The Orpheus Clock

by Simon Goodman

  Nonetheless Prominenten privileges were only relative. Theresienstadt remained a concentration camp, with all that that implied. Like any other prisoners, the Prominenten were often cursed at and reviled by their SS guards as “filthy Jews” or “Jewish scum.” At the Nazis’ whim they could be, and often were, subject to physical abuse. Prominenten who had outlived their usefulness, eventually including almost all of the council of elders, were regularly taken away and hanged, shot, or sent off to extermination camps. Prominent status was at best a temporary pass, not a guaranteed ticket to survival.

  Fritz and Louise were subject to the same treatment. Their luggage and all they had brought with them—cash, jewelry, clothing, and food—were taken away by the guards as soon as they arrived. The few clothes they were left all carried the yellow Jewish star. Technically, as Prominenten Fritz and Louise were supposed to be exempt from work. However, Fritz, who had a heart condition and was now fifty-seven years old, helped shovel coal. He also volunteered to dig for potatoes in the fields, while Louise, now fifty-one, distributed bread rations and taught English in the ghetto children’s school.

  A Czech survivor, the writer Anna Aurednícková, later reported that their sensational arrival had caused some understandable resentment. On top of which their Prominenten status created inevitable jealousies. Despite all this, Fritz and Louise were well liked, even respected, by the other prisoners. They were said to be dignified but amiable and generous—willing to share their meager rations with others in need.

  Fritz was even, to the extent possible in a Nazi concentration camp, defiant. A quarter century earlier, when he had been imprisoned by the British for the crime of being German, he had refused to speak English. Now, imprisoned by the Germans for the crime of being Jewish, he refused to speak German. Accordingly, Fritz and Louise spoke only English to each other and French, Dutch, Italian, or English, even a little Czech, to everybody else. Fritz encouraged his fellow inmates to do the same.

  There was no comparison between a British internment camp on the Isle of Man and a Nazi concentration camp. Nevertheless, Fritz had learned from his first time being locked behind barbed wire the importance of not giving up hope. As the months went by, even as the world beyond the ghetto walls grew ever more distant, he was said to have remained optimistic, certain that someday, perhaps even soon, the locked gates would fly open and they would all be free.

  Louise, on the other hand, was perhaps more perceptive. The Baroness Louise Gutmann von Landau, it was reported, was often seen weeping.

  • • •

  avendo ricevuta notificazione ufficiale decisione favorevole del DUCE per la vostra entrata del regno. ho telegrafato ad ALFIERI A BERLINO intervenire presso le autorità tedesche e bisogno agevolare vostra lecita uscita dalla GERMANIA.

  facci sapere quando e dove sarai in ITALIA

  saluti luca

  I have received official notification of the favorable decision from Il Duce for your entry into the kingdom [of Italy]. I telegraphed [Ambassador] Alfieri in Berlin to intervene with the German authorities and that he should facilitate your lawful exit from Germany.

  Let us know when and where you will be in Italy.

  Greetings, Luca [Orsini]

  While Fritz hoped and Louise languished behind the ghetto walls, their family in Italy tried desperately first to find them, then to save them. For young Lili, after waiting in vain for days at the Florence train station, an age seemed to pass.

  Then in early July, more than a month after Fritz and Louise had seemingly disappeared, the papal nuncio in Berlin, Archbishop Orsenigo, notified Rome that the Gutmanns had finally been located. Despite the Nazi assurances of their safe passage to Italy, the archbishop reported, “The couple Gutmann was in actuality brought to Theresienstadt in May.” With a curious mixture of gullibility and skepticism, the archbishop added, “The place has a relatively good reputation, and some say it is actually controlled by the international Red Cross. I find this doubtful.”

  Lili and her mother-in-law traveled to Rome to appeal for help and met with Nicolò de Cesare, Mussolini’s personal secretary. Lili’s uncle, Senator Orsini, got the Foreign Minister Count Ciano involved, and once again the letters and diplomatic cables flew. Brother Max, still living in Italy, also appealed to his contacts in the Vatican for help.

  At the Vatican’s urging, Orsenigo pursued the case, requesting from the German Foreign Ministry permission to travel to Theresienstadt to visit the Gutmanns and perhaps even secure their release. But Orsenigo reported in a subsequent message, “Concerning . . . a possible visit to the Internee Camp for Non-Aryans, Theresienstadt, in Bohemia . . . I was categorically told, ‘That is not possible.’ ”

  Even if it had been possible, Orsenigo was more interested in preserving the Vatican-Nazi status quo. The last thing the papal nuncio really wanted was to stir up trouble over the Nazis’ “model” concentration camp. The idea that the Gutmanns, or any other prisoners, might actually be released—and then talk—was something Orsenigo’s German friends would never tolerate.

  No inmate, no matter how prominent, was ever released to freedom from Theresienstadt until just a few months before the end of the war. Ultimately the Nazis realized it was hopeless to try hiding the secrets of Theresienstadt. In February 1945, the war all but lost, Himmler, Eichmann, and a few other SS leaders agreed to release twelve hundred of the remaining emaciated prisoners to Switzerland. In exchange they received 5 million Swiss francs. A million Swiss francs would go a long way in South America.

  However, in 1943 the Nazis apparently didn’t care if any of the Italian authorities were angry or resentful at being double-crossed in the Gutmann affair. Even as the Italians pressed their case, Italy’s fortunes and influence with its Nazi allies were steadily waning.

  By mid-1943 Mussolini’s Axis alliance with Hitler had become a disaster for Italy, with hundreds of thousands of Italian soldiers killed or captured in the Balkans, on the Russian front, and in North Africa. Among those interned was young Lili’s husband, Franco Bosi, a major in the Italian army, who spent the rest of the war in a British POW camp in Egypt.

  In late July 1943, after the Allied invasion of Sicily, and just weeks after Lili had appealed to the Mussolini government for help, Mussolini was deposed. Count Ciano, the Gutmann family friend, as part of the Fascist Grand Council, had voted for the removal from office of his own father-in-law, Mussolini.

  Just a month later the Italian government surrendered to the Allies—an act of treachery in the German view. As British and American troops landed in southern Italy, the German Wehrmacht occupied Rome and all the regions not already under Allied control. Mussolini, after being freed by the Germans, set up a puppet government in northern Italy. With the help of the Germans, Mussolini was able to have Ciano shot for treason.

  The country was divided and in chaos. Luca Orsini was forced to retire to his villa, outside Lucca, and keep a low profile. The Gutmann family’s leverage with the Italian government suddenly evaporated. Their contacts could hardly concern themselves with the fate of one poor couple locked away in far-off Bohemia. Even if the Italians had still wanted to help, their influence with the Germans had dropped to virtually zero. The Vatican, too, now found itself surrounded by German troops, and while it remained neutral ground, its influence with the Nazis, never great, was reduced even further.

  As the Nazis and the Gestapo took over in Rome and northern Italy, young Lili and Fritz’s brother Max found themselves running for their lives. Italy’s fifty thousand Jews had remained mostly unmolested in the early years of the war. Lili had been quite free to travel about and even seek out government officials for help. Max, too, had lived quite openly in Rome at the Hotel Excelsior on the Via Veneto. As a result of the loose enforcement of the Fascist Laws for the Defense of the Race, the Gutmanns had effectively been exempt from the gradual segregation of Italian Jews from the rest of society.

  The German occupation changed all that. In October 1943, the Naz
is began rounding up Jews throughout occupied Italy—they were herded into police transit camps before transport to the extermination camps of Poland. Except by the standards set in other Nazi-occupied countries, the roundup in Italy was less than completely successful. Largely due to the lack of cooperation by the Italians, only eight thousand Jews were deported. Meanwhile, the other forty-two thousand Italian Jews managed to go underground and survive thanks to non-Jewish friends and relatives. Max and Lili were among the fortunate majority.

  To Max’s horror, the German Army High Command took over the Hotel Excelsior as their headquarters. Amazingly, he escaped detection in the hotel for a while before going underground. He survived by selling pieces from his prized and valuable stamp collection. Next, Sophie’s widowed husband, Count Sciamplicotti, sheltered Max, until it became too dangerous. Eventually Max sought and was granted refuge in the Vatican.

  Young Lili, meanwhile, was preparing to flee Florence and hide in the countryside. Just a few days before she was scheduled to leave, she received a tawdry brown postcard with two Adolf Hitler stamps. Dated October 5, 1943, it had the preprinted message “I gratefully acknowledge receipt of your package, letter to follow.” Fritz had been allowed to just sign his name and add, by hand, their billet address: Number 8, Neue Gasse, Theresienstadt, Bohemia.

  With her three small children, Lili hid in one of her mother-in-law’s medieval towers in San Gimignano. When the German Gestapo and the pro-Nazi local police began searching the town for Jews, Lili and her children spent days hiding in a hunter’s shack, in the woods of her in-laws’ country estate in Massa Marittima, before sneaking back to San Gimignano. Lili and the children remained hidden in the tower for more than a year, in virtual solitary confinement, until Allied forces arrived in the spring of 1945. Strangely, during all this, Great-Aunt Lili Orsini continued to live comfortably and somehow undisturbed in her sumptuous villa (which had once belonged to Napoléon’s sister).

  • • •

  Fritz and Louise were, I imagine, at least vaguely aware of events in Italy. Despite the camp administration’s best efforts, news had a way of seeping into the ghetto. While the collapse of Mussolini and the Italian Fascists was a positive development in the war against the Nazi terror, for Fritz and Louise, personally, it was a near-catastrophe. One of the primary reasons the Nazis had been keeping them alive had just been eliminated. Only the Vatican connection remained as a source of help from the Italian front, but it was at best slim.

  I imagine my grandfather out in the potato fields looking to the horizon and trying to imagine escape. His prospects were next to nil. Anyway, Fritz realized that he could never leave Louise. Back to earth, he tried to think of the best way to smuggle an extra potato or two into the camp—which in itself was extremely risky. If one was caught, the punishment was usually a severe beating by one of the Kapos, sometimes with clubs, even whips.

  Among the tiny handful who did actually escape, one notable hero has to be mentioned. After attempting to escape from Theresienstadt, Siegfried Lederer was transported to Auschwitz in December 1943. Not only did he escape from Auschwitz, but he then broke back into Theresienstadt to warn the ghetto elders what awaited them in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

  The reality was stark: all escapees from the camp were easily rounded up, thanks to a network of Gestapo informants and collaborators in the surrounding region. Meanwhile, the Little Fortress was considered virtually “escape-proof.” Punishment was usually by firing squad. On occasion, though, reminiscent of a more ancient barbarism, the unfortunate ones were stoned to death by the guards.

  Against this bleak reality, Fritz had perhaps only one possible card left to play in the deadly game of survival at Theresienstadt.

  • • •

  The perverted Nazi compulsion to wrap even their most heinous crimes in a cloak of technical legality extended to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. German Jewish inmates arriving at the camp often were required to sign papers “voluntarily” committing themselves for life to what was described as the Theresienstadt “old people’s home.” Meticulous inventories of the possessions stolen from them—described as “donations” to the Reich—had to be signed, in triplicate. While shipping thousands of people east to certain death, SS guards might spend days writing reports to prove that a prominent prisoner executed in cold blood had been “shot while trying to escape.” It was a kind of small madness within the greater madness.

  The Nazis’ apparent obsession with the Gutmann silver collection was now thrown into the insane mix. Even though the silver collection (including the Orpheus Clock) had earlier been removed from Bosbeek and sent for “safekeeping” to the Munich warehouse of Julius Böhler, the collection’s legal ownership still hung in the balance. Böhler was eager for a resolution. Even before Fritz’s actual arrest, Böhler had already offered the entire silver collection to Helmuth von Hummel at the Führerhaus in Munich. SS Hauptsturmführer von Hummel was also Martin Bormann’s special adviser and comptroller of all of Hitler’s private funds.

  Meanwhile, on Fritz’s earlier advice, Senator Orsini had retained a Munich lawyer, who, in late 1943, started negotiations to try to move the collection to Italy. Böhler and Haberstock countered with a request to get the collection classified as Jewish. Technically, though, all the shares appeared to be in Senator Orsini’s name. By using this device Fritz had avoided having the family trust (and the collection) Aryanized. One half-baked idea was to divide the Eugen Gutmann Silbersammlung along ethnic lines. Böhler and Haberstock would keep all the silver and gold considered German or “Nordic,” and all works of “Latin” origin could go to Italy. Next, however, the Sicherheitspolizei (State Security Police) declared the whole collection a “national treasure,” effectively prohibiting any change in ownership or location. Things had reached stalemate.

  Even Dr. Hermann Voss at the Führermuseum appeared stymied. The collection, which had been earmarked for Hitler’s Linz museum, would stay under lock and key in Julius Böhler’s warehouse. It seems astonishing, but the Nazis, and particularly the curators of the Führermuseum, were quite fussy about these things. After the war it would be found that almost 90 percent of the artworks destined for the Führermuseum were accompanied by documents showing that they had been “legally” sold to Hitler—even if it was over the original owner’s dead body.

  The Nazis seemed determined to finally wrap up the “Gutmann Affair.” With Fritz and Louise safely locked away in Theresienstadt, all they needed was for Fritz to revoke the transfer of the family shares to Senator Orsini.

  At least twice during his months in the camp, Fritz was summoned for interrogation at the dreaded SS headquarters. The three-story brick building had once served as the Terezin city hall. Now it was the headquarters for the German security services. The second interrogation was by SS major Karl Rahm. The Austrian-born Rahm had worked for Adolf Eichmann’s benignly named Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna and Holland. A mercurial figure, he alternated between bouts of murderous sadism and curious incidents of consideration for some of his Jewish prisoners. Those incidents evidently were not sufficient to prevent him from being executed later as a war criminal.

  The interrogations in the commandant’s headquarters, presided over by Rahm, were aggressive without descending into outright torture. Fritz was manhandled, threatened, screamed at, and ordered again and again to sign documents transferring to the Reich the legal ownership of the Gutmann Silbersammlung. Again and again, Fritz refused.

  Was it honor, naiveté, faith, stubbornness, or bravery? I cannot say. Some in the camp wondered, “Why didn’t you just sign it! Why did you risk your life for that damned silver collection? After all, what difference does it make? They have already taken it. Why suffer over some stupid, pointless Nazi compulsion with legality?” Therein perhaps was the answer. Fritz must have realized that, given the Nazi mind-set, his signature on those Reich documents, or rather the lack of it, was the only leverage he possessed. Once the Nazis got
what they wanted, they would have no more use for him. If he signed those documents, he would surely be signing his own death warrant, and of course Louise’s. So he refused and he suffered.

  His refusal to knuckle under to the Nazis became the subject of considerable talk among Theresienstadt inmates. Such defiance was rare, if not unique. In ghetto lore he became “the baron who refused to sign over his fortune to the Nazis.” To others the stance seemed both courageous and dangerously foolish.

  Then, amazingly, it appeared that Fritz’s tenacity had paid off, that the Nazis had improbably given up. The news, according to survivor Zdenek Lederer, was that the Gutmann family’s connections in the Vatican had finally come through. On April 13, 1944, after over ten months in the Theresienstadt ghetto, Fritz and Louise were ordered to report to the commandant’s office with their remaining luggage. Lederer commented on how the couple seemed impeccably dressed, almost as when they’d arrived. They were quickly piled into a German staff car and driven out the front gate of the walled ghetto. Kommandant Rahm told the head of the ghetto council of elders, Paul Eppstein, that the Gutmanns were bound for Rome.

  The news prompted considerable comment, and no small amount of envy, in the camp. Willy Mahler, a young Jewish Czech who would later be transported to Auschwitz, kept a diary of his time in Theresienstadt that was posthumously discovered. His entry that day noted, “Baron [sic] Gutmann and his wife were released from the ghetto today, probably due to some foreign orders.” Another camp diarist, a Dane named Ralph Oppenhejm, who survived the war, wrote of the Gutmanns, “Released! Oh, what one wouldn’t give to be in their position.”

  Perhaps for a few moments Fritz and Louise believed it, too. Despite all the lies the Nazis had told them in the past, perhaps they truly believed that this time they were going to be free, that the hell of Theresienstadt was being left behind.