The Lady in Gold

by Anne-marie O'connor

  “Where is my father?” Nelly’s cousin Elinor wrote from Geneva, after her father’s letters abruptly stopped.

  The Gutmanns had no idea. All they knew was that Erno had never come home.

  The “Blonde Beast”

  It was a warm fall day in Prague in October 1941, and the lyrical Charles bridge was bathed in the golden light of autumn when a motorcade pulled up to inspect the Brezany estate of Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, just outside Prague. Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich, the new Nazi imperial protector of Bohemia and Moravia, got out of a sedan.

  Heydrich knew little about Ferdinand. He took in the crystal chandeliers, the long baronial dining room table, and the tapestries, and found the castle an excellent residence for the prestigious position he had long coveted. He liked the classic mounted antlers and the stuffed stag in the entryway.

  He was bringing his much-admired wife, Lina, to live here with his two sons and little daughter. Like many Nazis, his career had given him access to the spoils of stolen property, and he had used it to build his power base.

  This particular expropriated Jewish estate suited his personal vanities. Heydrich fancied himself a discriminating aesthete and defender of German culture, the kind of man who had always deserved an estate like this.

  He acquired these conceits during a childhood as the son of a minor German composer, Richard Bruno Heydrich, and a violinist mother. His parents named him after a passage in Reinhard’s Crime, an opera that his father had written. Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde inspired Heydrich’s second name. His third name, Eugen, referred to Prince Eugene of Savoy, the war hero of Vienna’s Belvedere Palace.

  Heydrich married Lina von Osten in 1931, after verifying that she possessed the racial pedigree required of the wives of SS officers—though he himself hid probable Jewish ancestry on his father’s side. Lina was the daughter of a school headmaster from a small island in the Baltic Sea. Lina and her brother had been early Nazi Party members, and her family was impeccably anti-Semitic. Heydrich met Lina in Kiel, where he was a naval officer and Lina was studying to be a schoolteacher. Heydrich, a carousing philanderer, had gotten a well-connected girl pregnant, but he proposed to Lina instead. He was expelled by the navy for conduct unbecoming an officer. Lina’s Nazi connections salvaged his career. In June 1931, Heydrich found himself interviewing with Heinrich Himmler, the national commander of Germany’s SS, an increasingly powerful paramilitary organization of the Nazi Party.

  Lina would discover she had married a dangerous man with a well-deserved reputation for treachery. The foulmouthed Heydrich made many enemies, even among Nazis. His rivals believed he was plotting to kill them. Their fears were not unfounded. In 1934, Heydrich sent men to kidnap a Nazi rival. They badly botched the job, killing their target and panicking, abandoning their car and leaving other glaring clues.

  Reinhard Heydrich, the “Butcher of Prague,” in his SS uniform, ca. 1940. Heydrich chaired the Wannsee Conference on the Final Solution to exterminate European Jews. (Illustration Credit 44.1)

  Heydrich had created a group of mobile commandos to secure government offices and documents when the Germans arrived in Austria in 1938. The force evolved into the notorious Einsatzgruppen, or mobile killing teams, whose members had carte blanche to commit butchery.

  By the time they arrived at Ferdinand’s house, even Heydrich’s wife feared him. People whispered about Lina’s close friendship with a good-looking Heydrich protégé, Walter Schellenberg. Lina had long resented her husband’s dalliances with young women drawn to powerful Nazis, and his enjoyment of the notorious bacchanalias of drinking and sex that were a male bonding ritual. Even Heydrich’s fellow officers dreaded his calls to join late-night binges in Berlin nightclubs and brothels. Heydrich was a mean drunk. Some saw Lina as a long-suffering captive of her husband. Unlike her husband, Lina was disgusted by the stuffed stag Ferdinand had placed in the front hall, and consigned it to the rubbish heap.

  Heydrich was often out of town. In January 1942, he chaired a conference in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee on the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” The conferees decided on extermination. The Nazis wished to accomplish this quickly and efficiently, using modern assembly-line methods inspired by an early admirer of Hitler, Henry Ford.

  Lina busied herself redecorating. She insisted on a swimming pool for their two sons, Klaus and Heider, and their little daughter, Silke. Ferdinand’s castle finally got a pool. By the spring of 1942, the renovations were finished. Ferdinand’s topiaries were clipped, his flowers bloomed, and all the castle’s musty old “Jewish” family papers, letters, and photographs were burned.

  Heydrich ruled as Nazi governor of Czechoslovakia from Ferdinand’s Czech castle. (Illustration Credit 44.2)

  On May 27, Heydrich opened the newspaper expectantly. He and Lina had gone to a classical music concert in Prague the evening before. The newspaper published a photo of him leaving the theater, fit and trim in his dress uniform. Lina, in a tailored dress and wide coat, seemed to have stepped out of a Hollywood film. Heydrich was pleased.

  Lina was in the garden that morning, her hair in blonde plaits wrapped around her pretty head in the new Germanic style. Her sons were dressed in Hitler Youth shirts and Silke in an equestrian habit. Lina was visibly pregnant. Their fourth child was due in July. Heydrich’s driver brought his sleek black Mercedes convertible to the door of Ferdinand’s castle. The “Butcher of Prague” finished his breakfast and wandered out to the garden for a leisurely goodbye. Brezany was a beautiful place to live.

  It was a lovely drive into Prague in the open air, bathed in soft spring morning sun, to Heydrich’s stately offices at the Baroque seventeenth-century Czernin Palace, the third-largest in Prague.

  As the car rounded a bend, a man ran into the street, opened his raincoat, and raised a gun. He pulled the trigger but the gun failed to fire. Heydrich was stunned. Outrageous! He shouted to his driver to stop, and stood and shot at the buffoon. Heydrich missed. Another man stepped from the bushes and hurled a bomb, shattering the windows of a streetcar. Passengers screamed. Heydrich’s driver leapt out and ran after their attackers. Heydrich, wounded by shrapnel, staggered after him, shouting, “Get that bastard!”

  The would-be assassins took refuge in Karel Boromejsky church, in the catacombs.

  Heydrich died of infection from his wounds. Hitler was furious. “That a man as irreplaceable as Heydrich should expose himself to unnecessary danger, I can only condemn as stupid and idiotic,” he said on June 4.

  Revenge was swift. On June 9, a train with a thousand Jewish Czechs was sent from Prague to Poland. Two thousand people were ordered out of the Theresienstadt concentration camp and sent east to be killed.

  Finally, under interrogation, someone told the Nazis to look for the assassins in the church. The SS men were greeted there with gunfire, and two officers were wounded. Shouts came from the crypt: We will never surrender!” The officers brought fire hoses to pump water into the catacombs, and tossed in tear-gas canisters. They decided to blow open the crypt.

  Gunshots crackled from the church bowels. The surviving would-be assassins had made sure they would not be taken alive.

  The Nazis wanted to make an example. They chose Lidice, a quaint, cobblestoned village well-established by the fourteenth century. The fiercely independent villagers disdained occupation. The Nazis rounded up 192 men and boys over sixteen in Lidice and executed them. The women and children were sent to concentration camps, where most of the children died. Lidice was torched and razed. More than 1,300 other people were executed for their purported involvement in the resistance.

  In Switzerland, Ferdinand was appalled. The human cost was a terrible price to pay for the assassination of his mad houseguest. Ferdinand worried about his blind sister, Agnes, whom he had moved from Vienna during the Anschluss, and who was now in a Prague sanatorium. Ferdinand contacted an old friend, Prince Schwarzenberg, who had fled the Nazis, and asked him to send someone to check on her. Ferdinand
soon got news: During the crackdown following the assassination, Gestapo agents had hustled off the terrified eighty-nine-year-old Agnes Meyer in a roundup of Prague Jews. She was deported to Theresienstadt. Poor gentle Agnes, who asked little more than to live in peace and die in her sleep, had survived less than three days.

  After his assassination, Heydrich was made a Nazi martyr, and the plan to exterminate Jews was named “Operation Heydrich” in his honor. Hitler bestowed Ferdinand’s house on Lina and her children in perpetuity. The deal soured somewhat as Lina argued with the SS over the employment terms of the concentration camp slave laborers ordered to remodel the estate, which was now envisioned as a hub of Aryan resettlement.

  Love Letters from a Murderer

  By 1942, Maria’s former minder, Felix Landau, had reached a position of relative power. After helping the Gestapo rob wealthy Viennese Jews, Landau went to Galicia, in the culturally rich eastern borderlands. Landau moved with German soldiers through scores of little castle towns, each a prism illuminating a mosaic of language, food, and ethnicity, where Jews, Gypsies, Ruthenians, and Saxons mingled. Along the way, embroidered women’s head scarves became elaborate shawls with dangling ornaments, and even men wore embroidered jackets. Dark-eyed Gypsies gazed up at the soldiers from horse-drawn wagons.

  In 1940, men like Landau were sent to conquer this magical East of balalaikas, Jewish mystics, and violent pogroms. Landau volunteered for duty in Drohobycz, a Polish city that had once been part of the Habsburg empire but was under Soviet control when the Nazis arrived. In Drohobycz, Landau was assigned to be director of Jewish slave labor. In this capacity, he found himself face-to-face with Bruno Schulz, one of Poland’s most distinguished writers.

  Schulz, the 1938 winner of the Golden Laurel of Poland’s Academy of Literature, was working on a novel, The Messiah, when the Nazis invaded. The son of a textile merchant, Schulz had been a quiet, artistic boy who grew into a gentle dreamer. He became a schoolteacher, distracting disruptive boys with fairy tales he drew on the chalkboard. One day, a friend showed Schulz’s letters to a Polish writer, who was bewitched by the magic Schulz found in ordinary daily life. His short-story collection, The Cinnamon Shops, was published in English as The Street of the Crocodiles. He illustrated the book himself, along with his next book, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. Schulz could not be cajoled to leave his beloved backwater, even as German troops drew near.

  The Germans ordered Schulz to report for slave labor, and he soon found himself standing before Landau’s desk. Schulz was able to converse with Landau in fluent German. The two men soon found their fates intertwined.

  One thing Landau shared with his previous detainee, Maria Altmann, was a fascination with Grimm’s fairy tales, the Germanic folk legends that permeated Wagner, Goethe, and popular culture—stories with a dark underside and an amoral code that did not always reward the good and punish the bad. The Big Bad Wolf often ate the defenseless woodland creature; the charming Pied Piper led children to senseless deaths. The stories were more warnings than morality plays, and it was often resourcefulness, not justice, that saved would-be victims. Landau’s obsession with these grisly stories would earn him a place in history.

  When Landau learned Schulz had artistic talent, he recruited him to paint nursery murals of fairy tales for Landau’s young son. Schulz had no choice but to accept. Landau left Schulz at his villa to sketch out his fairy-tale panorama of kings with golden crowns and sable furs, squires, and knights in armor. Schulz became known as Landau’s “protected Jew.”

  Polish writer Bruno Schulz, a talented artist, shown here in 1934, was forced to paint fairy tales for the nursery of his Nazi protector. The murals he painted, lost for years, were rediscovered in 2001, sixty years after they were created. (Illustration Credit 45.1)

  The emotionally unstable Landau was no protector. In June 1941, Landau suspected his mistress was cheating on him. “After a sleepless night,” he volunteered for an SS mobile killing squad, or Einsatzkommando, and “suddenly, everything had changed in me.”

  Along with other SS officers, Landau began to use Jewish strangers on the streets of the Drohobycz ghetto for “shooting exercises.” He would idly look out from his apartment at the Jews toiling in the community garden below, then practice his excellent marksmanship by taking aim at the gardeners.

  Then came his first massacre. “Fine, so I’ll just play executioner and then gravedigger, why not?” he wrote in one of his love letters to Gertrude, his mistress. There were twenty-three victims, and “we had to find a suitable spot to shoot and bury them,” Landau wrote. “The death candidates assembled with shovels to dig their own graves. Two of them were weeping. The others certainly had incredible courage.” Landau watched the people put money, jewelry, and watches in a little pile. “Strange, I am completely unmoved,” Landau wrote. “No pity, nothing.”

  “As the women walked to the grave they were completely composed. They turned around. Six of us had to shoot them,” he wrote.

  Later that month, Landau wrote Gertrude that a carefully organized massacre in the city of Lwow had turned into a ghastly public free-for-all at the city’s old Citadel, where soldiers “were holding clubs as thick as a man’s wrist and were lashing out and hitting anyone who crossed their path.” Landau wrote, “There were rows of Jews lying, one on top of the other, like pigs, whimpering horribly. There were “hundreds of Jews walking along the street with blood pouring down their faces . . . Some were carrying others who had collapsed.”

  As Landau directed these nightmares, Schulz painted his fairy tales, retreating into his rich inner life. “The thought of you is a true bright spot for me,” he wrote his dear friend Anna Plockier in September 1941. “You are the partner of my interior dialogues about things that matter to me.” Schulz wrote that “intuition tells me that we will meet again soon.”

  But Anna and her husband were seized by the Nazis in a surprise massacre and buried in the woods. Schulz was moved into the Jewish ghetto. His health deteriorated. He began to take notes, interviewing a fellow prisoner who had been shot. He told an acquaintance that he had written a hundred pages of documentation for a work based on the historic crime going on around him.

  But the final insights of this subtle, delicate genius would remain a mystery. In November 1942, as his literary friends outside the ghetto planned his escape, Schulz’s “protector,” Landau, casually picked off a Jewish dentist who happened to be the “protected Jew” of SS officer Karl Günther.

  The infuriated Günther came across Schulz chatting with a friend at a ghetto street corner, a loaf of bread in his hand. Günther shot Schulz point-blank, snuffing out one of Poland’s brightest lights. “You killed my Jew—I killed yours,” Günther reportedly sneered to Landau.

  The nursery frescoes Schulz left behind were embedded with artistic resistance. Though his kings and queens were cloaked in the royal splendor of an imagined past glory, they had the faces of the hungry Jewish captives in the ghetto. Schulz had painted in his father and even himself in royal garb, driving a carriage, one of the many things now forbidden to men like him.

  Ferdinand’s Legacy

  On August 6, 1942, Hermann Göring stood before the Nazi occupation ministers and reported on the treasures the Nazi looters had so far seized. “It used to be called plundering. It was up to the party in question to carry off what had been conquered,” he told the conference. “But today things have become more humane. In spite of that, I intend to plunder, and to do it thoroughly.”

  In a fit of disgust, Ferdinand began to rewrite his will. It read like a protest. Ferdinand noted how “in an illegal manner, a tax penalty of one million reichsmarks was imposed, and my entire estate in Vienna was confiscated and sold.”

  His family in Europe wasn’t safe.

  He was still trying to get the Klimt portraits of Adele.

  His house was a Vienna headquarters for the German railway that was deporting Jews to camps.

  A Swiss b
ank had illegally handed over the shares of his sugar factory for Aryanization. “The situation has changed,” a bank officer wrote coldly. Ferdinand was living at the exclusive Hotel Bellerive au Lac, on the shores of Lake Zurich, but he probably didn’t choose to live there. The Swiss, deprived of tourism revenue, often assigned luxury housing to the stateless.

  Everything had been stolen, sold, Aryanized.

  The world he had shared with Adele was slipping away. His old friend Stefan Zweig—Adele’s friend, really—had found refuge in Brazil, where he had finished writing a memoir about Vienna, their Vienna. Zweig had gathered all his memories—memories that Ferdinand shared—of Vienna’s turn-of-the-century glamour, the graceful life that had ended, perhaps forever. Zweig called it The World of Yesterday.

  In February, Zweig had left the manuscript, neatly typed by his wife, Elisabeth Charlotte Zweig, on his desk at their home in Persepolis, Brazil. He wrote a message thanking Brazil for giving them shelter, “the world of my own language having disappeared for me and my spiritual home, Europe, having destroyed itself.” Zweig wrote that at his age, “unusual powers are needed in order to make another wholly new beginning. Those that I possess have been exhausted by long years of homeless wandering.” He hoped his friends would “see the dawn after the long night!” while “I, all too impatient, go on before.”

  Then Zweig and his wife took their own lives.

  Such news made Ferdinand deeply weary. He was now just an old man in a suit, alone in a hotel in Switzerland.

  He wondered how he would go on.

  The Uses of Art

  In February 1943, as Ferdinand battled depression, Nazi authorities in Vienna proudly prepared to display the gold portrait of his wife, Adele. The exhibit was held at the Secession building, which had been renamed the Exhibition Hall Friedrichstrasse.