The Orpheus Clock

by Simon Goodman

  A certain J. E. Westerbeek, an Amsterdam solicitor of somewhat slippery character whom Fritz had employed for the family trust, was in the house that day to go over some legal matters. Much later, in a letter to Lili, Westerbeek described what happened:

  We heard a car drive up and then an urgent knocking at the door. When Piet, the butler, answered the door, he returned shortly afterward, white as a ghost, with a German in civilian clothes, followed by a uniformed man. He introduced himself as Untersturmführer [Lieutenant] Werner of the SS and in the SS’s disagreeable way demanded to know who were Herr Gutmann and Frau Gutmann. He then locked the door, and your parents and I had to stay in the room while he went through the house. You can understand the fearful state we were in, and this increased shortly thereafter, because Werner came back and told us that your parents had to go with him. After repeated entreaties he told us that the journey would be to Berlin. However, they should have no fear, because nothing would happen to them.

  He said that on the trip they would be allowed every comfort, and that after the journey to Berlin, they would continue on “to the south.” Your parents would be allowed to take money, jewelry, luggage, etc., and he would take care of the transportation. He said your father was a “special case,” referring to your father’s Italian relations, and he suggested that Italy was the ultimate destination, although he wasn’t really permitted to divulge anything.

  Westerbeek said the Untersturmführer then told them that Fritz and Louise should pack as many suitcases as they wanted and be ready to leave at 5:00 p.m. He would return with an extra car (for the bags) and take them to The Hague. There Fritz and Louise would board the D train to Berlin, departing at 6:45 p.m. They would have first-class tickets and a sleeping-car compartment. Werner posted an armed soldier at the front door and drove off, leaving Fritz and Louise in an agony of doubt, tempered by hope. It seemed as if this might actually be the beginning of their salvation. But as always there was the question: Could the Nazis be trusted?

  Westerbeek took up the story:

  After his [Werner’s] departure there was a lot of busy packing, and the mood became considerably less anxious. Your mother was still very nervous, but your father seemed to regain his confidence and even found some levity. The whole afternoon was spent packing the suitcases, eventually numbering some fourteen in all, large and small. They packed all manner of clothes, a good supply of linen, toiletries, etc., and some food supplies for the journey.

  Shortly after we were ready, Untersturmführer Werner came back [with the two cars]. The doors of the house were locked and the keys taken by him, and then we went full speed from Bosbeek to The Hague. I sat next to your mother in one car, and your father was in the other car with the suitcases. Your father’s car went straight to the train station, but we first went to Werner’s home so he could pick up his own suitcase. The Untersturmführer was to be their escort. We arrived at the station at the last moment, the train was already starting to move, so I had no opportunity to say good-bye. A pair of waving hands from the train window was the last thing I saw of your parents.

  The train moved slowly east on the four-hundred-mile journey to Berlin, the window shades in their compartment pulled down on Werner’s order. Returning to the country of their birth filled Fritz and Louise with dread. Frequently delayed by high-priority German military traffic, their train arrived in Berlin the next morning. To their relief, Ambassador Alfieri himself was on hand to greet them at the station. Unfortunately, Alfieri was not alone. With him were two civilian representatives, one from Seyss-Inquart’s office and the other from Göring’s—their instructions were plain: obtain a release for the Eugen Gutmann Silver Collection. Fritz was unyielding.

  With Untersturmführer Werner still accompanying them, Fritz and Louise and their mountains of baggage were boarded onto another train—in a private car, no less. The journey to Italy was to go via Dresden, Prague, and Vienna. After watching them depart, Alfieri’s office sent a telegram to Lili Orsini in Pisa advising her of her brother’s imminent arrival. Great-Aunt Lili immediately telephoned young Lili in Florence.

  Early in the morning on May 28, young Lili rushed with great expectation to the Santa Maria Novella station. Finally the train from Vienna arrived. On tiptoe she scanned the passengers disembarking. She waited until the last solitary traveler got off the train, but Fritz and Louise were nowhere in sight. She thought that perhaps they had missed one of their connections. The next day she came back to the station, and finally the train from the north again arrived. She waited until the last passenger had cleared the platform, and still there was no sign of them. She came back the next day, and the next, and the next, a thin, increasingly forlorn-looking figure, nervously pacing the platform and holding on to the hope that this day’s train would finally bring her parents out of the hell they had been living in for the past three years.

  As the days, and then nights, went by, and the trains came and went, Fritz and Louise did not arrive.

  They never would.

  CHAPTER 7

  THERESIENSTADT

  “Work will make you free.” Entrance to the courtyard of the Kleine Festung (the small fortress), which led to the Gestapo prison cells.

  It was not what was supposed to happen. As they were leaving Berlin, SS Untersturmführer Werner handed them off to another grim-faced SS escort, name unknown. Fritz and Louise, with their mountain of baggage, were escorted to a private car on another train. Their train finally left the Anhalter Station in Berlin about an hour later, southbound for Dresden and then on to Prague and Vienna.

  From Vienna they were to connect with the train to Florence.

  It is impossible to know exactly what went wrong and on whose orders. Certainly the Italian ambassador and others in his government thought that all was in order. They were unaware that the Nazis had no intention of letting the Gutmanns escape. Perhaps Reichskommissar Seyss-Inquart thought that Fritz would be more cooperative—that he would finally sign over what remained of the Gutmann family fortune. Perhaps Himmler had grown tired of the Italians’ weak and sentimental concern about these Jews and decided at the last minute to put them in their place. Most likely, though, it was Hermann Göring, who was never going to allow Fritz Gutmann and the Gutmann silver collection to slip out of his hands.

  Whatever the reason—the train suddenly stopped just east of Dresden, in Bautzen, and Fritz and Louise’s car was uncoupled on a sidetrack. The train chugged off, leaving their car behind. After the war, in his book Ghetto Theresienstadt, Zdenek Lederer described the incident in detail. The SS officer insisted that nothing was out of the ordinary. Next, drowning out Fritz’s anxious questions, was the sound of their carriage being hooked to a different train. Louise clutched Fritz’s hand as the new locomotive lumbered on through most of the night. At dawn, the shabby transport train rumbled into the little Bohemian town of Bauschowitz. From the platform a harsh metallic voice bellowed, “Aussteigen!” The SS officer echoed the command: “You will exit now.” Horrified, Fritz and Louise stepped out onto an empty platform. The officer pointed to a black SS car at the side of the station. Fritz and Louise, confused and no doubt terrified, were loaded aboard with as much luggage as the car would hold. They drove two to three kilometers along a narrow, tree-lined road before reaching the gates of the fortress. They had arrived at the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

  Their arrival caused some consternation among the inmates. Egon “Gonda” Redlich, a Czech who had arrived in 1942, wrote tersely in his diary, “A man and woman came from Amsterdam, only the two of them. She is elegantly dressed in an expensive fur!” Fritz, too, was impeccably dressed in a well-tailored three-piece suit under his astrakhan coat. Louise, in a long dress and fashionable hat, was indeed wearing a full black-mink coat—no doubt to ward off the late-spring chill. For a moment, the Baroness Louise Gutmann von Landau stood bewildered in the grimy camp courtyard as inmates gawked at the incongruous vision in furs. Then quickly, the SS escort handed them over p
ersonally to the SS camp commandant, Hauptsturmführer Siegfried Seidl.

  The method of their arrival, too, was remarkable. Most of the ghetto inmates arrived at the Bauschowitz railway station packed inside “transport” cars with little or no food or water, and no sanitation. Normally, the platform at Bauschowitz thronged with deportees clinging to their bags, while goaded by the rifles of the SS guards and the Czech police. They would then be forced to walk the two to three kilometers, in single file, to the Theresienstadt ghetto. Old and young alike, exhausted from the frightening journey, would clutch their meager belongings—the little that had not already been stripped from them. Fritz and Louise, by contrast, had arrived at the ghetto in a German staff car, with an embarrassing overload of luggage.

  The inmates found it incomprehensible that transport train number XXIV/Ez1 had made the journey carrying just two passengers. The next train bringing Jews from Holland would have 305 souls crammed in a few wooden carriages—the one after that carried 870 men, women, and children.

  The elaborate ruse of promising Fritz and Louise refuge in Italy was sadly just another case of the Nazis’ perverse and cruel tendency to lull their victims, to raise their hopes before sweeping them away. The same twisted logic led them to call gas chambers “shower rooms” and those gassed as receiving Sonderbehandlung, or “special treatment.” Concentration camps derisively put up signs declaring “Arbeit macht frei,” or “Work Makes You Free.”

  However, Theresienstadt was rather unusual among concentration camps. The ancient town was originally an eighteenth-century walled military garrison, a star-shaped enclosure surrounded by wide earth ramparts and moats. In late 1941, the site was personally selected by the Deputy Reich-Protector of Bohemia and Moravia Reinhard Heydrich, an SS general. Heydrich was also known as the “Butcher of Prague.” The Gestapo and the SS converted the Kleine Festung, or “Little Fortress,” into their prison. Meanwhile, the walled town was designated a “ghetto” for Jews, starting with those from Prague. As a result, the town’s five thousand or so Czech inhabitants were unceremoniously kicked out of their homes. Barbed wire was strung around the walls. Then Jews, by the tens of thousands, were moved in, crammed into overcrowded quarters that were soon teeming with vermin and disease. At its peak, well over sixty thousand Jews were crammed into the ghetto. From there, the next step was transport to the extermination camps farther east that the Nazis were busy building.

  Theresienstadt also served another, rather uniquely cynical, Nazi purpose. The Nazi high command had always gone to great lengths to try to conceal from the world and from their allies, and even from the German people (who may, or not, have actually cared), the true nature of the vast network of slave labor and extermination camps. The fiction that millions of Jews deported from Germany and the occupied countries were being sent to “resettlement” camps in the east became increasingly difficult to sustain. What was needed was a “model” concentration camp, a kind of showpiece that could demonstrate to the world that the tales of mass extermination and deadly hard labor were only so much enemy propaganda.

  On the orders of Göring, SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich convened the Wannsee Conference, in January 1942. Before the war, Wannsee had been a pleasant suburb of Berlin. The conference was held at a grand villa in close proximity to the golf club founded by Herbert. (The SS villa was also directly across the lake from the Arnhold Villa, which had been the home of Gutmann cousin Hans Arnhold. Hans and his family, fortunately, had fled to New York in 1939.) Here Heydrich, and his assistant Adolf Eichmann, along with other high-ranking SS officers and members of the Nazi government, established the blueprint for the “Final Solution” to the so-called Jewish Question in Europe. Over a buffet luncheon lasting barely an hour and a half, they agreed on an event of unparalleled evil in the history of mankind: the annihilation of an entire people. Even Hitler was heard to describe Heydrich as “the man with the iron heart.”

  At that infamous meeting, Heydrich also announced that Theresienstadt, while still being used as a way station for death camp transports, would concurrently be maintained as a “privileged ghetto” for certain Jews. Those Jews who were most likely to elicit sympathy from their fellow Germans, such as the elderly and decorated World War I veterans, were to be sent to the Theresienstadt ghetto. Certain prominent and well-known Jews from Germany and throughout the occupied territories would also be selected.

  Unlike in other concentration camps, Theresienstadt inmates wore civilian clothes, albeit graced with the yellow Jewish star, and men and women prisoners would not be so rigidly segregated. Internal ghetto affairs and operations were to be managed, within limits, by a council of Jewish elders. Despite the appalling circumstances, schools for children and cultural events, such as music concerts and theatrical productions, would periodically be tolerated.

  Fritz and Louise even found friends and acquaintances that they had known before the war. The elderly playwright Elsa Bernstein-Porges was one. Her animated reminiscences about prewar theater in Berlin and Vienna were a welcome diversion. Another friend, a Dutch cartoonist, Jo Spier, even introduced a few, but extremely rare, hints at humor. As a popular satirist for De Telegraaf, his parody of Hitler had landed Spier (who was also Jewish) in the Westerbork camp. In April 1942, he was transferred, with his wife and three children, to Theresienstadt, where he survived by illustrating whatever the German commanders ordered.

  At times, Theresienstadt almost appeared to be a functioning Jewish town. Astonishingly, the subterfuge actually worked. The first name the Nazis gave the camp was Theresienbad, or “Spa Theresien.” Some unsuspecting elderly Jews in Germany actually paid for an apartment in the “spa” camp. In 1944, the Nazis even allowed a Danish and Swedish Red Cross delegation to visit Theresienstadt, guiding them through carefully rehearsed interviews with temporarily well-fed ghetto inmates and conducting them on a “Potemkin village” tour of faux ghetto restaurants, parks, and sports fields. The “Boy’s School” had a sign: “Closed During the Holidays.” The ghetto “bank” even printed ersatz currency bearing the likeness of Moses. The Red Cross was unaware that, just before their arrival, the Nazis had sent seventy-five hundred inmates to their deaths. The three transports to Auschwitz-Birkenau included most of the sick and all the orphans. The Germans needed to relieve the unsightly overcrowding.

  The Nazis were pleased with the results and ordered a documentary film to be made by ghetto inmates, depicting similar staged scenes. The notorious propaganda film was officially entitled A Documentary Film of the Jewish Resettlement, but became better known as Theresienstadt: Hitler’s Gift to the Jews. Colonel Karl Rahm of the SS chose the talented actor and director Kurt Gerron to make the film. Gerron, who was a distant relative of the Gutmanns’, even sang “Mack the Knife,” which he had originally made famous in Berlin. In October 1944, immediately after the film was completed, Gerron and the jazz band, euphemistically named the Ghetto Swingers, were shipped off to Auschwitz. Gerron was gassed on October 28, 1944.

  Despite all the Nazi lies, the numbers tell the true story of Theresienstadt. More than 35,000 Jews died within the ghetto walls of starvation, disease, overwork, or brutality at the hands of the SS guards and their Czech Kapos. Another 88,000 died after being transported from Theresienstadt to the death camps at Auschwitz and elsewhere. In all, of 140,000 Jews sent to Theresienstadt, barely 17,000 were alive at the end of the war.

  The inmate population of the camp was, by Nazi design, divided into classes. The majority lived in crowded barracks, basements, and casemates within the earthen walls, with as many as fifty people occupying a space designed for three. They worked at various menial tasks such as hoeing in the fields, cleaning latrines, or laboring in the mines outside the town. They existed in constant terror of being included in the next transport east—a fear that for most of them would tragically come true. Those who did hard labor received better rations, which meant that the elderly got the least. Above them in status were the technicians and skilled w
orkers, who received slightly better living quarters. Those who kept the ghetto operating—engineers, electricians, architects, members of the “ghetto” government and their families—were temporarily protected from the dreaded transports.

  Then there were the Prominenten (prominent figures), also known as the “special cases.” Just one or two hundred were classified this way. Most of them were Jews who, because of their status, could not just simply disappear. Their immediate murders might excite protest in the outside world, and some were still politically useful to the Nazis. Among these were the Danish chief rabbi, a German ex–minister of the interior, a Czech minister of justice, the mayor of Le Havre in France, and the Dutch ambassador to the League of Nations.

  Also among the Theresienstadt Prominenten were well-known musicians, artists, and academics, as well as members of the ghetto council of elders. Dr. Leo Baeck, an internationally renowned rabbi and former leader of the Reich Association of German Jews, was a Theresienstadt “special case,” as were Franz Kafka’s sister, Ottilie, and Sigmund Freud’s sister, Esther. Others included Ellie von Bleichröder, the granddaughter of Bismarck’s personal banker, and businessman Arthur von Weinberg, founder of I.G. Farben (which had regrettably developed the poison gas Zyklon B). There was even an Olympic gold medalist.

  Fritz and Louise were assigned to this group of concentration-camp Prominenten. Fritz was number I/34 and Louise I/35. They were given a one-room billet, at No. 8 on the Neue Gasse, just a few doors down from the ghetto café. Their quarters were generous by ghetto standards, and they could also expect somewhat better food rations. Most important, being on the Prominenten A-list was supposed to exempt them from transport to the east—or at least until the Nazis changed their minds.