The Lady in Gold

by Anne-marie O'connor

  “Died suddenly” was, of course, code for “committed suicide.” Elsa Kuranda had been Therese’s best friend. The charmed world the Kurandas shared with the Bloch-Bauers had become incomprehensible, a place where once-pleasant neighbors turned on them, and their beloved city unleashed goons whose hatred they had no means of comprehending. Mother and son decided they could not go on.

  Bernhard had tramped through the Hungarian woods and boarded a train to Yugoslavia, paid a seaplane pilot to fly him to Lake Trasimeno in Umbria, and made his way to unoccupied Paris. Now he was bivouacked in the apartment where Maria and Fritz spent their honeymoon just weeks earlier, plotting his family’s escape. Ever the tough dealmaker, Bernhard didn’t care if he had to beg, borrow, or lie his family’s way out of this maelstrom.

  Maria could have left on her own. She had a passport in good order, money, the help of Rinesch. But she rebuffed any suggestion that she leave without Fritz. On May 13, Maria wrote to Fritz that she went to the Hotel Metropol to beg the Gestapo for permission to see him.

  A contemptuous desk clerk waved her away dismissively. In his eyes, Maria was no longer a well-to-do lady, or even a fellow Viennese. She was just a Jew. Maria wrote:

  I went away quite depressed. If God is willing, it won’t be long before we are together again. I’m with you completely, and the fact that we love each other so much, and have a long life ahead of us, gives us strength, turning weeks into days.

  I read your little letter every hour, over and over. It makes me incredibly happy. Peps said yesterday, “When will our adorable Fritz return?” Think of them, all the people who love you, and of a happy future with your wife, who loves you above all. The little Duckling is greeting the hero.

  Kissing you with my whole heart, Maria

  On May 15, Fritz wrote back:

  My beloved wife,

  With incredible joy I received your cards, as well as the razor. The four elements that determine my life are, the walk in the courtyard, the extra food from the four reichsmarks a week, a few rays of sunshine that at noon come through an angle of the cell—and the mail . . . My prayer book contains, besides your cards . . . the soulful words of our beloved Peps.

  Maria and her father “find words that go through the most forbidding walls, straight to the heart.” Fritz wrote. “Your lines are a revelation, a poetic reprieve from daily life.” He asked Maria to send his red cotton scarf and leather gloves, his lederhosen for the high summer, and photos of her.

  “Lover!” Fritz wrote:

  In my thoughts I send you hundreds of letters, and now that finally Sunday has arrived, it is again a very dull and ordinary one. I lay awake half the night thinking about how I could write you even more tenderly than ever.

  If you really live through the bad times, the future will pay us back a thousandfold. These days are forging the pitcher from which happiness will be poured. Please be strong. My beloved Maria, I am always with you.

  And for God’s sake, please don’t go on the diet that Luise was on! I wrap you in a long embrace, holding you so tightly in my arms to renew your force so you will be a strong woman for the weeks to come, even without me.

  Your husband in love

  Maria laughed at this. How could Fritz think she would start dieting at a time like this! “We both have to be patient,” Maria wrote on May 16. “But these weeks are bringing us so much closer. It won’t be much longer before you’ll come back to me. Last year, I was much more unhappy, as I waited for an uncertain goal, and this year I know you will come to me. I only live for you . . . A thousand kisses from your Maria.”

  On May 18, Maria wrote, “My love, today your letter arrived. Your beloved, long-awaited letter . . . My Fritzl, what an immense love I have for you . . . I just have one thought, and that is you, again and again you. My whole life long, I will only love you.”

  Maria didn’t mind that Fritz was seldom allowed to reply. Writing him allowed her to retreat into the romantic dream that shut out the menace closing in around her family.

  If there was one thing Maria underestimated during these tender exchanges, it was her resident Gestapo agent, Felix Landau. Landau still treated Maria with courtly deference. Maria saw him as an errand boy for more powerful evil men. She never imagined she was getting a daily, firsthand look at one of history’s monsters.

  Landau’s origins were pitiful. He was born in 1910 to a poor young Viennese Catholic woman. Around the time of his first birthday, his mother married a Jewish gentleman who gave the boy his name and raised him as his son, then died suddenly when Landau was nine. His mother sent him to a harsh Catholic boarding school and, when he was fifteen, to a trade school to learn furniture making. There he finally found dignity and belonging—as a member of the National Socialist Working Youth. This led Landau to Austria’s Nazi Party.

  When Hitler rose to power in Germany, Landau became a member of the Schutzstaffel, the SS, a fascist militia that surfaced publicly in 1934 when Landau and other Nazis-in-waiting mounted a coup against Austrian chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss. The coup failed, but Dollfuss was killed. Landau and other plotters were imprisoned, along with the Viennese attorney who defended them, Erich Führer. Released in 1937, Landau headed to Germany for a medal and a Gestapo post.

  Like Hitler, Landau returned to his Austrian homeland, no longer a loser, but a victor. Now he ruled the fates of the people into whose parlors he once would have entered only as a workman.

  Maria had no way to know Landau had been handpicked for a systematic campaign to rob wealthy Jews.

  Landau was playing a stealthy game of cat and mouse with Maria and Fritz. He probably read their love letters. Maria knew nothing of this the day she went to the police to bring fresh shirts to Fritz.

  Fritz was no longer there. Landau feigned ignorance.

  Of course, he knew Fritz had been transferred to another prison, the Landesgericht Wien, near City Hall. There the Nazis had put a guillotine in an execution room where hundreds would be murdered.

  Maria found Fritz by doggedly combing the detention centers of Vienna. She was certain of only one thing: She was first in Fritz’s heart. But that meant so much.

  “My love!” Fritz wrote Maria on May 22, from his new prison. “From the post I get I’m the Croesus of the prison! You cannot imagine how my time seems shorter by receiving this precious mail.

  “The daily gigantic letters are wonderful,” but if the entire family was going to write, “then I really need to be locked up,” Fritz joked. “The big event of the week is the photograph of the little wife. I laugh with joy just looking at it. The little frau, pensive.” Fritz wrote that his spirits were lifted by the camaraderie of his fellow prisoners, and “sometimes we have great laughs together. I don’t sleep on the floor anymore, so I’m really doing well,” he quipped.

  He peppered Maria with questions. Could she get his shirt collar repaired? “When is Thea supposed to give birth? I will keep my fingers crossed for her. When will her parents go to Ischl? What about you?”

  Go to Ischl for a holiday? Was he mad? Maria thought. They’re hunting Jews. One overzealous teenager in uniform on the road could doom their entire family. Her father was afraid to leave the house.

  “Please send an honest report,” Fritz concluded.

  An honest report? The Nuremberg laws “for the Protection of German Blood” were extended to Austria on May 20, forbidding marriage between Jews and “Aryans,” and prohibiting Jews from employing women “of German blood” under the age of forty-five as domestic workers. There were 170,000 Jews in Vienna, and it was now clear none were welcome. The Gestapo fired 153 of the 197 professors at the University of Vienna Medical School. One Jewish Nobel laureate, Otto Loewi, was jailed and forced to transfer his prize money to a Nazi-controlled bank before authorities would let him out of the country. Sigmund Freud was freed from Gestapo headquarters only through the intervention of an American millionaire who was also a former patient, after being forc
ed to sign a paper testifying to good treatment. “I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone,” Freud wrote drily, with an irony that would have made Mark Twain proud.

  An honest report would have landed them all in jail.

  “Dearest wife, I’m so happy to be your husband,” Fritz continued.

  If you feel this much love, it’s easy to be in prison, even for a long time, with joy. I feel sorry for all the people who are free, but don’t have a wife like you.

  I live on the thoughts of you and our future, and I’m incredibly happy dreaming about it. I’m also happy about the loved ones of both our families, who I know care for me. I’m deeply grateful to everybody, and for the love you give me, my beloved Duckling.

  Please keep sending me all your love. Please be healthy. Treat yourself well. And be deeply joyful and merry. I am too. I cuddle up to you and kiss your beloved mouth deep and long.

  Your husband, Z207

  He was now a number.

  Then, suddenly, silence. The letters stopped. Maria went to the Landes-gericht Wien prison and Fritz wasn’t there. The guard shrugged. A train had left for Dachau. Maybe Fritz was on it. Dachau! Maria hastily scrawled a panicked note to the Dachau command. “Desperately begging for information about the well-being of Friedrich Altmann, admitted May 24. Wife and family entirely without notice.”

  Work Makes Freedom

  Fritz was resting in his prison cell on an unbearably hot night in late May when SS officers strode in and ordered him and two hundred other men to get in line. “They’re taking us to Dachau,” some of the men whispered.

  Dachau.

  The SS recruits who pushed them onto the train with their rifle butts were boys. They looked sixteen or seventeen. Their soft faces contorted with hate as they yelled: “Get down!” The teenagers pushed a slow old man onto the floor and kicked him until he curled up in pain. They ordered the men to sit motionless and stare at the light in the ceiling. As the train bumped along into the countryside, older men strained to hold their necks rigid.

  As the hours went by, the guards forced elderly passengers to stand. Many were not physically capable of it. A former managing director of the Austrian railways stumbled, and they beat the old man over the head with their rifle butts until blood streamed down his face. He cringed on the floor, clutching his broken spectacles, his eyes bright with bewildered tears.

  This train was not filled with huddled masses of poor Viennese from Leopoldstadt. The passengers were clergymen, entertainers, decorated World War I veterans, hostages from wealthy families. This train carried celebrities like Fritz Grünbaum, the Groucho Marx of Vienna. This Dachau would house child psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim.

  Some gentlemen eyed the windows. Men had come into their homes, stolen their silverware, and dragged them off. What had become of their wives and daughters? But the guards watched them closely. People had already tried to jump from the train.

  Outside, the train rolled through a spring landscape Fritz knew by heart, a riot of Austrian wildflowers that Klimt had immortalized in his paintings. In the humid air, red poppies rested alongside lacy spikes of bouquets in every shade of purple and lavender. The grass was the pale green Klimt had captured so vividly, and the rich soil was fecund with beets, wheat, and barley. It was an unseen paradise, and Fritz, who had been in jail since the first chestnut trees bloomed, could tell when they passed through farmland by the smell of moist earth.

  Dawn broke. The train slowed to a stop. Fritz was shoved off the train, as cramped and stiff as a crab. Guards met them with angry faces, barking orders: “Line up! Get your head shaved there!” Fritz stood exhaustedly in line.

  The Fritz who had once risen at dawn to secure good standing room for La Bohème at Vienna’s elaborate, angel-bedecked State Opera now looked around, amazed, at a very different architectural tableau. Dachau, Germany’s original concentration camp, was outfitted for another kind of theater. The camp was surrounded by a deep trench and a high fence of barbed wire. Its stark yard was designed to make prisoners feel as insignificant as insects. This was the stage of deliberate cruelty. The SS held absolute power over the prisoners, who were humiliated, degraded, and crushed. Dachau would be the model for the camps of the Reich. As Fritz passed through the black iron gates, he saw the words spelled out, in twisted metal: work makes freedom.

  Was there anyone less suited to withstand the rigors of life at Dachau than the golf-playing, waltzing former playboy Fritz Altmann? His brother Bernhard fought the family battles. His mother, Karoline, had founded the business. If Fritz worried about clean handkerchiefs and pressed shirts in jail in Vienna, such niceties were now left behind.

  The Nazis had already seized Bernhard’s Vienna factory and arrested its two dozen managers. Bernhard still held cash from the factory’s earnings in foreign bank accounts. To force Bernhard to transfer the accounts to them, authorities had adopted “the gangster’s method, and took a hostage,” Fritz realized. “I was taken for the hostage, and was imprisoned. Nobody told me why, for how long, or to what purpose.”

  The Nazis were in a stalemate, chasing their infuriating prey. They set up a meeting in Paris. Bernhard arrived in an impeccable suit. Outwardly, it was like a business meeting, albeit a rather coercive one. The emissaries told Bernhard that if he wanted to see his brother alive, he should sign his client payment accounts over to them.

  The Reich also demanded his Paris assets, with an arrogance that the canny Bernhard noted with great interest. The Germans were not yet in France, yet they already felt entitled to Jewish businesses in Paris. Interesting.

  They ordered Bernhard to promise never to produce his well-known brand, Bernhard Altmann, anywhere else, to avoid competition with the factory they had confiscated. Bernhard wanted to laugh out loud—who the hell did they think they were? But he maintained his stern poker face, puffing on his cigar. “I’ll do as you wish,” Bernhard lied. “But first you must release my brother.”

  Since Fritz’s last name began with an A, he was among the first to have his head shaved. As the afternoon wore on, the prisoners were registered, shaved, and insulted, until they stood exhausted before the camp commander in their baggy tunics with Stars of David fashioned with red and yellow triangles.

  The men had not slept in thirty hours. Fritz stumbled to the barracks where he would sleep. Sunburned, dazed, and numb, he lay down on his wooden plank and passed out. At 3:30 a.m., the men stood before the guards as they took roll call, punctuated with “Jewish swine!”

  “Everything in Dachau is prohibited,” a commander told new prisoners. “Even life itself. If it happens, it happens by accident.”

  Fritz and the other men dug ditches and carted cement. The day went on endlessly into the evening. Those who fell down were flogged. Finally, at 9 p.m., they were relieved. They staggered to dinner. Men in their sixties and seventies—as old as his father-in-law, Gustav, Fritz shuddered—appeared near collapse. Fritz wondered how long they could make it. A few days after they arrived, they were forced to stand at attendance for hours while guards searched the camp and its surroundings for a missing prisoner. They finally found him. He was an old man, dead in his bed.

  Work makes freedom!

  What a lie, thought Fritz, who had never in his life performed arduous labor.

  In Fritz’s experience, the people who extolled the virtues of work were people who wanted other people to toil for them.

  They’re going to work us to death, the “Jewish swine,” Fritz thought.

  But the prisoners were not all Jewish. Some of the five hundred men at the camp were gay, with pink triangles, Communists and socialists with red triangles, while black triangles were used for “anti-social elements.”

  The deposed mayor of Vienna, Richard Schmitz, a Catholic, was in the camp for refusing to hand over City Hall. Also in Dachau, unbelievably, were Ernst and Maximilian Hohenberg, the sons of the last heir to the Habsburg throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination in 1914 had set off World War
I. The other prisoners, startled to be mingling with Habsburgs, addressed them as “Your Royal Highness.” The men bore their ordeal stoically, their stony faces doing little to disguise their disdain.

  Fritz was delighted when Grünbaum, the social satirist, was assigned to his barracks. Grünbaum was well-known in the cabarets of Berlin and Vienna. One of the letters asking for Grünbaum’s release was written from the Chateau Marmont hotel in Hollywood. Like those of the Marx Brothers, the targets of Grünbaum’s humor ran the gamut, from politics—meaning, of course, the Nazis—to himself. Grünbaum was irreverent, wicked, and an astute mimic. He reduced the guards who terrorized them by day into buffoonish, goose-stepping cartoons by night.

  But as the days passed, he did it more discreetly.

  The camp guards had it in for Grünbaum.

  They weren’t ashamed to imprison talented people. A Nazi propaganda pamphlet circulating in Vienna had photos of “Jews and Jew Lackeys at the Dachau Resort”—celebrities in uniform. Poor Grünbaum was featured prominently, his famous beloved face squinting into the Dachau sun in a white camp tunic. The Viennese were accustomed to seeing posters of Grünbaum in a dapper smoking jacket, smiling under his mustache and comically raised eyebrows, with his glamorous blonde wife, Lily Herzl, at his side. This new vision was bizarre, another sign of their upside-down world.

  Another camp luminary was Herbert Zipper, a former student of Richard Strauss. At the time of his arrest, Zipper had been conductor of the Vienna Madrigal Chorus and the Dusseldorf Symphony.

  Now these men, accustomed to applause and autograph seekers, were themselves the audience, for sadistic political theater.

  One morning, at roll call, a guard called out a prisoner’s number, and added: “Your mother croaked.”

  Now it was Fritz’s turn to soft-pedal reality. He wrote Maria on June 1: