Books

Taking on Goliath

Celia Brayfield

Published 19 February 2007

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L'Oréal Took My Home: the secrets of a theft

Monica Waitzfelder, translated by Peter Bush Arcadia Books, 221pp, £15.99

ISBN 1905147112

Every family has ephemeral little narratives that are passed around with the Sunday gravy. In Monica Waitzfelder's family, her mother used to say: "'Oréal took my home." Nobody in what was left of the family pushed her too hard to explain. They had a single photograph of the house, a mansion with twin turrets, but Monica was born in Brazil to German-Jewish parents who fled Europe as teenage orphans of the Holocaust, and their heritage was too painful to explore. In Brazil, "history was more to do with carnival and football", and they preferred it that way.

Over time, Monica learned that her mother's parents had lived in Karlsruhe in Germany. They fled Nazi persecution in 1938, settling in Paris, and were forced to sell the handsome house to a government agency. In France, the Nazis continued to pursue them; the father died in a transit camp, the mother in Auschwitz.

After the end of the Second World War, the house was bought by a hair-dye and perfume company. That company was part of what has become a multinational group which is, in its own words, "the world leader in cosmetics, synonymous with beauty, innovation and scien tific excellence".

More than 50 years later, Monica had settled in Paris and was working as an opera director. She got a government questionnaire in the post, sent in the belief that her family might have had property stolen by the Nazis and might, therefore, be eligible for compensation. As it asked for a stack of documentation, and most of the witnesses were long dead, she ignored it.

Earlier attempts to substantiate the family myth had been blocked but, finally, a follow-up call from a civil servant inspired Monica to try again; she met such a wall of negation that she at last understood that there was some dark substance to the family history with 'Oréal.

This book is the story of her investigation, a meticulously documented thriller worthy of Forsyth or Grisham, but told with considerably greater charm and punctuated with observations such as: "I was in Toulouse rehearsing Götterdämmerung when . . ." It reads like the story of a reasonable woman with a full life who has been pushed to the door of the European Court of Human Rights by a multinational behemoth that seems desperate to hide its origins.

To compile the necessary paper trail, Waitz-felder had to play archivists, bank clerks and officials off against each other, and came to wonder how her adversary had ensured the co-operation of even the Jewish reparation office that should have helped her. She also notes the connection of 'Oréal's founder, Eugène Schueller, with the notorious fascist terrorists of the 1930s, the Cagoulards.

'Oréal demolished the house in Karlsruhe to build a corporate HQ, then sold the site in 1991. By 2001, Waitzfelder had enough papers to apply for compensation. 'Oréal itself denied her claim and hired leading Jewish lawyers, one of whom was the son of the prominent states-woman and Auschwitz survivor Simone Weil. In the closing chapters, Waitzfelder seems too exhausted to detail the gutlessness of the French media in the face of one of their biggest advertisers, or the lame responses of the French judiciary.

She actually undersells her enemy somewhat. 'Oréal , 27.1 per cent owned by Nestlé and 28.2 per cent owned by the founder's family, posted a pre-tax profit of more than ?2,300m in 2005. The group brands include Lancôme, Giorgio Armani, Maybelline, Helena Rubinstein, Shu Uemura, Redken, Kérastase and the Body Shop. Forbes rates the head of the family, Liliane Bettencourt, as 16th on its list of billionaires.

A crumb from that table might have been tossed to the Waitzfelder family to avert a world-class public relations disaster, but no. The group seems to have acted as if it were unaware that we live in times when public apology is a central plank of image management and having a Nazi father is no bar to becoming the governor of California.

Waitzfelder at last explored the tragic history of her family, managing to trace a woman who saw her grandmother arrested in Provence. For all that we share the author's growing outrage, the most intriguing element of this book is the glimpse of a global citizen, a woman whose identity has not been built upon nationality or ethnicity. Perhaps when her case is closed, she will take a break from Götterdämmerung and think about an autobiography.