The Miernik Dossier

52. FROM THE FILES OF A BRITISH INTELLIGENCE SERVICE.

Bentley, Ilona Maria. Born at Berlin on 11th May, 1935, the daughter of a Hungarian national named Hanne Szemle (born at Budapest on 21st December, 1905) and of Bentley, John Brian Thomas, a British subject born at St. Petersburg, Russia, on 9th February, 1899, the elder son of Roger Alan Arthur Bentley, C.M.G. (q.v.), and of Lucy Anne Wyndham. For fifty years before the Russian Revolution, the Bentley family operated an export-import business at St. Petersburg; John Bentley’s father and grandfather served as H.M. Consul in that city for brief interims in the nineteenth century. John Bentley was educated privately in St. Petersburg by English and German tutors; he spoke both these languages, as well as Russian, perfectly. He witnessed the Bolshevik uprisings in St. Petersburg and afterwards claimed personal acquaintance with a number of the leading Bolsheviks, including Trotsky himself. Bentley hinted throughout his life that he had actually taken part in street fighting in St. Petersburg in 1917. In 1919, the family returned to England, and the following year Bentley went up to Magdalen College, Oxford; he took a third in Oriental Languages. In 1926 he published a book about the British expedition to Russia in 1918-19, The Death Rattle of Imperialism. It is believed (though not confirmed by documentary evidence) that he became a member of the British Communist Party in 1928. From 1927 to 1931 he frequently published articles in a variety of British periodicals on political and literary subjects. In 1932 he went to Berlin as a correspondent, accredited by a number of British publications including the Daily Star. Bentley wrote frequently for the Daily Worker under a variety of pseudonyms.

Ilona Maria Bentley, who is Bentley’s only child, was illegitimate. The marriage between Bentley and Hanne Szemle did not take place until 23rd September, 1938, in Berlin. At that time Bentley claimed paternity, and the child was afterwards granted British nationality on the basis of her father’s claim. Bentley had left Miss Szemle and their daughter in Berlin in 1937, when he went to Spain to cover the Civil War from the Nationalist side. Three weeks after his marriage to Miss Szemle, he returned to Spain, where he was killed on Christmas Day, 1938, while covering the Nationalist assault on Barcelona. Bentley’s wife was half Jewish, the daughter of a German-born Jewess. The German government refused to recognize the British nationality of Mrs. Bentley and her child, owing to the German parentage of the mother, and to the disparity between the child’s date of birth and the date of her parents’ marriage. It was believed that the authorities were influenced also by Bentley’s outspoken Communist sympathies. In refusing permission to Mrs. Bentley and her child to leave Germany in 1939, the German authorities referred to an undissolved previous marriage between Bentley and a German woman, but the existence of the earlier marriage was never established to the satisfaction of H.M. Consul.

In 1942 (date probable) Hanne Szemle Bentley and her child were arrested by the German authorities and sent to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The mother died there on 18th April, 1943. Ilona Bentley was liberated with other surviving inmates in 1945. She was at that time barely ten years old, and she was unaware of her own identity. She was not identified as Ilona Bentley, and therefore as a British subject, until February, 1946, when an examination of the files at Bergen-Belsen brought forth her British passport and that of her mother. In June, 1946, investigators succeeded in locating the child in a refugee centre in the British Zone of Occupation, and in establishing her identity through a comparison of the number tattooed on her forearm and the one entered by a German clerk on her British passport, which formed part of her file at Bergen-Belsen.

The child was given into the custody of her paternal grandparents on 15th July, 1946. The grandmother died the following year, and the grandfather in 1952. Ilona Bentley, as her grandfather’s only heir (her father’s brother died in action in Crete), inherited an estate valued at £175,000 after death duties. This included substantial amounts in Swiss franc accounts in the Union de Banques Suisses, Geneva.

During summer holidays, and after leaving school, Ilona Bentley travelled extensively in Europe, and in 1956 visited Hungary as a tourist. The Hungarian rebellion took place during her visit. On ³0th October, 1966, she arrived at the Austro-Hungarian frontier in the company of a young Kárdos, whom she attempted to smuggle into Austria. Kárdos was arrested and subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment on charges of subversion and murder arising out of his activities in the Budapest uprising. Ilona Bentley attempted to persuade the British Embassy at Budapest to intervene in behalf of Kárdos, whom she described as her fiancé. No intervention was possible. Ilona Bentley, in an interview with an officer of the embassy, claimed to be pregnant by Kárdos; if this was true, she never bore the child.

Ilona Bentley has a certain reputation for sexual looseness. Throughout her adolescence she created disciplinary problems at a variety of schools, and she was sent home on one occasion for misbehaviour with a boy from a neighbouring town. (According to the records of the psychiatrist who interviewed her after her release from Bergen-Belsen, she claimed to have been sexually abused by adult inmates of the camp.)

On coming of age, Ilona Bentley took up residence in Geneva, Switzerland, where she enrolled as a student at the university. At this time she relieved the solicitors who had been appointed as her guardians under her grandfather’s will of their responsibility for management of her affairs. The Swiss police, who have exercised their ordinary controls over Miss Bentley as a foreign resident, have noted no activity on her part that they construe as harmful to Swiss interests. Our own enquiries have yielded nothing of political interest. Miss Bentley was taught Russian by her grandfather.