, a White Russian. For some reason the family did not approve and when Olga was born, Sacha was away in Russia. The family did not go near Suzanne, who was gentle and timid unlike my plucky, forceful mother. Depressed, she killed herself, storing up misery for her daughter. “
My grandmother, Gabrielle, had been devoted to her sister and with my grandfather, Lionel, offered to adopt her and bring her up in Canada.
However Olga’s grandmother, Amelie, said she would look after the child - a decision which was to condemn this young girl to at times a Cinderella-like existence.
My mother wrote: “Olga was left with a sadistic maid in Beaujeu as the others were in Paris. She was treated shamefully and I have never forgiven my mother’s family.”
My mother recalled later that on one occasion a large Easter egg given by her parents to Olga as a special treat had been taken away by Amelie and melted down to make the breakfast hot chocolate for her, her husband and their twin daughters, Yvonne and Therese.
My mother said that Amelie disliked children, sending them off to a wet nurse as soon as they were born and off to boarding school as soon as they were old enough, as she found them a nuisance at home.
In the holidays they went to their grandmother near Beaujeu, who my mother said loved them and gave them all the affection they missed at home. Gabrielle always kept a photograph of the old lady by her bedside and kissed it before she went to sleep each night.
Despite an often miserable existence, Olga endured and blossomed, bolstered at times by sums of money sent from her concerned aunt and uncle in Edmonton.
My mother wrote: “The only thing Olga was given was the manners and standards of a lady.”
It was those assets which earned her the coveted role as a Lanvin model and led to the chance encounter with Andre which was to change her life forever.
My mother wrote: “At that time Olga was worried, because she had to have an appendix operation and there was no money. Andre learned this and paid all her expenses and asked nothing in return.
“He was her first man friend and they became lovers and he put her in a flat on the Rive Gauche near Notre Dame. It was there that I knew her. She met and was accepted by Andre’s family, but it still was not the thing to marry a penniless girl.”
“She and Andre went on lovely holidays and she was happy till the war came.”
Andre joined the French army as a reserve officer in communications and was decorated with the Criox de Guerre in the first combat actions against the Germans.
However in 1940 he was captured and became a prisoner of war, but carried on resisting and as a result spent almost all his captivity in the fortress of Lubeck in Northern Germany, a fellow inmate of French theologian Yves Congar, imprisoned there because of his numerous escape attempts from other camps.
The environment was no doubt grim, but Andre’s conditions somewhat improved after he showed his guards a book in the prison library dedicated to him and his contribution to space travel science.
On May 3, 1945, the name of Lubeck became infamous as the scene of one of the world’s greatest naval disaster, when RAF bombers sank three ships, the ss Cap Arcona, the ss Deutschland and the ss Thielbek, in the bay. Unknown to the airmen the ships were packed with concentration camp inmates and about 7,000 people died.
While Andre was a prisoner, Olga worked for the Resistance, engaging in highly dangerous activities, which later earned her their decoration.
After the war Olga and Andre married and she was fully accepted by his family, while he resumed his scientific work, taking part in the first International Astronautical Congress held in Paris from 30 September to 2 October, 1950.
My mother wrote: “When Andre died (in 1962) she was left well-provided for, but I believe things are not so easy with the taxes in France.”
However Olga still had a pretty cottage in the country and a magnificent Paris apartment overlooking the race-course at Longchamps and filled with the finest antique furniture and original oil paintings, including, as my mother noted on a later visit, an original Canaletto.
It was the same apartment in which Andre had been filmed in May, 1959, talking about that gathering of scientists in the 1920s when the words, astronautics and cosmonautics, had been coined.
My mother wrote after her reunion with her cousin: “She sees Mattieu, the son of Yvonne, who was so cruel to her, but Olga’s childhood has left deep scars. She says she could never go back to Beaujeu, where she was so unhappy.”
As a footnote to the above, a painting by Francesco Guardi – Venice, a View of the Piazzetta looking towards San Giorgio Maggiore – was stolen from Andre’s windowed mother in 1941 by Nazis working under the instruction of Hermann Goering.
It was returned to her in May, 1946, thanks to the efforts of the Monuments Men - the allied organization responsible for protecting treasures during World War Two, whose exploits were subject of a 2014 film of the same name starring George Clooney.
Shortly after the film’s release the painting was sold at a Sotheby's auction in New York for $245,000.