“POTTED WEALTH”

Greymouth Evening Star, 11 December 1940, Page 12

“POTTED WEALTH”

' WHY JEWELLERS ARE BUSY. LONDON, October 5. Many of London’s sellers of luxuries are to-day doing little or no business; jewellers, in the main, are an exception. Most of them cannot complain of any slump. The reason is given by Mr Louis Kornitler, the well-known jewel merchant, in his book, “The Jewelled Trail,” just published. “There is nothing more portable and handy, for people expecting at every moment to be torn up by the roots from the midst of their homes and friends than a handful of gems,” he writes. “For gems speak the language of every country and can be turned into real money when currencies are crashing and sharemarkets in a panic. “In England people tend to overlook the value of ‘potted wealth’ that can be slipped into the lining of a coat or concealed in the heel of a shoe and may give a footing to a refugee on an alien shore.” He goes on to tell the story of an Austrian monumental mason who hit on the idea of smuggling his jewellery out of Nazi Austria concealed in a cache hollowed out in a gravestone for a Jewish family in Rotterdam. Unfortunately for him some Nazi rowdies noticed the stone as he was taking it to the railway station. The lorry carrying it was crossing a Danube bridge at the time and the Nazis noticed the Hebrew lettering on the gravestone. They never found the jewellery, but they threw the whole stone into the river, where it was lost for ever.