The Lady in Gold

by Anne-marie O'connor

  Luise! But Yugoslavia was unoccupied. Were the Nazis already coveting the Gutmann timber empire? “My children are in England,” Therese said evenly. The Gestapo was furious. Bernhard Altmann had managed to get their prime hostage to his fortune out of the country. Bernhard’s wife, mistress, his children, and even many of his friends and factory workers had quietly escaped abroad, with the help of his cash and connections. The Nazis had his Vienna factory, his homes, his furniture and art. But Bernhard had outmaneuvered them. He already had a competing factory in Liverpool.

  Maria and Fritz were among the last to make it out on this lifeline. The operation was an open secret, and the Germans soon learned who was running it. They arrested Jan Honnef and deported him to Poland, to a concentration camp outside of Lodz. Jan’s six children fled to unoccupied Holland. But when the Nazis invaded Holland in May 1940, Jan’s son Josef was packed off to Auschwitz.

  Jan survived the war. Josef didn’t make it through the first winter. He died in February 1941 at Auschwitz, “where the people he and his father led to freedom were supposed to die,” a friend of his wrote to Maria. Josef’s daughter, Elfriede, never recovered from the loss of her father. Years later, she cried when survivors wrote to thank the Honnef family for saving their lives.

  Decent Honorable People

  Now Gustav Rinesch tried to engineer the escape of Maria’s brother Robert, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer’s onetime personal secretary.

  It wasn’t easy. Robert and his wife, Thea, had a newborn, Georg. Thea had a widowed mother, Ada Stern, and a mentally handicapped sister, Susi, who lived on a farm in the Alps. Thea, twenty, had wanted to leave the moment the Anschluss was declared. No one listened to her. Rinesch understood why: the Bloch-Bauers lived in a cozy world, where friendships lasted a lifetime. Even Rinesch couldn’t imagine a Vienna in which people he knew joined the SS.

  Thea could. Thea had been a baby when her father died in World War I. She went to public schools rife with anti-Semitism, where on field trips, non-Jewish children soaked the bedsheets of Jewish students so they shivered all night. Teachers announced after exams that “all the Jewish students got it wrong,” making the boys in the illegal Nazi groups smile. In Thea’s neighborhood, people spat at “Jewish swine” like her. For Thea, anti-Semitism meant having a thick skin, and expecting less of people.

  This had all changed when she married Robert Bloch-Bauer in 1937. Her pretty sisters-in-law, Maria and Luise, had never been called “Jewish swine.” Maria had gone to a private school where most teachers were Jewish. She moved in a cultured, exclusive circle where Jews and Gentiles mingled and married. Maria’s brother Leopold was socially prominent and flew his own private plane. Their house was filled with Leopold’s hunting trophies. At Ferdinand’s Czech castle, there were butlers, cooks, liverymen, chauffeurs, and laundresses. On her first visit, Thea’s little Czech maid dissolved in tears. “You don’t like me,” the maid sobbed. “You never call me to help you dress.” Thea was astonished: No one here dressed themselves?

  Thea viewed Hitler not as a distant aberration but as an immediate menace. To Thea, the Bloch-Bauers were living in a dream world. But it was a pleasant dream. Thea and Robert had beautifully furnished rooms within walking distance of the Belvedere, with a ruby-colored velvet settee and Biedermeier side chairs with petit-point seats. On their mantel was a magnificent marble clock, with a golden Roman legionnaire on a chariot with two steeds, a wedding present from the Bloch-Bauers.

  One day, as Thea and Robert left a movie theater, they spotted vendors selling afternoon newspapers headlined with the Austrian chancellor’s summons to meet Hitler at his Eagle’s Nest in the Alps. Thea froze. “We have to get out,” she said. Robert rolled his eyes. Thea was six months pregnant. Leave?

  The day Hitler arrived, Thea watched from her window as the German army marched down the boulevard. Tank after tank rolled by. German bombers roared overhead. “Today Germany belongs to us, tomorrow the world,” the soldiers sang. Harassment began immediately. Teenage boys pulled Jews from streetcars and beat them up. Thea, a petite blonde, didn’t “look Jewish” to these boys, and she hurried by, hiding her fear. Yet even Therese dismissed the notion of leaving. “We’re not going anywhere,” her mother-in-law said. “We’ve always been decent, honorable people.” Of course, Thea thought. But that’s beside the point.

  One day there was a knock at the door. Thea, exhausted from the heat, got up from a nap and peered out warily. It was the janitor, a harmless man. He smiled and made aimless comments about the humidity. Then he told her that every Sunday, he expected cash. Or else he would report them to the Gestapo as Jews with subversive literature.

  Thea stared at him, stunned. She gave him money and he slunk away.

  By June 1938, Thea was due to give birth any day. Their car had been confiscated, but Thea knew better than to stop making the payments. She had heard that someone was killed for that. Fritz was in Dachau. Robert was terrified. Gustav Rinesch had warned the family that there would be razzias, or house-to-house sweeps, that week to arrest Jews and deport them to concentration camps. Rinesch thought it would be safest for them to move into the hospital.

  But was it safer there? Jewish doctors had been turned out of non-Jewish hospitals like the Rudolfinerhaus, a private hospital near the Vienna Woods where Thea was to give birth. Jewish patients were forbidden. The staff had been replaced with Germans. Thea’s obstetrician was well-known. He had delivered Thea. Now he was a Jew whom Nazi authorities had ordered to stop practicing medicine.

  They could all be arrested.

  But the new German head nurse assured the doctor they would not turn him in. When they arrived, the new German hospital staff tucked Robert and another Jewish father into hospital beds, as Aryan “patients.”

  It was with great fear that the obstetrician nervously brought little Georg into this terrifying world.

  The obstetrician carefully examined the wailing Georg and handed him to Thea. Then he hurried down the hall, pulling off his gloves, gown, and cap. At the back door, he broke into a run. He vaulted over the garden wall and fled down the dark street. The doctor had brought new life into the world for the last time in Vienna. Now he had to save his own.

  A week later, Thea’s father-in-law, Gustav, died. At least poor Gustl is at peace, she thought. Now, with a newborn, how would they get out?

  Gay Marriage

  Thea’s mother, Ada Stern, found her own way to escape from Nazi Vienna. Vienna was becoming a mecca for a small underground of present-able “Aryan” bachelors. Except that these men were gay. Gay culture had flourished in Vienna artistic circles. Now some of its members would be lifesavers.

  Some gay men married Jewish women and asked for nothing. Many wanted something in return: money, or a temporary cover of respectability, before the inevitable divorce. Ada found a Dutch “fiancé,” Jongman van Genderingen, a distinguished-looking sixty-year-old. His boyfriend offered to marry Ada’s cousin. “Naturally,” Gustav Rinesch observed, “these gay men had their price. Since they were Dutch they understood diamonds, and the dowry was a diamond ring.” Ada bought a solitaire, but Jongman said the diamond wasn’t good enough. “At the town hall, they had a heated discussion, back and forth, about the value of this solitaire, and Ada had to exchange it for another.” It was a double wedding, witnessed by Rinesch, with “not a word about sentiment, compatibility, or consummating the marriage. The two men spent their wedding night together, at their hotel, and the two women returned to their widow’s beds.”

  Thea found her new stepfather “very decent.” Jongman was gravely ill with cancer. He wanted Thea to pay for surgery in Vienna, and his return to Holland.

  Thea prayed he would keep his promise to protect her mother and get her out of Austria.

  The Orient Express

  Rinesch helped Thea and Robert get a twenty-four-hour transit visa to Yugoslavia. At the last minute, Robert hastily stuffed some of Ferdinand’s family papers into a small suitcase, and they took
the train to the city of Osijek. Luise took them to a private Gutmann train station above a stone quarry in timberland nearby. There was a cow for fresh milk, and running water to wash Georg’s diapers. Luise sent servants with meat, bread, cheese, and vegetables. Luise rarely visited, to avoid drawing attention. There they waited for six weeks.

  One day Luise brought them visas for Canada. But they had long overstayed their twenty-four-hour Yugoslav visas. Rinesch feared they would be arrested boarding the train. Resourceful Luise had an idea. With help from Rinesch, she paid a conductor of the Orient Express to make an unscheduled midnight stop near the little station. Thea packed up their things one night and hiked to the train tracks with Robert. She held little Georg close and prayed he wouldn’t cry. The tracks began to sing, and they saw the light of the approaching train. But the cars rumbled by, one by one, until the last cars approached. Thea’s heart sank. The train was leaving them behind.

  Then the train slowed and groaned to a halt. Robert and Thea stumbled up the embankment in the dark. Without a station platform, the train steps loomed impossibly high. Robert pulled himself up and held out his arms. Thea passed Robert the baby and their suitcases.

  Tiny Thea strained to reach the train steps. Robert grabbed her arms and pulled. Thea struggled up to the platform, and the train began to move.

  In the little compartment, Thea fell into a fitful sleep. She awoke to find a nervous young Austrian woman with a man who looked at least eighty. Thea thought he was obviously a fake husband. Yugoslav authorities drew the same conclusion. They led the terrified young woman off the train. Thea feigned sleep.

  Italian immigration officials weighed Thea and Robert’s expired Yugoslav transit passes against their Canadian visas. The officials finally let them go, assigning a young carabiniere to guard them. Soon the carabiniere was gallantly fetching pretty Thea refreshments, lighting her cigarettes, and shaking his keys for little Georg, as they chugged toward Trieste.

  Now Therese, alone at the Stubenbastei, was the focus of the Bloch-Bauer shakedown. The Nazis insisted on their usual legal charade. They wanted Therese to pay an exit tax and to sign a paper leaving the family possessions to the state. Therese walked through the empty, beautiful rooms, with their carved antique furniture, their heavy gold mirrors, the tapestry of the lusty nobleman squeezing the bodacious maiden as the harlequin grinned knowingly.

  Stubenbastei, the lonely stage set of the warm family life Therese had built with Gustav. Must she leave all this to them?

  The days grew cold, short, and gray. One afternoon in November, as twilight fell, a roar rose from the street. Therese peered out the window. Truckloads of uniformed men crowded the Ringstrasse. A mob gathered. A friend called: SS officers were taking axes and crowbars to Jewish businesses, attacking Jews they found in the street!

  Men rounded up Jews at a school, and some people were so frightened they jumped out of the windows to their deaths. They were destroying the synagogues. There were fires all over the city.

  It was Kristallnacht—the “Night of the Broken Glass”—a dress rehearsal for the unimaginable destruction to come.

  Therese’s precious Vienna was a bloodthirsty mob. She was cornered. Three days before Christmas, Therese began to sign over her assets.

  She had to get out.

  The Autograph Hunter

  Like the Bloch-Bauers, many of Adele’s old friends stayed too long.

  “We’re going to have to leave,” Berta Zuckerkandl told her teenage grandson, Emile, one afternoon in February 1938 as she prepared for a salon in her apartment across from the Burgtheater. “You’re exaggerating, Grandmother,” good-looking Emile replied, smiling, lying cozily on her sofa as freezing sleet fell outside. “Everything will blow over.”

  Emile lived part-time with Berta on Oppelgasse, above the Café Landtmann, where Freud once took his morning coffee. It was a five-minute walk to Elisabethstrasse, and Berta’s friend Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer. Ferdinand provided financial help to Berta’s sister-in-law, Amalie Zuckerkandl, who had been on her own nearby since her husband divorced her for an actress. Amalie’s arresting but unfinished Klimt portrait, with bare shoulders and upturned face, hung in Ferdinand’s bedroom.

  Emile, sixteen, spent the rest of his time at the Zuckerkandls’ enormous Purkersdorf Sanatorium on the outskirts of Vienna. Josef Hoffmann had designed the main building for Emile’s late uncle, Viktor Zuckerkandl, an industrialist. Emile’s family lived in a splendid villa with a foyer dominated by an enormous Klimt painting, Mohnwiese, of a lush poppy field with the bright red blooms of an Austrian summer. Close by was the schloss of Serena and August Lederer, where Emile admired their statue of a Chinese dragon in the foyer, and their delicately pretty daughter, Elisabeth, the wife of the beer baron Wolfgang Bachofen-Echt.

  Berta’s salons were still filled with intellectuals. Alma Mahler had come with Gustav Mahler and Walter Gropius, and now she brought Franz Werfel. Felix Salten came, and Bertolt Brecht.

  Albert Einstein dropped by Berta’s salon after he fled the rise of Hitler in Germany. “Any nonsense can attain importance by virtue of being believed by millions of people,” Einstein wrote ruefully in Emile’s autograph book.

  The writer and cultural critic Egon Friedell thoughtfully wrote Emile a critique of materialism. “If humans, now that at long last it has become obvious that money is dirt, do not understand that money is dirt, they do not deserve for money to be dirt,” Friedell wrote.

  “For Emile Zuckerkandl, the magnificent grandson of a magnificent grandmother,” wrote Fritz Grünbaum, Vienna’s Groucho Marx.

  “So, you are an autograph hunter,” wrote Carl Moll, Alma Mahler’s stepfather. “So young and already so corrupted. Do you know where this could lead? To become a cutthroat vandal is no doubt the least! And I am supposed to share that responsibility? Well [Berta] already has more than that on her conscience. Reform yourself!”

  Julius Bauer, the portly poet of Bloch-Bauer weddings, wrote that Emile was “a descendant of a noble lineage. Your grandfather was a great man . . . The question of race never blocked his genius. Today that sounds like a fairy tale. You, too, even in the folly of today, will get over that dam.”

  French celebrity explorer Lucien Audouin-Dubreuil urged Emile to “take notes every day.” “One will always forget the days passing, in the midst of the effort and the beauty of the present day, and the hope of the unforeseen in the days to come.”

  Emile started a diary.

  Adele’s old friend Stefan Zweig had a few glasses of wine one night and scribbled: “Has not everything that we give already lost its way when it is not transformed into help or love?”

  How could they possibly give up this lovely existence? Emile asked Berta that day in February 1938. Berta smiled at her tall grandson, named for her husband, the late anatomist. She had high hopes for Emile.

  At her salon that night, everyone talked about Hitler’s latest hateful rally. “For kind remembrance of the speech of Hitler,” a writer, Walter Mayering, wrote sarcastically in Emile’s book.

  Now Hitler was coming.

  The sky was blue and cloudless. Emile walked down to the highway. Who were all these people? They pushed up to the roadside, cheering, throwing roses at German troops, weeping with joy. Finally a roar went through the crowd. High above the multitude, Hitler stood in his car, with his hand outstretched. “Heil!” the crowd chanted. Hitler passed very close to Emile, his car moving slowly. If I had a gun, I could kill him, Emile thought.

  A few days later, armed men pulled up to the Purkersdorf Sanatorium. Emile’s mother was in bed, recovering from a hysterectomy. Emile went upstairs to tell her the men were searching the house. She closed her eyes and sighed. She asked Emile to bring her a robe.

  “Burn your diary,” she whispered weakly. “Burn it!” Emile locked the bathroom door and regretfully held a match to his journal of the year leading up to the Anschluss, fanning the smoke out the window. The men came into the bedroom, and his moth
er pointed to the drawer where she hid her jewelry.

  One man paused before Klimt’s poppy field, hanging over the Steinway piano, and studied the exuberant blooms. He pulled it off the wall.

  Many of Berta’s friends, like Felix Salten, had already fled. Salten knew that men who would burn Bambi were capable of far worse. Berta showed up to take refuge in the sanatorium, joined by her friend, Egon Friedell. Friedell was distraught, and he walked the grounds with Berta, berating himself.

  Friedell had once suggested that benevolent dictatorship, as in ancient Greece, could defuse modern tensions. Berta had argued that “a dictatorship without a gospel of hatred is impossible.” Friedell had insisted that the enlightened dictator should be a man who had never known hatred, “and so he was doubly unhappy when history made him realize his error—when Hitler became dictator of Germany.”

  Now Austria was in the grip of this destructive man, whose gospel of hatred demanded scapegoats.

  Friedell felt guilty. Even anti-Nazi intellectuals like himself had frittered away precious time in the world of culture, disdainfully leaving the sordid business of government to the hack politicians who had ushered in this fratricidal present. “One has to pay for one’s sins,” Friedell kept repeating to Berta.

  A few days later, at his apartment, Friedell heard a loud knocking in the hall. It was the Gestapo. Friedell thought they were coming for him. He walked to his open window and dove out to his death.

  Stealing Beauty

  Klimt’s mosaic of Jewish patrons and friends would be pried apart, piece by piece, by men incapable of creating beauty but determined to steal it. The plunder of the families who gave Vienna its luster would not be engineered by mobs. It would be carried out by well-dressed gentlemen with pretensions to genteel respectability.