The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [157]
We try to speed things along. We need to know why Jelena Storozhenko's investigation was closed down. We show the colonel her report to Kuchumov of 1986. Perhaps it might jog his memory. Was Jelena Storozhenko correct in believing that her investigation had been hijacked, we ask?
The colonel slips on his heavy glasses. He thumbs through our twenty-page statement. He makes appreciative grunts. 'It's interesting,' he says. 'But you do not have the full story.'
Hel unlocks a cupboard and takes from it a small black-and-white photograph that shows ten people huddled in a group, standing inside an anonymous hall. Six men in black lace-up shoes. Four women in high-heeled leather boots. Smart shapkas on everyone's head and fur-trimmed coats wrapped tight against the Kaliningrad chill. The woman at the centre clutches a plastic bag that is stuffed with paperwork and a bunch of flowers.
'Chairman Storozhenko,' the colonel says.
Kaliningrad Geological Archaelogical Expedition team photograph with chairman Jelena Storozhenko at centre
We look closer. Jelena Storozhenko is almost smiling, her lips parted as if she is joking with the photographer. How innocuous her KGA looks, like middle-aged teachers preparing for a union conference, not a top-secret investigation ordered by the Kremlin.
The colonel leans over the desk. 'They operated out of the Church of the Holy Family, near the railway station. Called themselves "the Choral Society" to prevent any unwelcome inquiries.
'After the KGA was closed down in 1984, the state too wanted to inhibit unwelcome inquiries and for several years denied it had any papers belonging to the KGA. But I knew Jelena had amassed a vast archive and I told the authorities I had seen it in her office. Eventually I got hold of some of her things, including this, her personal ready-reckoner, which she carried with her every day of her investigation. Would you like to see it?'
We try not to grab at the small exercise book with a hard cover that the colonel has taken from his grey briefcase. A label on it states: 'Not to be removed from the State Archive of the Russian Federation, Moscow.'
We scan the contents page. A list of possible locations and witnesses. Transcripts of statements by Ernst Schaumann (friend of Alfred Rohde), Paul Feyerabend (director of the Blood Court restaurant at Konigsberg Castle) and Otto Smakka (another contemporary of Rohde's). Nothing new here. We have seen all of this before in Kuchumov's private papers.
There follows a short history of previous Amber Room searches and an essay, 'On Hunting for Cultural Treasures', by Comrade Jakobovich, the first head of the KGA. There is a translation of Alfred Rohde's Pantheon article, the piece in which he announced the public display of the treasure in Konigsberg Castle in 1942, then a review of Soviet searches 1945-67 and a plan of work for the future.
We see that Storozhenko has a copy of Kuchumov's conclusion of 1946, in which the curator stated that the room survived the war and remained concealed in the city. It was obviously a critical document for her too. Finally there are three statements from Professor Alexander Brusov: his original findings of 12 June 1945, a statement made in December 1949 and another on 29 July 1954. This is interesting. We have only ever seen the statements made by Brusov in 1945 ajfter his trip to Konigsberg and in 1946, when Kuchumov and Tronchinsky quizzed him in Moscow. We turn to look at the 1949 and 19 54 statements, but see that both have been cut out of the binding.
'State censors. They went through everything before I saw it,' the colonel says, watching us.
A long pause. He fiddles with some Nazi dog-tags that he found in a local ruin, then says: 'There was very strong centralization in Jelena's day and without permission from Moscow nothing could happen. It would take months for a request from