The Orpheus Clock

by Simon Goodman

  Those moments of hope and belief were cruelly brief. Everyone knew that just outside the Theresienstadt main gate the road reached an intersection. The road that went to the right led to the outside world, while the road that went straight led to only one destination—the Little Fortress prison. Which direction the staff car took after it drove out of the ghetto’s main gate would announce their fate.

  The staff car drove out the main gate—and went straight. Inside the prison courtyard, the car came to a screeching halt under the sign “Arbeit macht frei.”

  As bad as the Theresienstadt ghetto was, for the Jews imprisoned in the walled city, the Little Fortress was an object of abject terror, feared even more than transport to the east. Norbert Troller, a Czech architect imprisoned in Theresienstadt and later in the Little Fortress, described it this way: “In the ghetto the horrible rumors about the Little Fortress were only described in a whisper. No one who wore a Jewish star had escaped alive from there . . . . [The fortress] was a hellish place, but conceived in a place none of us could have imagined in our wildest nightmares. In short, it was worse than we thought hell would be like . . . . Entering the main gate, crossing a bridge over the foul-smelling moat, one felt and smelled decay, death, hopelessness, despair, and damnation. Everything was built to crush you, to leave you no hope, to convey to you your nothingness, prepare you for annihilation. You are lost!”

  The Little Fortress’s reputation was deserved. Operating separately from the Theresienstadt ghetto, it was run by SS troops, Gestapo agents, and pro-Nazi (usually Czech) guards—the sadistic Kapos. It was primarily used to imprison Czech political prisoners in the thousands, but also more ominously as punishment for “Jewish troublemakers,” usually from the ghetto next door. Although not technically a death camp—there were no gas chambers—nonetheless prisoners were sent there to die, by starvation or abuse or outright execution. Prisoners dressed in scraps of old uniforms were crowded by the hundreds into underground casemate cells awash in filth, while prisoners being held for Gestapo interrogation were thrown into dungeonlike solitary cells, hardly bigger than coffins. Club-wielding guards mercilessly beat prisoners to death for the smallest offense or no offense at all. Public hangings and death by firing squad took place against a bloodred brick wall. In a single day, over 250 Czech patriots were shot to death at the execution site between the ramparts. Presiding over this horror, striding about in riding breeches and sporting a Hitler-style mustache, was the Little Fortress SS commandant, Hauptsturmführer Heinrich Jöckel, a notorious sadist and Jew-hater. Jöckel, who routinely beat prisoners to death with his own hands, actually lived in the Little Fortress with his wife and two teenage daughters. Even the daughters would torment the prisoners with their vicious German shepherds. (After the war Jöckel was hanged as a war criminal.)

  • • •

  Fritz and Louise were now delivered into this hell on earth. Later, Sturmbannführer Rahm would acknowledge to Paul Eppstein the Gutmanns’ true fate. Louise’s close friend Hedwig Eppstein then spread the shocking news back to the ghetto. Those who had envied the Gutmanns’ were suddenly full of pity. The diarist Ralph Oppenhejm noted, with horror and remorse, that the Gutmanns “were not sent to Italy. Instead they are locked up in the Little Fortress . . . . The husband is . . . seriously ill after the treatment they had put him under. And I was so jealous!”

  Unlike in the ghetto, in the Little Fortress there was no Prominenten A-list, no special treatment. Every prisoner was damned, and Jews damned most of all. Fritz and Louise would immediately have been separated. There would have been no chance to say good-bye to each other. Louise was locked in cell No. 8, the stifling women’s cell. Fritz went into solitary confinement. His dank cell was No. 2, off the first courtyard and reserved for Jews.

  Most of the Nazis’ meticulous records from the Little Fortress were destroyed near the end of the war, for obvious reasons. However, Fritz and Louise were evidently admitted into the Little Fortress under the R.U. designation—namely Rückkehr Unerwünschte, or “Return Unwanted.”

  The interrogations in the ghetto would have bore little resemblance to the beatings Fritz suffered in the Little Fortress. They would have been almost indescribably worse. From what I have been able to deduce, Fritz survived two weeks in cell No. 2 of the Little Fortress.

  According to Joan Dubova (a survivor of both Theresienstadt and Auschwitz), Fritz Gutmann was dragged from his cell in the late afternoon at the very end of April 1944. The Kapos pulled and pushed him all the way to the foot of the bastion. There Dubova, on her way back from work duty, saw my grandfather beaten to death with clubs by the Kapos below the ramparts of the Little Fortress.

  A different version I found was even more gruesome, however. Poor Fritz was garroted with a wire by the Kapo called Spielmann.

  Spielmann, reputedly, then took Fritz’s favorite gold cuff links, which had miraculously survived up to this moment. In another of Fritz’s pockets was a visa for Italy, signed by Mussolini himself.

  The story goes on that Spielmann later fell out of favor with his SS masters and was sent to Auschwitz. There he met a few of his former victims from the Little Fortress. They clubbed him to death in stages; the torture lasted a week.

  • • •

  Did Fritz, beaten beyond bearing, refuse one more time to sign over ownership of the Silbersammlung? I cannot know for certain, but clearly, after denying the SS Kommandant at least twice already, he had crossed a line. Nazi law was adamant on Jewish insubordination.

  If he had given them what they wanted, might he have been among those emaciated inmates who were still in Theresienstadt when the Red Army, finally, arrived on May 8, 1945?

  I do know that after examining hundreds of Nazi-era documents concerning the Gutmann silver collection (documents bearing the signatures of lawyers, German officials, and Nazi dealers), nowhere could I find Fritz’s authority to sell. So perhaps, despite his suffering, my grandfather defied the Nazis and Hitler right up to the end.

  Fritz’s final resting place is also beyond my grasp. Does he rest anonymously under that shockingly green grass by the red walls? Does he lie undiscovered in an unmarked grave under one of the earthen ramparts that surround the Little Fortress? Or in a mass grave? Was his body taken to cell No. 18, which led to the crematorium the Nazis built after they ran out of burial space at Theresienstadt, and then rendered like so many others into ashes—ashes that later on SS orders were dumped by the ton into the Ohre River? We searched all these places looking for a clue.

  My eleven-year-old, James, ran with a stubborn determination through the entire Terezin Memorial Cemetery looking for Gutmann, any Gutmann. Aisle after aisle, he scrutinized the individual graves, all 2,386 of them. Finally, exhausted, he returned just shaking his head silently.

  The scant remains of thousands more, from the Little Fortress, the Theresienstadt Ghetto, and the outside labor camp have been gathered in a mass grave marked by a pile of boulders. Out of the gray pile rises an enormous Star of David, made from steel girders. In all, the remains of some ten thousand victims lie within the Terezin Cemetery.

  • • •

  Today the town features an occasional shop and café for the benefit of the local residents, and a museum dedicated to the town’s dark history. As I walked about, the clean, quiet, well-kept streets seemed eerily deserted. Even though today some three thousand Czechs apparently live within the walled city, I barely saw a soul. The walled community of Terezin has the feel of a ghost town—literally, a town of ghosts.

  On the other side of the river, connected by a narrow bridge, and also enclosed by moats and battlements, is the smaller companion to the garrison town, the Kleine Festung, the once-dreaded Little Fortress. Although initially designed as a bulwark against foreign invasion, the Little Fortress was never called upon to actually repel an invader. No soldiers of any nation ever won any glory there. Instead, for most of its existence the Little Fortress served as a prison, a dungeon, a final destination of the da
mned. The people who died there—and there were thousands of them—included Gavrilo Princip, the assassin who had the dubious distinction of starting World War I. He died in the cell right next to my grandfather’s. Ironically, also, SS Sturmbannführer Karl Rahm was captured after World War II and sent back to the Kleine Festung, where he was held until he was executed in 1947.

  • • •

  These days, just outside the fortress, stands a dismal gift shop. It is hard to imagine what trinkets they sell. Improbably, they also offered microwave pizza. We shuddered and moved on. The Little Fortress stood empty, apart from small knots of solemn tourists who had come to see the dark prison cells, the worn set of gallows, and the cemetery. The well-manicured grass is intensely, curiously green. The Kleine Festung is a place of tunnels and underground bunkers filled with the dank odors of earth and stone and seeping wet. Eschewing the guided tours, I found myself in front of Gate No. 17. No. 18 was the mortuary cell, but No. 17 was the entrance to a long tunnel. The tunnel goes through the old fortifications of the Kleine Festung for a quarter of a mile. The long, dark, cold tunnel is almost unbearably claustrophobic, winding endlessly with no end in sight. The sense of dread is overwhelming. I realized my wife, my son, and I were all crying. Finally there is light, but the relief is short-lived. It is the firing range, the gallows, the killing field.

  Usually the Gestapo and the Kapos took their victims the short route from the cells to the execution site just outside the walls. The gate they took was known as the Gate of Death. However, the long tunnel also leads to the same place of horror. Taking the long tunnel would have added an immeasurable level of sadism to the Kapos’ routine brutality.

  I can’t help wondering if my grandfather took these same steps, the last he ever would, on that day in April 1944, as the Kapos poked and prodded and dragged him. He finally reached the light only to meet his end.

  My grandfather, the cultured and dignified man with the wry smile, who stares back at me from the old photographs, the man who loved art and music and beautiful things, died broken and shattered in this forlorn ditch.

  • • •

  The scant details of Louise’s fate are almost unbearably cryptic. Postwar accounts state that two excruciating months after Fritz’s murder, the Baroness Louise Gutmann von Landau was taken from the Fortress on July 2 and loaded aboard a cattle wagon. With her were just nine other souls. The destination was the extermination camp of Auschwitz.

  Compared to the three previous transports, which included over seventy-five hundred condemned, this time the SS ordered a special transport for just ten unwanted prisoners from the Little Fortress.

  Immediately on arrival in Auschwitz, my grandmother, the beautiful, elegant woman of the Man Ray portraits, the vivacious, fun-loving woman who tore across Europe, scarf flying, in her LaSalle convertible, was ordered into the “left line.” She had been spared slave labor. This gentle woman was instantly herded into a gas chamber and murdered. Her ashes, like those of over a million others, were next dispersed by noxious black smoke from the chimneys of the overworked crematoriums.

  Between March and November of 1944 the German killing machine was at the height of efficiency and the depths of depravity. During these few short months, while the Allies were advancing (and flying overhead), the Nazis disposed of nearly six hundred thousand Jewish lives in Auschwitz-Birkenau alone.

  One sad, final irony: I discovered that much of Auschwitz was built on land originally owned by the Laurahütte mining company. The Laurahütte had been founded in happier days by Louise’s grandfather Jacob von Landau. On the board of directors, just before the Nazi takeover, had been Louise’s uncle Eugen von Landau. Fritz’s brother Herbert was another director.

  • • •

  It was necessary to summon a special courage to retrace the final steps of Fritz and Louise. Unfortunately, I have read much about the complex of Nazi slave-labor and extermination camps known collectively as Auschwitz—the railhead selections, the medical experiments, the starvation, the hangings and shootings, the unspeakable barbarities committed against humanity. The living and the dead were treated like so much industrial waste. Beyond nausea and beyond belief, the mind attempts to grasp the enormity of it, but then recoils.

  Nevertheless, on another European trip I resolved to go to Auschwitz, to see the place where my grandmother died. At the train station in Warsaw, I stood on the platform for the train to Kraków. A poster even offered tours of Oświęcim—Polish for “Auschwitz”—just a short ride from Kraków. I tried to prepare myself for what lay ahead: the preserved remains of the death camp, the barbed wire and the gallows, the gas chambers and the crematoriums. I imagined the farm fields and birch forests where my grandmother’s ashes might have scattered. I tried to get some sense of her last days and hours.

  But when the train to Kraków came and the passengers, ordinary Poles and a few tourists, climbed aboard, I stood on the platform unwilling, unable, to move. I stood there, unused ticket in hand, and watched as the train pulled slowly away.

  I simply could not do it. I could not bear to see the place where my grandmother was murdered. I could not take the train to Auschwitz.

  CHAPTER 8

  BERNARD

  Bernard graduating Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1937.

  After his last visit to Bosbeek in the summer of 1938, my father, Bernard, then twenty-four, had returned to London to enjoy what was left of his youthful freedom. He understood that taking his art history degree at Cambridge had been all very fine, a properly broadening experience for a young gentleman, but making art a career was never a serious consideration. Sooner or later, just as Eugen had with Fritz, his father would insist that Bernard settle down in the ubiquitous family world of banking.

  In the meantime, he was determined to enjoy himself—not a difficult objective for a good-looking, socially connected, and quite wealthy young man in prewar London. With a few well-heeled friends, Bernard rented a seventeenth-century house in fashionable Mayfair, on the corner of Charles Street and Waverton Street—probably the last original timber-fronted house in all of London. As the storm clouds gathered over Europe, the house on Charles Street soon developed quite a local reputation; it was said that all one had to tell any Mayfair cabdriver was “Take me to the party house!” and the driver would know exactly where to go.

  The lull before the storm was short-lived. Britain’s declaration of war against Germany, after the invasion of Poland in September 1939, left my father in a somewhat unusual position. Although still a Dutch citizen by law, he was concurrently by birth a British citizen. Nevertheless, the Gutmann family was strongly associated with the new enemy, Germany, and Bernard also had close family ties, through his sister and his aunts, with Britain’s soon-to-be enemy Italy. Certainly he was well aware of the persecutions his parents and other ethnic Germans, even those with British citizenship, had encountered in England at the outbreak of the First World War. He understood, too, that wartime passions could often override legalities, or even common sense.

  His concerns were not misplaced. In the first days of the Second World War, around six hundred “enemy aliens” in Great Britain were interned. By May 1940 more than six thousand had been rounded up, some once again in camps on the Isle of Man, others shipped off to Canada and even Australia. Astonishingly, many of them were German and Austrian Jews who had recently fled persecution from Hitler, only to be considered potential allies of the Nazis by some mindless bureaucrat. Among them was Bernard’s cousin Luca, Herbert’s son, then living with Herbert and Daisy in their Park Lane apartment in London. Apparently Herbert’s and Luca’s association with the Anglo-German Union, whose members also included a number of prominent British Fascists, made them both suspect. Herbert, then suffering with throat cancer—his love of cigars had finally taken its toll—was allowed to remain free, perhaps because of his illness. A few years later, in 1942, the cancer would finally take his life. But Luca was arrested and shipped off to an internment camp in C
anada, along with more than two thousand other German and Austrian refugees who had aroused suspicion. It was all quite absurd, given that Herbert had come within an inch of being executed by the Nazis, and Luca had been living in England for years without any suspicious activities—not to mention that they were, in Nazi eyes, Jews or at least half-Jews. But then, in war common sense is often the first casualty.

  Even before the war began, my father began to anglicize himself. First he changed his name, by deed poll, from the official Bernhard Eugen Gutmann to the English translation, Bernard Eugene Goodman. Then, in January 1939, he enlisted as a private in the British army.

  Bernard was placed with the Gloucestershire Regiment, one of those venerable British units that traced its origins back to the seventeenth century. Given his athletic ability and adventurous spirit, he volunteered for training as a commando. Meanwhile, his regiment, as part of the British Expeditionary Force, was fighting a valiant rearguard action before evacuating from Dunkirk in the spring of 1940. Tragically, this was the same German offensive that trapped Fritz and Louise in Holland.

  My father had been eager to fight the Nazis. In January 1941, while on a training mission near the South Coast, he and some of his chums cadged weekend passes into town and checked into a hotel in Portsmouth. That night more than a hundred German bombers attacked the city. Being young and foolish, and feeling indestructible, my father stood on the second-floor balcony to watch the fireworks, instead of fleeing to an air-raid shelter. A German bomb landed close enough to blow him and the balcony across the street and onto the rubble below, breaking his back, several other bones, and cleaving off a portion of his right heel. His injuries would cause him pain for the rest of his life.

  Bernard spent six months in a military hospital, much of it encased in a body cast and in traction for his spinal injuries. It was not at all certain that he would ever walk again. He had hoped to remain in service, but it was impossible. His army discharge noted that he was “permanently unfit for any form of military service.”