The Orpheus Clock

by Simon Goodman

  As the final days of 1945 approached, government offices across an exhausted Europe began to close. Pa returned home to London to celebrate Nick’s first Christmas. It was a rather subdued affair. By New Year’s Eve, he was back on the ferry, this time to Ostend, then Brussels, and the overnight train to Prague. On the first day of 1946, Bernard found himself traveling, albeit reluctantly and with considerable anxiety, across Germany for the first time in eight years. As the dim light began to fade from his second-class compartment, he gloomily watched the devastation unfold. When the train pulled into the Cologne station, there seemed to be barely one other building standing, except for the famous Gothic cathedral. The great twin spires loomed eerily over an otherwise flattened city.

  In Prague, a gaunt Lederer took Bernard to visit an even more emaciated Czech woman named Joan Dubova, who had narrowly avoided the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Reluctantly, she began to talk. Not only did she confirm Jo Spier’s account of what had happened to Fritz and Louise, she had actually witnessed my grandfather being beaten to death at the foot of the Kleine Festung. After some convincing, she agreed to retell her story before a notary on Vaklavska Street, in a section of Prague built in the fifteenth century, now known, rather oddly, as New Town (or Nové Meĕsto). On January 4, 1946, an affidavit was issued. This significant step, however, only heightened Bernard’s growing sense of gloom. Nevertheless he returned to Amsterdam more determined than ever, only to be informed by the Dutch authorities that they did not recognize foreign notaries. Undeterred, my father contacted the notary in Prague and asked him to take the affidavit to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Finally, three months later, on April 16, 1946, the Czechoslovak government issued an official death certificate for Fritz Gutmann.

  In the interim, however, in true Kafkaesque style, the Dutch authorities had already appointed an accountant as official administrator of the Fritz Gutmann estate. This was the same accountant who had been administering the Gutmann Family Trust since the occupation, with disastrous results. Meanwhile, it would take another five months before my father could obtain a legal Dutch death certificate. As soon as he received this, he filed suit against the Dutch State to be recognized as his father’s legal heir. Unfortunately, it would then take more than another year before Bernard was officially declared, in October 1947, heir and administrator of the Fritz Gutmann estate.

  My father might have complained, but only to my mother or his sister, Lili. In Holland, Bernard could count on Franz Koenigs’s daughters, Nela and her sisters, for some sympathy, but not many others. Along with the Proehls, the family of the late Franz Koenigs was all that was left of the entire social world the Gutmanns had known in the Netherlands.

  In the meantime, my father had much to preoccupy himself with. Ever since that dismal day in December 1945 he could not get out of his head the haunting image of the ghostly white walls of his beloved Bosbeek. When Bernard had last seen the family home in 1938, it had been filled with color, with the wonderful artworks his father had so lovingly collected over the years—the two Degas, the Renoir, the Cranachs, the Memling, the Guardis and the Gainsborough, the Bosch and the Botticelli. When he returned to Bosbeek on that cold day in December, not one of them remained. The paintings, the furniture, the china, the silver, the carpets, the cars, even the dogs—everything was gone. Even the door to the safe room, which had once protected the Orpheus Clock and the other family treasures, had disappeared. Pa knew nothing of Haberstock and Böhler, of Mühlmann and Miedl, of the Führermuseum and Göring’s Carinhall. Bernard knew only that the Nazis had come and then they had gone, and with them the paintings and other artworks had vanished.

  Amid the destruction left by World War II, mere possessions, even valuable paintings, meant relatively little. Millions were dead, including Bernard’s parents; millions more were displaced and scattered to the winds as refugees and stateless people, including many of his own family members. Europe lay in ruins, its cities damaged or destroyed, its communications and transportation networks in chaos, many of its people starving. In the midst of all that, a few pretty canvases were perhaps insignificant.

  Yet, as the months passed and the terrible finality of his parents’ deaths sank in, for my father those missing artworks took on an importance beyond their artistic or material worth. They were the last link to the happy days of his youth, the sole remaining connection to the life he had once known, and they were his murdered parents’ last legacy. He understood that, given their value, it was highly unlikely the Nazis would have destroyed any of them. He knew that at least some of those stolen paintings had to be out there, somewhere.

  The only clue Bernard had was a letter from Lili, who was still in Italy waiting for legal travel documents. Lili had relayed to her brother the contents of the note that Fritz had smuggled out to her, on Hotel Ritz of Paris stationery. In the note he stated clearly that he had managed to send several pieces from his collection to Paris in the care of Arthur Goldschmidt and the Paul Graupe gallery on the place Vendôme. So Bernard decided his quest would begin in Paris.

  • • •

  In those same years, as the ashes of the war were settling, the scale of the Holocaust was becoming apparent. Fritz and Louise were not the only members of the extended Gutmann–Von Landau family to perish under the Nazis. Other innocents from our decimated extended family included Alice Gutmann, Ludwig Bloch, Egon Bloch, Stephanie Heller, Arthur Misch, Bettie Meyer, Vally Manheimer, Fritz Wallach, Gertrud Huldschinsky, Emma von Landau, Maurice Poznanski, Curt Sobernheim, Ellen Citroen, Franz Ledermann, Ilse Ledermann, and the fifteen-year-old Susi Ledermann.

  Thankfully, though, most of Bernard’s immediate family had survived, but were scattered across Europe and America. Uncle Max, remarkably, managed to hide in Rome until the liberation. Uncle Kurt had left Paris when the Germans occupied the city in 1940, fleeing south toward the Franco-Spanish border. There he was caught and imprisoned by the Vichy French authorities while trying to cross the Pyrenees. Somehow he escaped and returned to Paris, deciding it would be safer to hide in the big city rather than in the French countryside. He worked as a window cleaner, then as a cook, and successfully kept ahead of the Gestapo until liberation came. Kurt’s daughter, Ursula, meanwhile, had managed to make her way to New York.

  During all this time, the two aristocratic aunts, Lili Orsini and Toinon von Essen, had remained comfortably in their villas in Italy—Lili in the Villa Principessa outside Lucca, and Toinon in the Villa Mercadente in Rome. Seemingly, neither had been bothered by any anti-Semitic restrictions. Toinon’s daughter Jacobea, who married Baron Sapuppo, had successfully brushed off any suggestion of Jewish heritage. On the other hand, Toinon’s older daughter, Marion, was not able to keep such a low profile. Married to the head of the German Rothschilds, Marion had to flee to Switzerland in 1938, along with her husband, Albert von Goldschmidt-Rothschild, and their four children (including the twins, Mathilde and Nadine). With great regret, Albert was forced to abandon the ancestral home of Grüneburg outside Frankfurt, along with literally a trainload of precious artworks. Not satisfied, the Germans relentlessly pressured the Swiss to cancel his visa. The day after Christmas in 1941, Albert took his own life by jumping from the window of his hotel, overlooking the beautiful lake at Lausanne.

  In England, after Herbert’s premature death, Daisy and Marion Gutmann (first cousin of Marion von Goldschmidt-Rothschild) had waited out the war, until Luca’s eventual release from the British internment camp in Canada. Herbert’s second son, Fredy Gutmann, was another who successfully made his way to New York; there he changed his name to Fred Gann and joined the US army. His knowledge of German became of great use when he was promoted to lieutenant during the invasion of Germany.

  Back in Italy, young Lili had remained hidden in the San Gimignano tower with her children until July 1944, when Free French forces had liberated the town. (Lili was stunned to find the French forces led by a glamorous woman lieutenant perched on top of a tank. She discovered it was
the famous writer Ève Curie, daughter of Marie Curie.)

  At the end of the war, Lili was officially a resident of a former enemy country. As a result, she could not return to the Netherlands until her Dutch citizenship was reinstated. In 1946, after eight years, Bernard and Lili were tearfully reunited in Amsterdam. It was a miracle that either of them was still alive. They clung to each other for a long time, and then they started talking. There was so much to tell.

  Lili described dodging the Fascists and the Gestapo only to be nearly shot by ungrateful Communist partisans. She had been smuggling supplies to the Resistance, on a horse-drawn buggy, when the partisans accused her of withholding vital food.

  Meanwhile, Bernard told of a near miss: while still recovering in the hospital, another bomb hit his local pub, the Red Lion, at the end of Charles Street, exactly opposite his house. Even in March, just before the end of the war, a V-2 flying rocket-bomb landed nearby in Hyde Park, killing several people.

  The war stories were accompanied by a certain bravado. But when Bernard explained what had happened to Bosbeek, the gloom set in. The subject, inevitably, turned to Theresienstadt. Eventually Bernard and Lili just sat in silence together.

  PART III

  RESTORATION

  CHAPTER 9

  OUT OF THE ASHES

  The new generation: Simon and Nick, with Bernard, visiting Bosbeek in 1952. In the background is a rare statue the Nazis had not removed.

  Before the war, the many descendants of Eugen had come to rely on Fritz for financial support. Now with Fritz gone, it would fall to my father to handle not only his parents’ estate, but also what remained of the Eugen Gutmann Family Trust—a task that, given the disruptions of the war and the ponderous pace of bureaucracies, would take many years. But first the Dutch State had to confirm Bernard as the executor of his father’s estate and of the family trust. With the final hearings in Dutch court still several months away, at best, Bernard headed for Paris.

  Pa found a room above Le Berkeley restaurant, on the avenue Matignon. Le Berkeley had been a favorite of Fritz’s in the thirties, when he would tour the great art galleries, such as Bernheim-Jeune, just a few doors down. A helpful man at the British Embassy directed Bernard the next day to the Commission de Récupération Artistique (Commission on Art Recovery). The new commission’s offices had been set up initially in the Jeu de Paume. Symbolically this would be where the Allies would start returning all recovered French artworks.

  Bernard was ushered into the offices of the former Résistance leader Albert Henraux, now director of the CRA. “Ah, Monsieur Gutmann! We have been waiting for you.” Unfortunately Henraux didn’t have good news for my father. As best he could, the director began to explain what had happened to the Graupe Gallery and the collections entrusted to its care. In 1941, Hitler’s art agent, Karl Haberstock, had arrived at the gallery with orders to collect from the Gutmann collection eight major paintings (including the Memling, one of the Cranachs, and the Holbein). Then, when Paul Graupe fled to Switzerland, and his associate, Arthur Goldschmidt, to the south of France, what had been left in the gallery had been seized by a branch of the Nazi Party known as the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (or ERR), including the Pietà statue and the Veronese, I would later discover. Meanwhile, the other Gutmann artworks had been put in storage on the boulevard Raspail and filed under the pseudonym “Muir.” The strategy was that a Scottish name such as Muir might go undetected by the Nazis, whereas they would certainly pursue anything listed under a typically Jewish name, such as Gutmann. Henraux believed these artworks included the three Impressionist paintings. Ultimately, they would suffer the same fate as the other works when the ERR discovered them in 1942.

  Henraux next handed Bernard an envelope containing three negatives. He explained that they had been taken in late 1942 by Henraux’s colleague Rose Valland (now Captain Valland). During the years of German occupation, Valland was the only remaining French official at the Jeu de Paume Museum, which had become the depot for the art that the Germans were looting. Undercover for all of that time, and at great personal risk, she was working for the French Resistance. She was indeed a remarkable woman. At night, Valland secretly cataloged and photographed as many artworks as possible before they were shipped to Germany—including, as we discovered, some of my grandparents’ paintings. Amazingly, Valland was barely noticed by the Germans. They were not even aware she was fluent in German.

  A shiver ran up my father’s spine when he realized he was in the very same building at that moment.

  Henraux explained that so far none of the Gutmann paintings seemed to be among those the Allies had already found. However, Rose Valland was, at present, in Munich, at the new Central Collecting Point, busily looking for any pieces taken in France by the Nazis. Henraux, or Valland herself, would contact my father as soon as they had found something. Henraux pointed out it was early days yet—they had “thousands” of artworks to sift through.

  • • •

  The scale of the Nazi art looting of Europe in World War II beggars the imagination. Hundreds of thousands of pieces—paintings, sculptures, antiquities—were stolen outright or “purchased” under duress and usually transported back to Germany, not only by top Nazis such as Hitler and Göring but by all levels of Nazi officials and military men. From France alone, thirty complete train convoys packed full with masterworks (approximately 140 wagons with over twelve hundred crates) left Paris for Germany between the end of 1940 and July 1944. As the war neared its end, the bombing of Germany increased and the Allies closed in from the west and the east. Out of fear of detection and no doubt to safeguard these valuables (along with German gold reserves), the Nazis hid the priceless treasures in more than a thousand repositories across Germany and Austria—in castles and cathedrals, in cellars and warehouses, in underground bunkers and huge salt mines.

  What they hoped to accomplish with this subterfuge is uncertain. Perhaps they thought the Allies would not find these vast troves of art and gold. Perhaps some of the top Nazis, Göring in particular, thought that after the war they would actually be allowed to keep the thousands of artworks they had “legitimately” collected from the occupied territories. Whatever the Nazi thinking, it was delusional. As the Russians swept through eastern Germany, the Red Army’s “trophy brigades” swept up countless artworks and unabashedly shipped them back to Russia—works not only stolen by the Germans during the invasion of the Soviet Union, but artworks stolen by the Nazis from other European countries as well. Hundreds of thousands of artworks disappeared, seemingly forever, behind what would soon be known as the Iron Curtain—a small measure of restitution, the Russians felt, for the terrible destruction they had suffered in the war.

  To this day, the Russians still refuse to return stolen artworks or even, in some cases, acknowledge that they had even taken them. The Western Allies, to their credit, took a more humanitarian approach at the end of the war. Alarmed by reports of the Nazis’ cultural rape of Europe, in 1943 the American government initiated a joint Allied military unit called the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) group, a collection of museum professionals, art historians, art dealers, and other experts in uniform. The task of the so-called Monuments Men was to protect significant cultural structures such as cathedrals and museums from wartime destruction, and to recover and return to their rightful owners the artworks the Nazis had stolen. As Allied armies uncovered stashes of looted art, Monuments Men rushed to secure the artworks and to begin the process of repatriating them. At the same time, the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), forerunner of the CIA, set up an Art Looting Investigation Unit, charged with tracking down the art vultures who had orchestrated the thefts—men such as Mühlmann, Hofer, Haberstock, Böhler, Wendland, and scores of others.

  The Monuments Men, whose story, until recently, had rarely been told, performed their work admirably, with dedication and courage. The task they faced, however, was overwhelming, especially for a unit that at its height number
ed less than four hundred men and women. Perhaps it was inevitable that thousands of stolen artworks that had escaped destruction in the war would remain undiscovered.

  Nevertheless, pieces of Fritz’s stolen art collection started turning up. In the vast underground Austrian salt mine at Altaussee, the Monuments Men found more than ten thousand paintings and artworks. Alongside Michelangelo’s Bruges Madonna, Van Eyck’s Adoration of the Mystic Lamb (known as the Ghent Altarpiece), and Jan Vermeer’s The Astronomer, which had been Hitler’s most cherished painting, were several paintings that had been stolen from the collection of F. B. E. Gutmann. Among this vast horde, slated for the Führermuseum in Linz, were at least one Cranach, two Liotards, one Van Goyen, the Jakob Elsner, the Nicholas Maes, and the Isenbrandt, all from Fritz’s collection. Then in bunkers and on a freight train, hidden in an abandoned railway tunnel near Berchtesgaden, Allied soldiers found thousands of artworks from Göring’s collection. Among these looted pieces were many from the collections of Fritz’s friends Franz Koenigs and Jacques Goudstikker, as well as the fourteenth-century Pietà sculpture that Fritz had sent to Paris in 1939, and several pieces from the Gutmann silver collection. However, the Dosso Dossi portrait, which had been taken from the Wacker-Bondy storage on the boulevard Raspail for Göring’s private collection, was nowhere to be seen.