The Lady in Gold

by Anne-marie O'connor

My beloved good wife,

  Today I got your precious letter of May 27th, for which I thank you with all my heart. I’m really doing fine here. My body, which has endured mountain hikes, doesn’t abandon me here, nor do my good spirits. I’m fresh and healthy. Your baldie has already a nice tanned color and red cheeks. Please send me 15 marks a week . . . Visiting, etc. is not permitted, my love. Your thoughts watch over me, like a guardian angel. I can really feel them.

  I kiss you, your husband.

  Ridiculous, Maria thought. He makes it sound like he’s on holiday.

  In Vienna they were unfurling banners of Jewish Shylocks with hooked noses on public buildings. She tried not to imagine what might really be happening in Dachau.

  “I’m fit as a fiddle,” Fritz wrote on June 6. “Knowing that my delightful Marienkinderl and family are doing well gives me strength, courage and balance,” he wrote. “Maria, we have been married for half a year. I am so happy to have you! I can feel your love so strongly, and it keeps my spirits up.” He asked Maria not to worry about him, and “don’t think about coming here, or trying in Vienna.” Fritz joked that Therese was “very unlucky with sons-in-law . . . I will always be totally yours, beloved wife.”

  The camp guards deliberately set out to dehumanize and disorient the privileged prisoners. Well-to-do scions like Fritz dug trenches, and composers cleaned latrines. On this level playing field, comedians cheered up depressed prisoners, and a kindly grocer with a fourth-grade education became the de facto camp therapist for those who were suicidal. Soccer games matched gays against Gypsies, or Jews against Communists. Fritz found himself befriended by burglars who bragged in meticulous detail of their heists at factories, banks, and jewelry stores. One night, smiling meaningfully at Fritz, one of the thieves described Bernhard Altmann’s textile factory: where the cash was hidden, when workers were paid, even the watchman’s dog. The burglar was one of the thieves who had broken into the factory a decade before. They had stolen so much from its safe that his accomplice had moved to America.

  Fritz, sitting on the dirt floor of the barracks, felt a strange lack of outrage. These criminals practiced their vocation—stealing—without disguising their crime with “legal” Aryanization or self-righteous rhetoric about a German “homeland.” Fritz felt only envy, “that I was the person from whom he had stolen, and not the one safe in the States.” In a netherworld in which social roles had been stripped off like carnival masks, Fritz and the burglar became fast friends.

  Maria’s letters filled Fritz with tenderness. “My beloved husband,” Maria wrote on June 17, “Yesterday evening Thea gave birth to a healthy boy. She and Robert are overjoyed! From Landau and his friends we were told that [you] will soon be on [your] way home. I’m with you every hour, and I dream about our reunion when I’m awake and when I’m sleeping.” At the grave of Fritz’s father, Carl, “I prayed for you,” Maria wrote. “In spite of everything, I’m so incredibly blessed to have you. Your Maria.”

  Your Maria. Fritz knew things were not fine. He knew he and Maria might never see each other again.

  But he clung to her gentle fictions as he drifted off to sleep, exhausted, listening to his bunkmates murmur about a rumor they would be sent to a place called Buchenwald.

  Instead, the guards sent Grünbaum.

  Maria’s letters began to worry Fritz. She must stop going to the Gestapo headquarters at the Metropol to ask for permission to visit him. What if some bored bureaucrat decided to arrest her?

  “After your last letter you must have been especially impatient,” Fritz wrote on July 3. “Don’t let Landau get to you! We didn’t mind the time before our engagement, and now we know how much we love each other, even if it takes three times longer” to be reunited, he wrote. “Shame on you, Duckling!”

  He reminded Maria that they had been married six months, and joked that if they were lucky, they’d be together again by their first wedding anniversary. “I want you to drive immediately to join your parents in Ischl, you hear me? I will address the next letter to Ischl!”

  “I have only one worry: If Peps is going to be well soon. Maybe he can write a few lines?”

  A few days later, Fritz’s burglar friend asked him if he wasn’t married to one of the Vienna Bloch-Bauers. He held up a newspaper obituary for Gustav Bloch-Bauer. He had died on July 2. Peps! His merry father-in-law, who had cried when Maria married but had opened his big heart to his Galician in-laws.

  Why hadn’t Maria told him?

  It was terrible to be unable to speak with her. Fritz was marooned, in an endless limbo. Day after day, he woke to dig ditches in the hot summer sun and then fell into bed for another day of toil. As he worked, he began to sing, over and over, a poem by Wilhelm Muller that Schubert had set to music. It was called “Courage.” “When your heart within you breaks, sing serenely and brightly,” he sang to himself. “If no God is here on earth, let’s all be gods together!”

  Thunder at Twilight

  There were many things Maria had not told Fritz.

  At the Stubenbastei, Gustav had declined precipitously after the Gestapo stole his Stradivarius and suicide took his best friend. It was as if all the losses of old age had happened overnight. One day, Therese asked Georg, the butler, to go to the butcher. Georg gave her a hard look. “Things will be different now,” Georg said, and walked off the job. Emma was ill. So Therese ventured out, looking away from the swastikas hanging from stores. One day she asked the baker for Gustav’s favorite pumpkin-seed rolls, but the shopkeeper only glared.

  The Gestapo had arrested Maria’s brother, Leopold, as a hostage for the assets of his father-in-law. Leopold had managed to flee abroad with a promise of shares of the sugar factory, which Ferdinand had protected in a Swiss bank trust. The “sudden deaths” continued. An entire family committed suicide with weapons the sons had once proudly displayed with their World War I medals.

  Gustav begged Therese not to go out again, even for a walk. He was afraid his indomitable wife would never come back.

  “Where is Fritzl?” Gustav kept asking. Maria told her father Fritz was still in prison. She didn’t dare tell him Fritz was in Dachau.

  Gustav now had severe gastrointestinal pain, which couldn’t be blamed on nerves. He had suddenly worsened. Therese told Maria her father had cancer and that it had metastasized. They searched for a specialist willing to treat him. Gentile doctors were reluctant or unwilling to treat Jews, and Jewish doctors were on the run or in hiding. The Felsovanyis’ Sanatorium Loew, the top private medical center, had been Aryanized. Therese heard it was to be the Vienna headquarters for the German Luftwaffe.

  On July 2, Therese looked in on Gustav and realized with a shock that he was gone.

  It was inconceivable to hold a service at the Stadt Temple, two blocks from Gestapo headquarters at the Hotel Metropol. Instead, they quietly placed Gustav’s ashes in an urn at the family mausoleum in Central Cemetery, under the gold-lettered plaque of Adele Bloch-Bauer. Hans Mühlbacher played for the funeral service with the two other members of Gustav’s quartet. They played Mozart, whose joyous spirit seemed to conjure up the merry Gustav of the old days.

  Gustav Rinesch dropped in to check on Maria.

  Rinesch was pulling any strings he could on Fritz’s behalf, and now his drinking buddies came in handy. One of the Richthofen barons, a nephew of World War I flying ace Manfred von Richthofen, the “Red Baron,” was overseeing Aryanized Jewish banks. Rinesch told Richthofen’s staff that getting Fritz out of Dachau, alive, would persuade Bernhard to hand over all his foreign accounts.

  Rinesch poured Maria some whiskey, but he did most of the drinking. He told Maria he was worried about her. “I don’t think you ever knew how much in love with you I was,” Rinesch began, after a couple of drinks, his eyes bleary, as if he hadn’t been sleeping well.

  There was a long, awkward silence.

  Maria dreamed of Fritz, dreams where he kissed her again and again, as he had in Paris. Or dreams where F
ritz was again the aloof stranger who loved someone else, and Maria would awake feeling haunted and unloved, relieved to remember that Fritz hadn’t abandoned her. They had taken him away.

  A few weeks after her father died, Maria awoke to loud knocking. It was early. Maria pulled on a dress and drowsily opened the door to stony-faced Gestapo officers. Maria froze. Arrest was commonplace now.

  The men parted to reveal a gaunt, sunburnt man, his head fuzzy with short stubble. Fritz! A fragile-looking Fritz, who bore no resemblance to the suave dandy who had won her heart with a romantic ode. But he was alive. Fritz smiled wanly as the Gestapo officers took their leave. Inside the door, he clung to her.

  Now Fritz and Maria enjoyed a second honeymoon, conducted in hushed whispers. Fritz was frightened, worried by the guards and the openly hostile world outside. He became feverish, and for days he slept. He awoke ravenously hungry, and asked for Viennese pastries with whipped cream. “I’m in love with my husband,” Maria typed on a sheet of paper one hot afternoon in September, as Fritz slept. “Night and day you are the one, only you beneath the moon and under the sun. In the roaring traffic in the loneliness of my lonely room I think of you.”

  Rinesch joked that Dachau had turned his rival, Fritz, into “a crew-cut skull, which didn’t improve his looks.” In the heat of late August, Rinesch spent his days in line at the Palais Albert Rothschild. It was now the new Central Office for Jewish Emigration, presided over by Adolf Eichmann. Rinesch said the mansion had been picked clean of art, furniture, fixtures, everything. The Nazis told Rinesch they wanted Maria’s mother, Therese, to sign over any remaining family valuables too. One day, as Rinesch stood in line to get Maria’s brother Robert a passport, Gestapo agents came by to kick, insult, and spit on Jews in line. “You don’t look like a Jew,” a young Gestapo agent remarked to Rinesch. “I’m here for a friend who’s sick in bed,” Rinesch replied. Robert was sick—with fear. “You Jew lackey,” the agent said derisively, laughing at Rinesch. After a lifetime in a Vienna known for its social delicacy, Rinesch was appalled.

  Fritz’s family was observant. They had welcomed the Sabbath together every Friday evening, with silver candlesticks that were such treasured keepsakes that their father had buried them when the emperor called for donations of metal in World War I. As roving gangs beat Jews on the streets in Vienna, Maria decided to please Fritz with a special celebration of the Jewish holiday Yom Kippur, or the Day of Atonement. Maria was a novice cook. Her dish, Fräulein Emma’s Hungarian-style peppers stuffed with spicy meats, was not entirely appropriate. Maria nervously pulled the hot dish from the oven. The peppers spilled all over the floor. She looked up with chagrin. But for the first time since his return, Fritz met her eyes and smiled with conspiratorial amusement, like the old Fritz. After helping her pick the peppers off the floor, he sat down with her and ate them, proclaiming the dish a delectable triumph.

  Bernhard finally got them a message: “I have found a way for you to leave. You must do exactly what I say, and tell no one. Wait until you hear from me.”

  All Saints’ Day was approaching. Roving mobs of brownshirts were erupting into spontaneous riots, randomly arresting Jews in the street. Why are we still here? Maria thought desperately one day, as she walked past Adele and Ferdinand’s house on Elisabethstrasse, now dark and shuttered, on her way to the Stubenbastei.

  Jahen answered the door at her house, wagging his tail and spinning happily. Silly Jahen! What would become of him? Maria had heard the Nazis shot the dogs of Jewish families right in front of them.

  It was very quiet. Emma was sleeping, though it was early afternoon. Emma was very ill. As Therese set the table for lunch, Maria tiptoed into Emma’s room and sat on her bed. Emma, her dear nanny, finally opened her eyes. “Emma,” Maria whispered. “Fritz and I are going to escape. We’ll take you with us.” The gray-haired Emma was no longer a young fräulein. Maria was like a daughter to her. Emma smiled, imagining an adventure, a life together, far away. “I love you more than my life,” Emma said. “I can’t come. I’m too sick.” Doctors suspected she had ovarian cancer. Soon Emma would go back to her village. Maria asked Emma to give Jahen to Georg. Georg loved Jahen. Maria hugged Emma. As she left, Emma called out that the jeweler needed to see her.

  The jeweler greeted Maria gravely and locked the door. His face was old and lined. He was sober and unsmiling. By now they must have picked his safe clean. Turning in Jewish jewelry was mandatory.

  The jeweler opened a small purple flannel bag and revealed two diamond earrings that matched Adele’s necklace. He pressed the bag into Maria’s hand. “I saved these for you, Maria. They could help you.” Meaning, Maria supposed, that they could be used as a bribe. The jeweler attempted a strained smile. “Go with God, Maria.”

  Maria asked Landau for permission to leave the house with Fritz for a doctor’s appointment. They took a city train, getting off at different stations to see if anyone was following. No one seemed to be. Another day, Maria told the guard they were going to the dentist. Listening to the radio, the guard disinterestedly told them to return by five that evening. It was a cloudy fall morning. Maria and Fritz pulled on their raincoats and set off. They walked a few blocks, hailed a cab, and asked to go to the airport. Maria had Adele’s diamond earrings in her brassiere. At the airport, a bespectacled man with a cold expression inspected their tickets carefully. A Catholic woman Maria knew had purchased tickets for a small commercial flight to the German city of Cologne.

  Since Austria was now Germany, they didn’t need passports. Fritz had no papers. The man waved them to the gate, and Maria breathed a sigh of relief.

  When they boarded the plane, a pretty blonde attendant looked Maria over carefully. Maria and Fritz went to the back of the plane and took the last seats. There were only ten other passengers. The plane’s propellers whirred, and Maria and Fritz relaxed. Then the propellers spun to a stop. The stairs returned to the plane, and the door of the plane opened. The captain came out of the cockpit, and he looked back at Maria and Fritz. Maria squeezed Fritz’s hand. She was terrified. The Gestapo must have learned of Fritz’s absence. They would be arrested! Some officials boarded and spoke with the flight crew, who nodded gravely. The pretty attendant asked for their attention. Bad weather at their destination had caused a delay. She thanked the passengers for their patience. Then she approached Maria and Fritz. They froze.

  “I was admiring your raincoat,” the attendant said to Maria, in a German accent, smiling. “Did you get it in Vienna?”

  Forty minutes later the plane took off for Cologne. When they landed, they went to the Gothic cathedral of Cologne to meet the contact who would take them to the Dutch border. They waited nervously for the rest of the afternoon. The man didn’t come. “Let’s not waste any more time,” Fritz said. They boarded a train to the German city of Aachen. There they gave a cabdriver an address in Kohlscheid, a small German town on the border. The driver couldn’t find the house. Finally he turned down a one-way street that led to the border post where Germans stood guard. “Let’s ask them,” the cabdriver said. Oh God no, Maria thought.

  Maria asked the cabdriver to drop them off. She and Fritz walked briskly, unsure of where they were going, when Maria suddenly saw a strikingly handsome young priest. “Ah yes, a lot of my people go to him,” the priest said, when they showed him the address. “I’ll take you.”

  The priest stopped at the house of a farmer, Jan Servatius Honnef. Honnef was a tall, long-limbed man with high cheekbones, clear blue eyes, and a kind, reassuring smile. He was Dutch and the father of six children. His farmland ran along the German side of the border. The border had always been friendly and porous, until the Nazi takeover.

  Jan’s son, Josef, worked in a mine a few miles away in Holland, so the family often crossed back and forth every day. Jan had expected Maria and Fritz to arrive the next day, but he welcomed them into his home.

  They sat down to a farmer’s dinner of chicken and bread with thick slabs of white cheese
, washed down with lager. They waited for the change in shifts at the border post they had passed, which would allow a several-minute lull in vigilance. Josef was to be their guide. He was in his early twenties and recently married, with a little girl, Elfriede, who doted on her father. But Josef had expected them to come the following day, and he wasn’t there.

  So Jan walked them into the crisp fall night. The sky was dark, with stars and a sliver of a moon. Maria had her diamond earrings in her bra. She and Fritz followed Jan through his pasture and over the stepping-stones of a little brook. Jan stopped for a moment and looked at the guards. Then he gingerly held down the barbed wire and whispered “Hop!” to Maria. Maria didn’t see the wire in the dark, and she thought he said “Run!” So she charged blindly ahead, falling face forward over the barbed wire into the mud, shredding her silk stockings. She lay there, certain she had given them all away.

  Fritz stepped carefully over the wire and helped Maria up.

  Jan waved goodbye and melted into the night.

  A Dutch man and woman stepped from the shadows, putting their fingers to their lips. “We’ll do the talking,” the woman whispered.

  But they met no Dutch border patrol on their walk to the little hotel in Maastricht. Bernhard had made arrangements with a son-in-law of the chief of police, and the hotel barred the doors behind them.

  At dawn, Maria and Fritz ran to catch the train to Amsterdam. In the Dutch capital, Bernhard had a private plane waiting, with champagne and caviar. At Liverpool, Bernhard’s contact in Immigration welcomed them warmly, though Fritz had no papers. Bernhard already had a factory in Liverpool. Maria and Fritz stared at each other. It was unreal. They had made it.

  Back in Vienna, the Gestapo banged on Therese’s door. “Where are your children?” they demanded. Therese had no idea what they were talking about.

  The Gestapo returned the next day. “We know your children are in Yugoslavia, and we can find them there,” they said.