The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich

victory of Jewry, but on the contrary, the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe.” 1
    David Reich, an energetic man possessed of a simple elegance who was the father of a bright five-year old boy, had stopped deluding himself by May 8, 1940. He had already witnessed too much, having personally experienced anti-Semitic persecution, as had his parents and grandparents. He was born in 1902 into an Orthodox Jewish family in the Galician shtetl of Przemyl among the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. Pshemishl, as the town was then known in Yiddish, belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire but is now situated in southeastern Poland on the border with Ukraine. When the Austro-Hungarian monarchy fell during World War I, there were once more terrible pogroms against the Jews in Galicia. David Reich fled with his parents and relatives toward Western Europe.
    He started a new life from scratch twelve hundred kilometers from the place of his birth, in Frankfurt in the German
Reich
. It was an experience he shared with many European Jews, and an experience that in-grained itself in the collective memory of the Jewish people. In many Jewish households a suitcase packed with the essentials was always kept ready at hand, in order to leave at a day’s notice “if it starts again.” After Adolf Hitler was named chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, which also brought ultimate power to the Nazis, David Reich soon found it was time to get out that suitcase. Once more he was to leave his home, never to return, as he had done with Pshemishl.
    In this fateful year of 1933 that would lead Germany to its greatest catastrophe, he met a petite, attractive woman called Paula “Pepi” Wang. Born in 1910 in Saarbrücken, she fascinated him, not least with her boundless energy. She was a woman who knew what she wanted and was not afraid to say it. The couple married and decided to settle in Antwerp, a Belgian town of special significance for Jews. Antwerp was at that time (and is now once again) one of the great centers of European Jewry. The city on the river Scheldt is a commercial center with a glorious past and boasts one of the largest ports in the world. The French historian Fernand Braudel described it as “the centre of the entire international economy” in the sixteenth century. 2 Portuguese ships unloaded their precious cargos there, whether pepper from India or cloves from Zanzibar. It was an international, cosmopolitan town of traders and businessmen from the major trading nations all unified in their desire to make a profit. It was also an extremely tolerant town that permitted the development of a large Jewish community. David S. Landes characterizes Antwerp as a center of industrial, commercial, and mental progress used to economic, intellectual, and spiritual diversity. 3
    The city to which David and Paula Reich emigrated in late 1933 was the most important center for the global diamond trade. Eighty percent of the world’s finished diamonds were produced and traded here. 4 Of all the diamond businesses, 90 percent were in Jewish hands, but David Reich did not have either the luck or the right contacts to get a foothold in this lucrative business. He thus practiced one of the few professions that had been open to European Jews for centuries: trade. He worked harder than most and traded everything that could be sold, first scrap metal and then fabric, before concentrating on shoes. “David was always on the move. He was very dynamic and had lots of ideas,” a family friend told me. Antwerp was a town that imbued its inhabitants with a mercantile mentality.
    Their income was sufficient to ensure a modest lifestyle—an apartment in the inner city, three meals a day, and an occasional trip to the movies. Today it would be called lower middle class. Their little paradise was complete when Paula Reich gave birth to a boy on the afternoon ofTuesday, December 18, 1934. They called him Marcell, after Mars, the Roman god of war. His middle name was David, after his father.
    Marcell David Reich, who was later to make a name for himself as Marc Rich, was born into a devout Orthodox family that adhered to kosher rules and said Hebrew prayers. His father was a learned man, strict with himself and with his family, and uncompromising when it came to discipline, hard work, and religion. He was a demanding father whom Marc adored. He was also a reliable, honest man who could be trusted implicitly. Paula, his mother, was an