The Lady in Gold

by Anne-marie O'connor

  By the time Allied bombs rained down in Vienna in 1944, Austrian masterpieces, many of them stolen, would be tucked away in the cavernous onetime monastery of Gaming, or in the Schönborn Castle, not far from Schloss Immendorf. The Austrian Gallery’s Fritz Novotny sent a typed memo reporting that a painting by Oskar Kokoschka was being held for safekeeping, along with Klimt’s second portrait of Adele, in the stronghold of the massive twelfth-century Weinern Castle in the eastern Burgenland.

  Degenerate or not, Kokoschka was still Austrian.

  At Schloss Immendorf, Johannes and his brothers and sisters played near the paintings, shrieking with laughter as they ran past Klimt’s Golden Apple Tree, avoiding crates that might contain statues. Their father had warned them of what would happen if they damaged the Klimts.

  The Child in the Chapel

  Croatian authorities sent the Gutmanns to the notorious Savska Cesta political prison in Zagreb. The prison was filled with anti-Nazi partisans. It had a small adjoining hospital, where partisans who had been tortured could be revived for further interrogation.

  By 1943, Josip Broz Tito and the partisan guerrillas he commanded were strong enough to seriously threaten the Ustasha and the Nazis. They fought fearlessly, sustaining high casualties but taking a heavy toll on Axis forces. The woods near Belisce were a partisan stronghold.

  For Nelly, now fourteen, the prison brought the close family life she had always wished for. She felt safe. Her father spent hours with her, reading and discussing Goethe’s Faust, teaching her math and languages. Nelly finally had her parents’ full attention.

  One Croatian prisoner had been a guard at Jasenovac. The Croat said guards at Jasenovac were frightening and brutal. They killed prisoners with axes, sledgehammers, and a special knife they invented, shaped like the crescent moon of the Turks, called the srbosjek—“the Serb-cutter.”

  The Croat had been a provincial policeman. He was shocked by the stupid, illiterate guards and the ghastly slaughter. He fired off letters to the Ustasha government, telling what he saw. Surely they would share his outrage.

  Instead, they had arrested him and sent him here.

  Nelly learned that, for Jews, the prison was supposed to be a way station. Jewish families would appear overnight. They were locked behind the iron grillwork of the small hospital shrine, from which gilded saints had once gazed out mercifully.

  One morning, as Nelly walked by the chapel, she saw that a new group of families had arrived. They were rail-thin. They had been stripped of their belongings and were dressed in rags. A father was hugging a small child. The child was only five or six, hollow-eyed and listless, with patchy hair and limbs hanging like matchsticks. This child was barely clinging to life. When anyone walked by, the father raised the dying child in his arms behind the grillwork, his imploring eyes begging each passerby to help. The father must have been starving too. He looked so weak that he seemed barely capable of raising the child. Yet he did.

  The sight of the suffering child horrified Nelly. She would have liked to bring soup or water. It seemed incredible that prison guards could walk by, laughing and smoking, ignoring the desperate man and his feeble child. Nelly cringed as she walked by the chapel, and her breath quickened. But she was unable to stop herself from looking up into the pleading father’s eyes.

  When Nelly awoke the next morning, the man and his child had vanished, along with the rest of the Jewish prisoners.

  The chapel was again the empty, silent sanctuary that had once held statues of Mother Mary and Jesus, their faces frozen with mercy.

  The Castle of the First Reichsmarschall

  By 1943, Baroness Elisabeth Bachofen-Echt, one of the dispossessed heirs of the Lederer Klimt collection, was living in desolate isolation. “Beautiful Lisl” spent her days in virtual solitary confinement. As the hours passed, did she sometimes wonder if she was losing her mind?

  The Lederer Klimt collection had been seized and sent to Schloss Immendorf. Her mother was eking out a bleak existence in Budapest. Elisabeth was apparently still living at Jacquingasse, though the home was in the name of her “Aryan” ex-husband, Wolfgang. Rinesch said Wolfgang worried about her, even took her to see her mother in Budapest before Serena died there in March.

  Wolfgang was also listed as the seller of two Lederer Klimts, the Faculty Paintings Philosophy and Jurisprudence, to the Belvedere. Thanks to the Nazis, Klimt’s shocking modernism was finally making its way into the academy.

  Loneliness was Elisabeth’s first waking sensation. She flipped through her books at Jacquingasse, or watched the noisy construction crews that were excavating the garden of the Belvedere outside her window, pouring heavy concrete into an immense underground chamber under the pond.

  Her neighbor, a little boy named Hans Hollein, watched the goings-on with interest: he would grow up to become one of Austria’s finest architects. The composer Richard Strauss, living nearby with his Jewish daughter-in-law under the protection of Baldur von Schirach, had to walk around the construction site as he strolled the Belvedere gardens.

  There would have been few other witnesses to the mysterious project at the Belvedere, except the leonine stone sphinxes, the guardians of secrets.

  The brilliant former director of the Austrian Gallery, Franz Martin Haberditzl, was very ill in January 1944 from the complications of his degenerative disease. He spent the last hours of his life in a chilly apartment at the Belvedere, listening to his daughter Magdalene read the work of the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, a fellow soul-seeker whose lover had been a disciple of Freud. “Think, dear friend,” Rilke had written, “reflect on the world you carry within yourself.”

  Haberditzl sifted through a lifetime of memories. He had attained the dream of Austrian art he shared with Adele, at least for a fleeting instant. Now, as a bitter winter wind blew across the snowdrifts outside, Magdalene read from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, a story about the meaning of Time as Death draws near:

  You come and keep what is monstrous behind you. As if you had come far in advance of everything that may come, and had at your back only your hastening here, your eternal path, the flight of your love.

  Magdalene’s voice grew fainter as Haberditzl, the gentle visionary, closed his eyes and slipped away from his ravaged world forever.

  The Austrian Gallery’s paintings had been carted away to castles throughout Austria. Other works went to the ancient Celtic salt mines, deep in the bowels of the earth, at Alt Aussee, where they were packed like furniture next to art from all over Europe.

  By September 1944, as Goebbels waged Totaler Kriegseinsatz, or total war, the museum was closed.

  In reality, the Austrian Gallery had ceased to function solely as a museum. Now it was also occupied with the administration and protection of stolen art. There had been a Nazi plan for a museum of Prince Eugene’s military exploits. But there was no time for that.

  The massive fortified bunker under the Belvedere was completed, and a military team moved in. As Allied air raids began, a metal periscope emerged from the ground above the bunker and sounded an alarm.

  Baldur von Schirach had alternate offices in the Belvedere, and as the bombing intensified, these elegant digs became much more attractive. Schirach had a deadly fear of bombings, and a love of bunkers—and this new refuge was designed to be impregnable.

  A National Socialist daily called the Belvedere the “Castle of the First Reichsmarschall.” Prince Eugene’s Belvedere had become a true palace of war.

  As the days grew shorter in the autumn of 1944, perhaps the comings and goings at the Belvedere relieved the endless monotony of Elisabeth’s days at Jacquingasse.

  What was left for her? Her mother had not lived to see the Jewish citizens of Budapest deported to Auschwitz. Her mother’s sister, Aranka Munk, had been expelled from her Austrian country villa at Bad Aussee, now just a few miles from the vacation homes of Nazi leaders at Alt Aussee.

  Aranka had been arrested in October 1941. By then deportees wer
e driven away in open-air trucks while Viennese on the streets yelled obscenities and catcalls. Onlookers laughed at old people who couldn’t walk, who had to be lifted into the deportation trucks in chairs. Jeering crowds was their last sight of their beloved Vienna.

  Aranka died a few weeks later in Lodz, Poland. Her daughter was murdered at the Chelmno camp in 1942. Someone carted away the painting Klimt had done of Aranka’s daughter Ria after her death, in which the fading Klimt had struggled to infuse his subject with life. The man Ria had killed herself for, Hanns Heinz Ewers, the German writer of popular vampire novels, was by then penniless and dying of tuberculosis, following a Nazi flirtation that had not ended well. He earned the Führer’s approval with a biography of a Nazi martyr, Horst Wessel, a young brownshirt who had been shot by the supposedly Communist pimp of his prostitute girlfriend and was nonsensically celebrated as a Nazi everyman. But the writer found himself banned when he created a valiant Jewish mistress in his novel Vampyr. Revelations of his support for a homosexual literary magazine sealed his exile.

  Amalie Zuckerkandl, the white-shouldered model for the unfinished Klimt masterpiece, whose father had written a play with Mark Twain, had been deported in 1943 with her daughter Nora Stiasny. They were believed to have died in Belzec.

  Authorities had also deported Samuel Morgenstern, the Jewish gentleman who had taken pity on the down-and-out young Hitler and bought his mediocre Vienna paintings. Morgenstern wrote Hitler a desperate letter. There was no reply.

  Morgenstern, sixty-eight, died of exhaustion in the Lodz ghetto in August 1943. His widow probably died in Auschwitz.

  In this bleak Vienna, there was almost no one left who had not betrayed the decency of Elisabeth Bachofen-Echt. She made a final foray to the Bachofen-Echt schloss in Nusdorf, the home of her brother-in-law Eberhard and the seat of the beer fortune Elisabeth’s father had bailed out. She walked into the great house. The servants knew Elisabeth well. They were shocked to see her. They stared at her as if she were a ghost. But they made no effort to stop her as she made her way to the nursery of her nephew, Eberhard’s son.

  He was a little boy, his age close to that of Elisabeth’s son, August, when he died. Trying not to cry, Elisabeth told her small nephew that she loved him very much. But these were very hard times, and they would not see each other for a long while. She stooped down to hug him and kissed him goodbye.

  Eberhard was furious when he found out. Relations like Elisabeth were hardly an asset for someone in the SS.

  By October 1944 air raids were taking a toll on Vienna. As fierce battles raged, turning the tide of World War II, the forsaken Elisabeth succumbed to deep depression until finally, Gustav Rinesch wrote, she “died of a broken heart.” Another piece of Klimt’s painted mosaic had crumbled.

  The Partisans

  At the Zagreb prison, Nelly, at fifteen, was becoming a young woman. She angled for the chore of emptying the chamber bucket because it was the social event of the day, where prisoners chatted and got to know each other.

  Some partisans befriended her, and asked her to help them. Nelly got permission to see a dentist. A prison guard had to accompany her, and since Nelly had promised him a mushroom omelette, he looked forward to it. The dentist belonged to the Communist Party. Once in his chair, Nelly took off her shoes and stockings and handed him the letters hidden there: important partisan mail, messages to prisoners’ families, and letters from her parents to family members.

  Nelly asked to stop down the street at a tiny store where an old lady sold buttons. There she delivered more letters while the guard smoked outside. Nelly returned to prison with correspondence passed along by the dentist and the button lady. Authorities eventually arrested the dentist and sent him to a concentration camp, but he never implicated Nelly or the button lady.

  Nelly had reached the age when she wondered if boys found her pretty. Nelly did not possess Luise’s soft baby face. The solitude of her childhood had not encouraged her to cultivate the teasing banter or the sultry gaze with which Luise had entranced young men in Vienna. Physically, Nelly took after her father: her face lean, her cheekbones high. But she had none of his easy confidence. Nelly was reserved and wary, with watchful eyes.

  Still, Nelly had admirers, among them the Croatian former policeman imprisoned for his letter of outrage at Jasenovac. One day at sunset, he led the prisoners in a courtyard serenade of Nelly. She smiled down from the window of her cell, thrilled.

  Perhaps the Croatian policeman had learned Nelly was Jewish: Jewish women were fair game, lucky to be alive. The Croatian no longer felt obligated to court Nelly, or win her heart. One day, while cutting cooking greens on a table, throwing bits to the ducks that quacked noisily for scraps at her feet, Nelly heard footsteps. Before she could turn around, someone grabbed her in a tight embrace. It was the Croatian. He was strong. He shoved her against the table, running his hands over her body. Nelly, clutching her knife in her hand, warned him that if he didn’t stop, she would cut him. He ignored her. Nelly raised the long knife and brought it down on his hand. Yelping in surprise and pain, the Croatian scurried away, clutching his bleeding hand.

  Nelly proudly told her parents that she had defended her virginity. They exchanged worried glances. Jewish girls did not stab Gentiles with knives. But days went by, and nothing happened. The Croatian wore a thick bandage wrapped around his hand. He no longer met Nelly’s eyes, but he had not told how he was injured.

  If he had, he might have doomed Nelly’s whole family.

  Then, one day, the family was sent to live in a sanatorium and the restrictions on them eased. Luise sent Nelly to live with a woman who hid Jewish children, but then she brought her back and Nelly later heard the woman was deported to a concentration camp. Then the family was allowed to live in an apartment, under the supervision of police detectives who kept an eye on them when Nelly’s father was ordered on trips.

  Her father told her little about his trips to Hungary and Switzerland. Viktor knew what would happen to his family if he used the trips as a chance to escape.

  In the woods, the partisans drew closer.

  The Man Without Qualities

  By the fall of 1944, the Allies were closing in. They had invaded France, liberating Paris. The Red Army was pushing into Yugoslavia, forcing German troops to withdraw. The Japanese were under pressure.

  Astute observers in Vienna could see that it might be time to hedge their bets. That September, Erich Führer, Ferdinand’s lawyer, rolled up Kokoschka’s portrait of Ferdinand with lederhosen and a hunting rifle. He brought the painting to the Vienna offices of a state culture official he knew, and asked him to confirm that it was “degenerate.” Führer didn’t want to be accused of exporting patrimonial art from the Reich.

  Nazi bureaucrats did not consider Kokoschka’s works valuable. They had so much trouble auctioning confiscated Kokoschkas that Göring had tried to sell one to a foreign correspondent. The Vienna official obligingly stamped the back of the canvas “Degenerate Art” and handed it back to Führer.

  Führer made his way to Zurich. Ferdinand met him in the lobby of his hotel. “Herr President, here is your painting,” Führer said to Ferdinand, with a respect he did not feel.

  “He was very content,” Führer would tell a judge years later.

  Ferdinand was prouder than ever to have been immortalized by Kokoschka. The artist, now in London, was a fervent and vocal critic of Nazism. The long-ago protégé of Klimt had not changed his principles to suit the times. Earlier that year, Kokoschka had complained publicly that schoolchildren asked him to show them his country on a European map, but the only maps that he could find showed Germany seamlessly encompassing the invisible borders of Austria. “Will it be of any interest for British readers to know the embarrassment I felt?” Kokoschka wrote in a letter to the Forward, a socialist newspaper. “Is it incidental that ‘the first free country to fall a victim of Nazi aggression,’ according to the statement of the Moscow conference, should be the only one
not marked?

  “How will future British tourists find their way to the country, traditional here for its ‘Gemütlichkeit,’ if Austria has been wiped off the British globe?” Kokoschka wrote.

  Ferdinand donated Kokoschka’s portrait of him to Switzerland’s national gallery, the Zurich Kunsthaus. The work by Austria’s best living painter would not return to the Vienna that had put a bounty on Ferdinand’s head. Ferdinand made sure it would remain forever in the country that had given him refuge.

  Führer would later testify that he had risked his life to bring the painting to Ferdinand. But archives that surfaced after the war suggest Führer actually made the trip to spy for the SS in Switzerland. And that Führer made as much as a million reichsmarks in 1938 alone—on an annual salary of 1,000 reichsmarks—profiteering at the expense of dispossessed Viennese like Ferdinand.

  The Nero Decree

  Hitler’s last feverish thoughts were of art.

  In the wee hours of April 29, 1945, Hitler, the failed artist, raved into the night about the great Führer Museum he planned in Linz to showcase his assemblage of stolen masterpieces.

  By then, Hitler’s army had stolen 20 percent of the artworks of Europe. The art was hidden in salt mines, monasteries, and convents across Europe, and hanging in the estates of Nazis who were now on the run. “My pictures, in the collections which I have bought in the course of years, have never been collected for private purposes, but only for the extension of a gallery in my home town of Linz,” Hitler wrote in his will from his underground bunker in Berlin.

  Two hours later, he and Eva Braun committed suicide.

  The towers of the Schloss Immendorf still sheltered the greatest single collection of works by Gustav Klimt. But the German soldiers guarding the castle were nervous. Their leaders had surrendered. Russian forces were a day away. Even the Jewish slave laborers knew of the German defeat.