FELT OUTCAST.

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 20, 25 January 1939, Page 5

FELT OUTCAST.

AUSTRIAN HEIRESS. "WHERE IS THE RIVER?" JEWESS DISAPPEARS. (By Air Mail.) LOXDOX, January 1. In despair at the prospect of becoming a woman without home or country, Countess Mari Kageneck, wealthy Austrian heiress, wrote: "I will end myself"—then vanished. That is the drama behind her disappearance now being investigated by Scotland Yard, from her West End hotel. She was a Jewess, her husband, Count Franz Kageneck, an "Aryan"—holder of an official post in Xazi Austria. Her German passport expired in a few weeks and could not be renewed. He could not help her; she was convinced she would never see him again. Unfinished Letters. So it was that, distraught, she sat in her luxury suite in Sovrani's Hotel de Xormandie, Knijrhtsbridge, S.W., trying to write farewell letters. On one piece of paper, she began: "Dear Mary, I feel utterly " The word trailed down to one corner of the paper, the letter remained unfinished. She tried again: "I will " she began illegibly. Then followed: "You have been an angel. Comfort my children." She addressed this to Mrs. Mary de Trafford, a skiing friend at Chamonix. s Again she wrote—"to the Countess of Munster." Finally she wrote her husband, owner of the Castle Oberwarth, Burgenland, and another estate near Vienna. She bade him goodbye, enclosed a large sum of money. Then she walked out into the traffic of Knightsbridge and has not been seen again. That was eight days ago—and search by friends and trustees of her estate his failed to yield a single clue. "Divorce to Aid Him."

Something of the worries that reduced Countess Mari Kagenheck to a nervous wreck, advised by doctors to enter a home for treatment, were told by a friend who saw her the evening before she disappeared. _ "She had applied in vain for a renewal of her German passport here. It would expire in a week or two and she saw herself with the prospect of having neither country nor friends to help her. "She was desperately fond of her husband, and always said that their divorce was not valid under German law. They had been through some form of divorce in Czechoslovakia to make things more easy for him, since her Jewish blood barred her from visiting Germany. They used to meet regularly, often in Switzerland, but the last time was only three weeks ago in Paris. "She came back more depressed than ever, for her husband naturally wanted their two children—lß-years-old Julio, who also bears the title of count, and 15-years-old Yvonne, who is at a private school in England. "The boy is at school in Switzerland, and she has seen less of him in recent months, but the girl's name is inscribed on her own passport. "She feared that if she did not get this renewed —fend there seemed no hope whatever—that the father would get the girl registered on his passport. Like that the girl would go- back to Germany, and would be lost to her mother for ever.

"Where is the River?" "It was in this frame of mind that she returned from Paris three weeks ago and telephoned me. She could not sleep, she could not eat, and felt terribly alone in the world. ■'I had heard her *ay tempestuously. 1 will kill myself.' She had often said it. but what made me pay attention was when, last Sunday' week, she said to me very quietly, 'Where is the river?' "It was the next day she wrote the letters and disappeared." The Countess Mari Kagenheck was in the habit of receiving a handsome allowance which was paid to her through American solicitors in Paris. This came to her through her uncle, Mr. James Speyer, son of Edgar Speyer, famous as the friend of King Edward VII. and notorious for his disloyalty to this country during the war, which resulted in him being'deprived of his knighthood and membership of the Privy Council.