The Lady in Gold

by Anne-marie O'connor

  Landau eagerly pulled out Adele’s diamond necklace, fingering it with satisfaction, then slipped it into his pocket like a handful of marbles. Maria was going to tell him that such a fine piece of jewelry could get scratched rolling around with pocket change and car keys. Adele had hardly worn the necklace after she decided she was a socialist. It was in perfect condition. But Maria remained silent.

  Landau walked through the apartment, appraising the modern kitchen and bathroom. He ran his hand over Bernhard’s luxurious brocade drapes, lingering in the bedroom and rubbing the fine sheets between his fingers, until Maria nervously led him back to the kitchen. Landau told Maria and Fritz they had to move out of the apartment. As she and Fritz packed, Landau stopped them, demanding a satin dress, some fine silk stockings, an elegant black smoking suit. He spotted a silk dress hanging over a chair; Maria had set it aside to remove a red wine spot. He wanted that too. Did she have to give him anything he demanded? What difference did it make, really, Maria thought. A lot of these things were wedding gifts. She hadn’t had them long enough to be attached to them. Landau’s men, meanwhile, brought a suitcase and some small bags up the stairs. The Gestapo was taking the apartment Bernhard had created for them, after just ten days of married life there.

  As Maria and Fritz headed downstairs to another Altmann family apartment in the building, the guards brought Landau’s things in. Was Landau going to sleep in their bed? That would put Maria and Fritz under house arrest. The agents stationed at the door seemed to leave no question. They were Landau’s prisoners.

  Or were they? Landau smiled as Maria left for the streetcar, and said goodbye, in his working-class Viennese accent. At least Landau didn’t try to greet her the way he did his fellow agents and her neighbors, who gleefully replied in kind: “Heil Hitler!”

  The streets were erupting with joy. The newspaper said Hitler was on his way. People poured out of their homes and ran past her, waving Nazi flags, on their way to the Heldenplatz, Heroes Square, as the news spread. At the Stubenbastei, her father was sitting in his study, pale and silent. Gustav greeted Maria with a wan smile, as Fräulein Emma quietly prepared lunch. Outside, people began to cheer wildly. Therese walked briskly through the apartment, shutting windows and drawing drapes. “Peps,” Maria said to her father, “come have something to eat.” It was impossible to ignore Hitler’s arrival. A far-off roar grew as the motorcade neared Heroes Square. Maria wished there was a way to nail the windows shut, as the family sat quietly and listened to the crowd chant “Heil Hitler.” Gustav stared into his plate silently.

  As Maria made her way home to Fritz, the path of Hitler’s motorcade was strewn with roses. Eager Viennese waved the flags of Nazi Germany.

  If only we could find Bernhard, Maria thought. Bernhard was so fearless. Bernhard would make her father strong. But Bernhard, Maria and Fritz discovered, had fled. He was driving across Vienna as news of the Anschluss came on the radio. Turn the car around, Bernhard ordered the chauffeur: Get us to the Hungarian border. Bernhard, with his sprawling textile empire and foreign bank accounts, knew he would be a prime target. Bernhard had been keeping an eye on Hitler since he began to threaten Austria in February. The memory of anti-Jewish mobs in Poland was etched in his psyche. Bernhard’s driver pulled up to a quiet rural border crossing. A guard stopped him. Bernhard insisted. The guard, perhaps persuaded by some of Bernhard’s cash, told him to wait for darkness. At nightfall the guard turned his back. Bernhard slipped out of his elegant sedan and ran into the woods of Hungary.

  In Vienna, the Gestapo was furious. Bernhard’s wife, Nelly, tearfully protested that she had no idea where he was. “Do you know your husband has another family?” they taunted her, confirming a terrible suspicion she had long harbored. “Did you know your husband has a mistress and three children?”

  Maria’s father was more withdrawn every day, and he complained of vague abdominal pains, perhaps from nerves. When a Gestapo agent banged on the door, Gustav didn’t even come out of his study. His stern wife had long intimidated him, but now he relied on her strength. Therese showed the Gestapo agent to the parlor. “Would you mind removing your hat for a lady?” she said witheringly. The pink-cheeked young man quickly put his hat on the settee.

  The next morning, Therese insisted that Gustav accompany her on a stroll in the composer’s park. He trudged by the golden statue of Johann Strauss like a sleepwalker. When they returned, Fräulein Emma opened the door with a look of alarm. The Gestapo had come! The officers had asked to see the Rothschilds’ Stradivarius cello. Georg, the butler, had opened the glass music cabinet and handed over the valuable instrument. The Gestapo carried it away. Gustav was visibly shaken.

  Did they have to take his cello? Maria thought, as she walked from Stubenbastei to see Christl. How did the Gestapo know he had it? They knew everything.

  Christl’s father must be happy, Maria thought. His beloved Hitler was in Vienna. Christl opened the door with red-rimmed eyes, wearing a simple black dress, her wheat-blonde hair in a French twist. “Maria, my God! Something awful has happened,” Christl whispered, pulling Maria into the apartment so neighbors wouldn’t hear. Christl poured them each a glass of wine. Christl couldn’t talk long. Of course, father was delighted when Hitler came. Then he discovered he was violating the race laws. Christl’s mother, a baptized Catholic, had Jewish parents. That meant Christl and her sister were half Jewish. This was news to her father! His euphoria faded to reveal an impossible future. He found his old World War I pistol, raised it to his temple, and pulled the trigger.

  “He was so happy Hitler was coming,” Christl said, shaking her head. “He found out all his dreams were false.”

  Maria gasped. She had never liked Christl’s father. But this was shocking.

  There was more. The Nazi fiancé of Christl’s sister had broken off the engagement, though perhaps he could help them escape. Anton Felsovanyi had gone to see Hitler speak, out of curiosity. All of Vienna was at the Heldenplatz, waving and cheering. When Felsovanyi got home, his mother, Gertrud, told him she had Jewish parents. They had to leave their elegant palace on Pelikangasse to avoid being arrested. After a lifetime as a Catholic, on the day of Hitler’s triumph Felsovanyi had discovered he was Jewish. Felsovanyi’s sister, Maria Aline, a comely sloe-eyed girl with a sleek bob, was jilted by her Catholic fiancé.

  Felsovanyi might be Christl’s husband, Maria thought, if Gertrud weren’t such a snob. Not that it would help now. Christl went to the parlor mirror and began to pin up loose strands of her long blonde hair. With her blue eyes and hourglass figure, Christl was the living image of a good German girl. It all seemed so bizarre. “You’d better go,” Christl said. “My mother and sister will be back. They’re trying to organize a memorial. There are problems with my father’s family, though they all seemed to like us. Before.” Christl looked at Maria. What a mess!

  “So now we’re all going to leave, just like that?” Christl said, looking around the comfortable apartment with its plush rugs, her father’s family portraits, the ticking antique clock decorated with a pastoral maiden and her suitor. Leave everything?

  That night, Maria went home to Fritz. Bernhard had sent word: You must leave the country. All of you. I’ll arrange it. Don’t do anything to provoke the Gestapo.

  The mobs in the streets seemed to be growing more violent. Terrible stories were coming out of the poor neighborhood of Leopoldstadt. Elderly Jews were being ordered to get down on their hands and knees to scrub the streets. Sometimes the water was mixed with acid, so it burned their hands. In the posh Währing district, Nazis urinated on the heads of Jewish women as they knelt down to scrub. Brownshirts were forcing merchants to paint “Juden,” in big letters, on their shops. They grabbed a woman who ventured into a Jewish store and hung a sign around her neck, this aryan swine buys from jews, forcing her to sit in the store window for hours, weeping, while crowds yelled insults and spit at her. Jeering crowds were plundering stores, and even barging into the homes of Jewish f
amilies.

  Wealthy families like the Bloch-Bauers had factories, valuables, and bank accounts that could be used to bolster the coffers of the Third Reich. But how long could that shield them? Dapper Louis Rothschild was locked up at Gestapo headquarters at the old Hotel Metropol, where Mark Twain had imagined he saw Satan from his window. The Gestapo agents who “searched” the home of the aging industrialist Isidor Pollack beat him so badly that he died. Franz Rottenberg, the chairman of the Creditanstalt, was picked up by SS agents and pushed to his death from a speeding car.

  Uncle Ferdinand had briefly attempted to organize a monarchist rebellion against the Anschluss, at his age! Thank God he had given up and fled to his Czech castle.

  What a relief, Maria thought, that Ferdinand didn’t have to listen to the news that Adele’s old friend Karl Renner, the dashing hero of Red Vienna and former chancellor, endorsed the takeover as a way to heal the wounds of World War I.

  In a statement covered by national radio, Renner confessed some distaste for the “methods” of the Anschluss. “But the Anschluss has nonetheless been achieved; it is a historical fact,” Renner said. “I regard this as satisfaction indeed for the humiliations of Saint-Germain and Versailles. The twenty years of stray wandering of the Austrian people is now ended.”

  Maria and Therese listened in disbelief.

  How could a onetime hero of Red Vienna place a seal of approval on a movement that had persecuted Jews for years in Germany? What about the Jewish friends who had helped Renner become chancellor, build schools and hospitals, implement social reforms? Were they now so expendable? Maria flicked the radio off.

  What if her father heard?

  But Gustav was sitting silently, staring blankly at the curtains drawn over the closed windows. The Ringstrasse, the source of so much joy and pleasure to Gustav, with its promenades, moonlit strolls, and cafés, was now a source of dread. He didn’t dare to walk around the corner. Gustav sat like a ghost in his chair. When Maria kissed him, he managed a wry smile.

  Now the family concealed many things from Maria’s father.

  They kept the radio off in the apartment a few days later, when the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, staged an hours-long rally in Vienna for an appallingly vast sea of admirers. Goebbels dismissed foreign press reports of attacks on Jews as just Greuelmärchen—gruesome fables.

  “I have been informed that many Jews in Vienna are committing suicide,” he told the crowd with faux sadness, alluding to reports that hundreds of Viennese Jews had taken their lives since the Anschluss.

  “In the past, Germans committed suicide. Now Jews are committing suicide, and there is nothing I can do about it, since I cannot put a policeman behind every Jew,” Goebbels said in a coldly mocking tone.

  The crowd roared with laughter and applause.

  The world had gone mad. What were they going to do?

  Maria and Fritz still found refuge in new love, even under the watchful eye of Felix Landau. Maria was concerned, but not frightened, when in late April, as the chestnut trees bloomed along the Ringstrasse, the Gestapo came to pick up Fritz for questioning. We’ll bring him back this afternoon, Landau assured Maria.

  Night fell. Then dawn. Fritz had not returned.

  Landau sounded a little tougher now as he told Maria that Fritz was at Rossauer Lande, a police jail where political prisoners were held for questioning by the Gestapo at the Hotel Metropol.

  Fritz would be released, Landau said, when Bernhard turned over the foreign accounts of his textile factory, and everything else.

  Love Letters from a Bride

  Just weeks after their honeymoon in Paris, Maria had lost Fritz. As their world crumbled, on April 29, Maria sat down to write him a love letter.

  My beloved Fritzl,

  I hope you are well and you write to me soon. What should I get you? Do you have a blanket and pillow? I will bring you a comb, a brush, the toothbrush holder, new laundry and warm pants on Monday. Today I am sending you five reichsmarks. I will send you some more money in two or three days. Your family is well. We are together, speak only of you, and love you boundlessly, above all your wife Maria, embracing you from deep in my heart.

  With love from your family embracing you, Maria.

  Fritz replied in the same spirit.

  My beloved Duckling!

  I arrived here in a good mood, and am here with some acquaintances. I got your delivery this morning at the police station, and was allowed to take it with me, to our great joy. I thank you for it, with all my heart. In the future, there will be a laundry package brought to me every week, Tuesday between 4 and 5:30 p.m., and my dirty laundry will be collected at the same time. I really don’t want you to run these errands. And of course, visiting is not allowed. So please send me: one laundry bag, slippers, another pair of pajamas, two day shirts, two pairs of underpants, handkerchiefs, two towels, a rubber bag for the washing things, a little comb, Brilliantine, a small toothbrush, toothpaste, plus, via postal order, 6.50 marks. You’re allowed to write me daily (everybody’s allowed to write to me). I, however, am only allowed to write one card every 8 to 14 days, and of course, I will write it to you. I send greetings to all the others—yes please, one sports training suit. Only send older clothes. Please don’t be afraid for me. I’m really excellent, and the treatment is flawless. I also have a lot of patience and love for you. Please send greetings to all of our loved ones. I embrace you.

  Your Fritz.

  Maria was startled. The treatment was “flawless”? Well of course, his mail was read by the police. What could he say?

  There was no point in upsetting him with the stories she heard of the Vienna unraveling at their doorstep. Teenagers were painting “Juden” on Jewish stores up and down the posh Karntnerstrasse. A feeble old Jewish man had been kicked to death in front of a jeering mob. Thousands of Jewish professionals were being arrested. Her father’s best friend, a Catholic pediatrician, had committed suicide with an overdose of morphine. In his formal old script, he wrote a farewell apology: “From an old Austrian who can no longer live in the world of today.”

  How could Maria convey all this, in letters she was sure were read by authorities, written in tiny letters on pieces of paper as small as an index card? Yet her and Fritz’s attempts to bridge this gap in correspondence provide a remarkable document of two young Viennese trying to cope together with the deterioration of their safe, predictable world.

  A few days later Maria wrote:

  My beloved Fritzl,

  Today I received your lovely card, and it made me so happy. In my thoughts I am living only with you. My parents are well. Our families are often together and every word is devoted to you. Be patient. Everything will be fine. Soon you will come back to your wife who loves you above all else . . .

  “Be embraced by your Maria,” she wrote, signing her letter with a drawing of a little duckling.

  Next Maria wrote “my beloved husband” that she had tried to bring him sports clothes, but the police had turned her away. “I’m with you every minute of the day, and walk around as if in a dream,” Maria wrote. “Have patience, love. Our parents are fine. They send you a thousand greetings. I really am bearing up with courage, a real ‘lion-woman.’ Keep my loving memory. I love you more every day. Your Maria.”

  Fritz’s sister Klara wrote Fritz that Maria’s little fox terrier, Jahen, was “taking good care of his mistress,” barking at anyone who came near her. “Your wife is the most enchanting creature on earth!” his niece, Lisl, added.

  “My beloved Fritzl,” Maria wrote on May 5. “It has been a week since I last saw you. For me, it has been an eternity.” Gustav, she wrote, “has problems with his nerves.” This was a massive understatement.

  “Last night I had a wonderful dream, that we would see each other soon,” Maria wrote. “Do love me. Thinking always of you, your wife.”

  On May 6, Thea, the chic and very pregnant young wife of Maria’s brother Robert, wrote Fritz that “the Duckl
ing ruffles her feathers sadly every day, and kisses you, deeply in love.”

  “I have to tell you again how incredibly much I love you,” Maria wrote next. “Peps is doing much better with his nerves . . . I’m trying to be brave and patient.”

  In reality, Maria’s father was having anxiety attacks and chest pains. Seven close family friends had taken their lives.

  Fritz focused on minutiae in his letter, sending Maria elaborate laundry lists. He had four daytime shirts but needed two more. He needed two pairs of pajamas, twelve handkerchiefs, two napkins, leather gloves, terrycloth towels, a white pullover with sleeves, a gray pullover without sleeves, a cravat.

  “My beloved Fritz,” Therese wrote from the Stubenbastei. “We’re thinking of you with much love. Your good, lovely wife is with us often, and is our whole joy. Be embraced with much love, from your Mama who loves you.” Maria’s father added: “How much I’m hoping that you will soon, with the help of God, be home with our beloved Baby (Bützel).” On the same card, Maria wrote, “You see, the parents are fine, my love!”

  Maria didn’t dare tell Fritz that no one was fine. Everyone they knew regretted not trying to escape immediately. Austria’s deposed chancellor, Kurt Schuschnigg, locked in the Belvedere Palace and a nervous wreck, had married a Czernin countess by proxy. On April 27, the Nazis had filed trumped-up charges of tax evasion against Ferdinand. His sugar factory was being run by one of his employees, a cashier who happened to belong to the Nazi Party. Jews had been ordered to register their assets.

  “My dearest Fritzl,” Maria wrote on May 11, “I received your truly precious letter. You write so enchantingly. Your lines keep me going for the whole week, and I live for the next letter. As you know, I can wait, and love you more every day. When someone is loved by you, they are so strong.”

  Maria gently noted that Elsa Kuranda and her journalist son, Peter, “died suddenly.” “You see, I tell you everything,” she wrote. “As an improvement on your food rations, I send you a big pot full of love. Your life, Maria.”