The Orpheus Clock

by Simon Goodman

  As the Nazi nightmare intensified, Herbert and Daisy existed like so many Germans in a strange netherworld between despair and hope. Some of their friends and relatives—including Fritz and Louise—urged them to leave. Others still believed that the Nazis’ anti-Jewish persecutions would eventually pass. Former friends or associates, such as Schacht and Von Ribbentrop, when they deigned to speak to Herbert at all, smilingly assured him that there was nothing to worry about: Herbert and other members of wealthy and established German Jewish families would not be harassed. Then the next day the Gestapo would be knocking on Herbert and Daisy’s door, checking on them, asking questions. There were odd, almost surreal social interactions. Once, during a visit to her hometown of Baden-Baden, Daisy to her horror found herself at a dinner party seated next to SS officer Sepp Dietrich, the head of Hitler’s bodyguard and a future SS general. Not knowing who Daisy was, Dietrich joked about executing prisoners during the Night of the Long Knives—the same purge that almost cost Herbert his life.

  Finally it was too much. Herbert and Daisy decided to leave Germany, but it had to be done carefully so as not to arouse the Gestapo’s suspicion. During a visit to Fritz and Louise in Holland, Daisy smuggled her valuable family jewelry across the German-Dutch border hidden under her clothes—an almost insanely risky thing to do. Under Nazi currency and assets export laws, such smuggling could bring the death penalty. Herbert and Daisy sent their children to England one by one, ostensibly on vacation—first Luca, then Fredy, and finally little Marion. In late 1936, under the guise of attending a business meeting in Switzerland, Herbert and Daisy crossed the German border and made their way to England. With the help of Fritz, Herbert rented a suitable flat on London’s Park Lane. Back in Germany the Nazis’ punitive taxes on Jews and Jewish property took everything he had left, including Herbertshof.

  Once safely in England, Herbert continued to receive demands from the German government. Documents, adorned with the Nazi eagle and swastika, ordered payment for various taxes. Again, it seems unbelievable, but Herbert, ever the loyal German, still hoping that Germany could regain its senses, still believing that he might return, filled out the forms and complied. Herbert’s “atonement tax” came to thirty-five thousand Reichsmarks.

  In reality Herbert, and all others who had fled Germany, were forced to leave behind virtually everything they had owned. The taxes were nothing more than a device for “legally” stripping all Jewish assets.

  Nevertheless, while financially ruined and forced, with a heavy heart, into the bitter life of a refugee, Herbert and Daisy were some of the lucky ones. Of half a million Jews living in Germany when Hitler and the Nazis took power, some three hundred thousand managed to get out before the war began and the door slammed irremovably shut. Of the two hundred thousand Jews who would not leave Germany or could not find another country that would accept them, 90 percent would perish.

  • • •

  The repercussions of the Nazification of Germany did not stop at the German border. In December 1933, with the Aryanization of the Dresdner Bank in Germany well under way, a delegation of bank officials, armed with a sheaf of writs and authorizations, arrived at the Proehl & Gutmann offices on the Herengracht in central Amsterdam. They curtly informed Fritz that, under the provisions of the Nazi “Professional Civil Service” law, his association with the Dresdner Bank was dissolved. Proehl & Gutmann’s assets—accounts, files, office furniture, the paintings on the walls, everything—were being seized. Among the paintings were two Goyas and a spectacular Guardi. It was all quite legal. The last tenuous link between the Gutmann family and the Dresdner Bank had been broken.

  Ernst Proehl, as a German-born “Aryan,” might have been able to continue an association with the Dresdner, despite that his wife, Ilse, was Jewish. Proehl, who was fiercely anti-Nazi—a stance that would later almost cost him his life—wanted no part of it. Instead he and Fritz formed ostensibly separate but cooperating companies, Firma F. B. Gutmann and Proehl & Co. The former was to handle international credit and trade transactions; the latter was to continue the dealing with German companies that had formed the lion’s share of Proehl & Gutmann’s business.

  Still, times were difficult. The Depression had hit Holland just as it had everyplace else, and business never had time to recover. As director of the Gutmann Family Trust, Fritz was also required to dip into the now-diminished trust capital to help support other members of the family. Herbert, obviously, was in need of funds, especially after he and Daisy fled to London. Kurt, now divorced from Vera, had fled to Paris to escape the Nazis and was, as usual, constantly broke. Max, now residing permanently in Italy, had never had a civilian job and was also a constant drain.

  Yet, despite the financial crunch, increasing international tensions, and the loathsome persecution of Jews in Germany, Fritz and his family in Holland, and millions of other families throughout Europe, had an odd sense of normality, of life going on. There were still parties at Bosbeek, trips to Paris, and holidays in the Swiss Alps. The day-to-day business of earning a living and sending children off to school continued for Fritz.

  In 1934 my father, Bernard, graduated from the Lyceum Alpinum Zuoz in Switzerland and set off for England to enroll at Cambridge University. At Trinity College he majored in art history, girls, MG convertibles, and sports—not necessarily in that order. Unlike the crushed, taciturn, and damaged man I knew, in those days he was outgoing, gregarious, and fun—not to mention wealthy and well connected. He was a member of the best clubs and captain of the Cambridge Ice Hockey Club, then considered one of the elite university hockey teams in England. When the English national hockey team, which was composed primarily of professional ringers from Canada, went to the 1936 Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Bavaria, the outstanding Cambridge team went along to play some exhibition games.

  It was the first time Bernard had been back to Germany since the Nazis took over. The 1936 Nazi eagle and swastika stamp on one of the old British passports I found in my father’s boxes was from that trip. During the Winter Games the Nazis went to great pains to temporarily downplay their anti-Jewish program, ordering the “No Jews Allowed” signs to be removed from stores and cafés and excising the more strident anti-Jewish rhetoric from newspaper articles. I don’t think my father was fooled for a minute; he was well aware of what the Nazis had done to his uncle Herbert and the Jews in Germany. I remember, as a young boy, being told the story about how my father had been tailed by Gestapo agents in Garmisch, tailed in an obvious and surely ominous way. My father, always self-deprecating, seemed to think it funny that they should take such notice of him. Regrettably this story was one of the tiny exceptions to my father’s normal rule of silence. Years later, after the war, when we were racing across Germany toward Switzerland without stopping, I wondered if my father remembered, too, as he kept looking in his rearview mirror.

  Fritz was well aware of the long reach of the Gestapo and the German intelligence services, even into Holland. Aunt Lili recalls him warning her not to discuss politics while visiting Aunt Käthe at Hartekamp. Although still a teenager, Lili was already an ardent anti-Nazi. Fritz suspected, quite correctly, that Catalina von Pannwitz’s butler was a Nazi spy.

  Reports on prominent German expatriates, Fritz included, were routinely forwarded to Berlin. The Nazi specter even loomed over the Netherlands’ biggest social event of the decade: the 1937 royal wedding between Crown Princess Juliana and the Gutmanns’ young friend Prince Bernhard zur Lippe-Biesterfeld. Prince Bernhard had wooed the heir to the Dutch throne after meeting her at the 1936 Winter Olympics. As a prelude to the wedding the prince had publicly renounced both his Nazi connections and his German citizenship. However, at a gala pre-wedding party in The Hague for twenty-five hundred guests, Fritz and Louise among them, members of Prince Bernhard’s family gave the Nazi salute and the band played the Nazi marching anthem, “The Horst Wessel Song.” In news photographs of the day everyone is smiling, the happy smiles of people who don�
�t understand what’s coming.

  Meanwhile, Aunt Lili had met a young man, Franco Bosi, during her finishing school days in Florence. The Bosis were an old Italian family with extensive property holdings in Tuscany. Franco Bosi’s mother even owned two of the famous medieval towers in the old walled city of San Gimignano. (Today, the towers attract tourists by the seemingly endless busloads.)

  Lili and Franco were engaged to be married in the summer of 1938, which would seem to be not a moment too soon, given that the Fascist government under Mussolini would later that year enact a set of Nuremberg-style laws. The new decrees prohibited marriage between Aryans and non-Aryans. All foreign Jews—with the exception of those over sixty-five years of age or those married to Italian citizens—were ordered to leave the country within four months or be forcibly expelled. Great-Aunt Lili was already married to Luca Orsini and, as a result, immune from these decrees, but Great-Uncle Max, on his own in Rome, was clearly at risk. Fortunately, the Italian people never took anti-Semitism as seriously as their budding German allies. While there was indeed persecution and harassment, initially the country’s fifty thousand Jews were mostly left alone. The true atrocities against Italian Jews did not begin until the Germans arrived late in the coming war.

  So the wedding went on in Florence, although Fritz and Louise did not attend. I don’t know why—Aunt Lili to this day refuses to discuss the matter—but I sense that Fritz did not completely approve, that he felt his only daughter could have done better. Nevertheless, he was either unable or unwilling to stop the marriage. My father, however, freshly graduated from Cambridge with a bachelor of arts degree, did attend the wedding. He drove, no doubt at breakneck speed, from Bosbeek to Florence in one of Fritz’s convertibles. This time he took the long way, through France, avoiding Germany altogether. Then it was back to Bosbeek for a quick visit with his parents before returning to England to enjoy some postgraduate freedom. Meanwhile, he pondered what was no longer such a certain future. He could not have known that it would be eight years before he would see Bosbeek again.

  Even as these family activities went on, Europe was inexorably moving toward catastrophe. Just twenty years after the end of the first war, unbelievably, “the lights were going out all over Europe” for a second time.

  In 1936, Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland. In 1937, the Nazis started bombing Republican forces in Spain. Then in 1938, Hitler annexed the German-speaking Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. Only a few months before, the German army had marched into Austria. This “union” or Anschluss was greeted with hysterical delight by most Austrians. Hundreds of thousands greeted Hitler’s triumphant entry into Vienna with flowers and Nazi salutes. Within days, Vienna’s Jews, including our distant Gutmann cousins, were being taunted, humiliated, beaten, arrested, and of course having their property confiscated. Through it all, the Western allies, namely England and France, averted their eyes and did nothing. Life went on blithely, unless you were a Viennese Jew forced by storm troopers to scrub sidewalks and privies, or a Czech antifascist hauled off to a concentration camp.

  On November 9, 1938, in Germany, the Nazis used the murder of a minor German diplomat in Paris by a young Polish Jew to unleash a nationwide orgy of violence against Jews. History knows this as Kristallnacht. Thousands of Jewish stores and shops were smashed and looted, at least a hundred Jews were murdered, and tens of thousands were arrested and locked up in Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and Dachau. Jewish cemeteries were desecrated and over a thousand synagogues burned. While the Dresden synagogue that my great-great-grandfather Bernhard helped to build was destroyed, Bernhard’s grave in the Jewish cemetery in Dresden, and Eugen’s tomb in Berlin, miraculously survived almost untouched. In the wake of the violence, the Nazis imposed a 1 billion mark “atonement tax” on German Jews to pay for the damage. This was one of the taxes that Herbert, albeit safe in England, had no real choice but to pay.

  Kristallnacht marked the turning point for those Jews who remained in Germany. No longer could there be any doubt what the Nazis had in store for them, even if the rest of the world still did not quite believe it. Those who could fled Germany, in the tens of thousands, their passports stamped with a large red J for Jude. Most were only allowed to take with them a few clothes and ten marks in cash after paying the Reichsfluchtsteuer, or Reich flight tax. Their remaining possessions in Germany were confiscated.

  Holland had waxed and waned in its acceptance of German Jews, but in the wake of Kristallnacht some seven thousand German Jews were allowed into Holland, joining the twenty-five thousand German Jewish refugees who were already there. Among those was Louise’s mother, Thekla, who moved into Bosbeek. Another arrival in Holland was Louise’s second cousin Franz Ledermann, a Jewish lawyer from Berlin. While living in Amsterdam, his ten-year-old daughter, Susi, would become best friends with another young German Jewish girl, Anne Frank. Each day after school, Susi and Anne would play hide-and-seek. On weekends the Franks and the Ledermanns would listen to chamber music over tea in the Ledermanns’ crowded apartment.

  Those immigrants without means or family connections were housed in a refugee camp at Westerbork, their expenses paid by the Dutch Committee for Jewish Interests, to which Fritz and Louise and their friends were substantial contributors.

  By mid-1939, it was finally clear to almost everyone that war in Europe was coming. The prospect of Hitler’s not respecting Dutch neutrality had become a real possibility. For all of Hitler’s promises, for all of Neville Chamberlain’s appeasing talk of “peace for our time,” the Nazis would not stop with Austria or Czechoslovakia—which after the Sudeten crisis, Hitler had gone on to swallow almost whole.

  Fritz, ever cautious, was all too aware from his World War I experience just how quickly events could overwhelm a country, and a continent. Urgently, he took steps to prepare. He transferred funds to several accounts in Switzerland and some securities to my father in England. A few artworks were sent to New York. A much larger portion of his art collection went, for safekeeping, to the Paris gallery of the art dealer Paul Graupe. After obligingly doing the Nazis’ dirty work with the “Jew sales” in Berlin, Graupe had finally fled, himself, from Germany to France to escape the Nazis.

  Then, in September 1939, just over two decades after a conflict that had killed some 12 million people, Europe was once again at war. Thanks to a treaty negotiated by Herbert’s erstwhile friend Joachim von Ribbentrop, now the Nazi foreign minister, Hitler had nothing to fear from the Soviet Union. Armed with the cynical nonaggression pact he had just signed with Stalin, Hitler invaded Poland unopposed. The Germans unleashed for the first time the lightning style of war known as blitzkrieg and easily gobbled up the western half of Poland, while the Russians took the rest.

  England and France, finally awakening, declared war on Germany. As the French army and a British expeditionary force settled down behind France’s Maginot Line, the war entered into an uneasy stalemate—the so-called Phony War. In the Netherlands, the government hoped, as in the First World War, that the country could somehow stay out of the conflict. Despite this, Dutch intelligence reported an imminent German invasion. While some attempts were made to bolster defenses, hope seemed to be the Dutch government’s primary option. In April 1940, German armies invaded Norway and Denmark, both of which had, like Holland, been neutral in the last war.

  Bernard sent telegrams imploring Fritz and Louise to leave Holland and join him in Britain while there was still time. Stubbornly Fritz refused, though he certainly had the means to do so. It’s one of those situations in which I want to shout back across the generations, to ask my grandfather why he stayed. Why didn’t he and my grandmother drop everything and flee? But there are no answers. Despite his own experience in the previous war, and despite what had happened to his brother Herbert, Fritz must have thought he could weather the storm. Perhaps he believed that his family would somehow be protected by his wealth and his connections with the Kaiser, with the Dutch royal family, and with the Italian government. Maybe h
e did not understand that civilization as he had known it, had, at least temporarily, come to an end. Under the Nazis, his native Germany had already descended into barbarism. Or maybe, in what clearly was a Gutmann family genetic trait, he was simply obstinate—a fifty-four-year-old man who was set in his ways, secure in his position, a man who refused to be run out of the home and the life that he had built, even in the face of armies on the march.

  Whatever the reason, Fritz and Louise stayed in Holland. And by the time they realized their terrible mistake, it was already too late.

  PART II

  DEVASTATION

  CHAPTER 6

  THE WOLVES AT THE DOOR

  Heinrich Himmler’s letter where he assures the Italian ambassador, “the Jew and Dutch citizen Gutmann” and his wife will be exempt from any Security Police measures.

  I try to imagine how Fritz and Louise felt on that day, May 10, 1940.

  I can imagine them staring up at the sky over Bosbeek in the early-morning hours, watching with shock and astonishment, and no small measure of terror, as the squadrons of German bombers roared overhead. I see them listening to the low, far-off rumble of bombs falling and the booming of Dutch antiaircraft artillery. The black, oily smoke from crashed and burning planes loomed over the horizon. In the morning twilight, they could just make out, in the distance, the tiny, eerie, white shapes of German paratroopers floating down. They were landing around Valkenburg airfield, just twenty miles away. Then the frantic phone calls started, the lines suddenly going dead in midsentence. The near-hysterical reports on Dutch radio were full of short-lived bravado. Together Fritz and Louise listened to the news from the Hilversum radio station, following the Germans’ advance. I can see their hands trembling as they clasped each other and wondered what this would mean. They must have felt the Germans’ approach like a jail door slamming.