The Lady in Gold

by Anne-marie O'connor

  She rode the train back to Zagreb and ran to the courthouse, holding her petition triumphantly in hand. It didn’t matter: Nelly was told her father would be shot the next morning. She hurried over to the prison with her little brother, Franz. It was already late afternoon. Little Franz barely understood what was happening. The guards allowed Franz to say a brief goodbye to his father. Then a close friend of Viktor and Luise, Joseph Gattin, a Catholic schoolteacher, took Franz’s hand and walked the boy home.

  The prison guards told Nelly she could spend her father’s last night with him. She followed them to her father’s cell, stunned. She and Viktor lay on a blanket talking as the prisoners played chess by candlelight and smoked cigarettes. Viktor was peaceful. He spoke to Nelly as an adult, not a child.

  He talked about how life would go on without him. During his months in prison, he had rehearsed his death in his mind, and he wasn’t afraid.

  In the next room was a dean of the university, who would also face the firing squad. The dean and his family were sobbing loudly. “Let’s move,” Viktor told Nelly. “It’s getting on my nerves.” They pulled their blanket to another corner of the floor. Viktor continued in the same detached tone. “So many people have been shot in the last few years,” he mused. “What’s one more?”

  One more? Losing her father was unbearable. An ocean of exhaustion swept over Nelly. She closed her eyes for a moment, and her father’s voice faded to a distant murmur.

  When Nelly opened her eyes, her father was touching her shoulder and whispering her name. It was nearly dawn. Nelly was so ashamed. She had slept through her last night with her father. Her father had spent the night awake, reading Goethe’s Faust. The guards walked in. “You can go home now,” a guard told Nelly.

  Her father stood up. He walked from guard to guard, shaking their hands with cordial formality. “Goodbye. Thank you very much,” he told each guard, as if he had just dined at their house.

  Viktor handed Nelly his copy of Faust. Then he hugged his daughter for the last time.

  The guards walked Nelly to the door of the prison, and she stepped out into the cold air. The dark sky was beginning to turn pale blue, and the first birds were singing. Nelly walked slowly down the deserted streets, feeling like a ghost in a dream. The first early morning workers, men in worn work dungarees and women with scarves around their faces, brushed by Nelly in their winter coats, preoccupied with their own tragedies, in a country torn apart by war. Nelly searched their tired faces, but found no answering glance. She wanted to stop them and say, “Don’t you know they are shooting my father?”

  Viktor was shot that morning. The guards stole his clothes and shoes. They gave Luise one of Viktor’s books, an anthology of the “worldly wisdom” of Goethe.

  One of them handed Luise a letter from Viktor. It was dated January 30, 1946—two weeks before his execution.

  Viktor knew he was doomed. He wrote:

  Dearest Luise,

  The Supreme Court has rejected my appeal.

  I do not want to become sentimental and pathetic at this moment; that is not necessary between us.

  I am completely calm. In the course of these difficult months, I have become so used to the thought of dying that I confront my fate under complete emotional control. God wanted it this way and therefore it will presumably be good and right.

  I would now like to tell you a few things that concern me. There are two in particular. The first is, that you and the children should do your utmost to overcome these difficult events emotionally as soon and as completely as possible.

  This will be more difficult for you than for them; the children have their whole lives before them; you have half your life before you.

  You should make a particular effort to only look ahead and not back.

  At first, your path will be a difficult one, and now comes the second thing that I have to say.

  It is my wish that the man, who during these difficult times proved to be such a good, noble friend and such an honorable person, and who is so fond of you, should remain at your side as support and help in your future life.

  Of course, I assume here that this is in agreement with the wishes of you both.

  So Viktor had noticed. In the past few months, his good friend Joseph Gattin had been falling in love with Luise. Viktor wrote:

  He was a Godsend to you. I am also sure that he will appreciate what a unique treasure he will have at his side.

  I beg you to do everything in your power to achieve a future state where you have peace of mind and emotional calm and can think about yourself and your well-being . . . As far as the children are concerned, they have turned out so well that I don’t worry about their future . . .

  They were the greatest joy of my life.

  I do not wish to write you about the cursed shares. It disgusts me to mention a word about them in this letter . . .

  I have one more wish: please do not feel too badly about me . . . In the course of my life, I experienced and saw so much that was beautiful. And how many millions of people have faced the same fate in recent years.

  There is just one thing I regret: that I was never able to tell you and show you how very much I loved you.

  I kiss you and the children a thousand times,

  Your Viktor

  P.S. It is my wish that the case of my trial should not rest. All possible evidence should be collected and efforts should be made so that the truth about the events that took place here become known in the widest possible circles.

  Luise asked for Viktor’s remains. The prison administrator bluntly refused. They kept his watch. As she left, Luise saw a guard walking through the prison yard, wearing Viktor’s fine long black wool overcoat.

  She trudged into the Interior Ministry, sat on a dirty bench, and waited her turn. Perhaps they could just tell her the location of the grave? An official glared at Luise across a desk. “If you don’t stop pestering people,” the official warned her, “you could end up like your husband.”

  Luise and her children were now pariahs, the ostracized family of an enemy of the people. Nelly retreated into shell-shocked silence. There would be no funeral, no memorial. That would only draw disdain, or worse. By now Nelly was familiar with suspicious stares and whispers. She kept her grief to herself. Alone, she pored over the picture of her father, alongside Uncle Erno, handsome in their Habsburg uniforms trimmed with gold braid and medals: the dashing Gutmann barons.

  There was no trace now of Luise the baby-faced belle. Luise was desperate. There was no future for her in Yugoslavia, no future for her children.

  She tried to escape. She was caught by a border guard with crazy eyes who seemed capable of anything. “Do you have any money?” he asked. “Jewelry?” Luise had almost nothing. “Can you get some?” the guard persisted, with his unfocused stare, pointing his gun at her. Luise began to cry. “My husband was murdered,” she said. “I am all my children have.”

  “They burned my wife and children alive!” the guard retorted, with his mad eyes. “They stuck them like pigs!” Luise looked into his unbalanced gaze with horror. He let her go.

  Refugee

  Then, improbably, a door opened. In 1948, the state of Israel was declared. The Tito government said Jews who could get visas to Israel were welcome to go. Non-Jewish spouses were included.

  Nelly loved her new home from the moment she saw the ancient stones of Jerusalem in the desert sun. She was not a Zionist, or a partisan. She was an orphan of a hostile world. Now she had a refuge. A place where people who had lived through hell were embracing life, joy, idealism, and love. Where intellectuals tilled the soil, smiling as they sweated in the sun. Nelly enrolled in a Jerusalem medical school, worked in a hospital, and helped relocate Jews from Yemen. Some of these men had six wives and thirty-five children. They tried to light cooking fires on the plane. One man amused Nelly by asking how much it would cost to make her his youngest wife. After years of fear and rejection, everyone here em
braced Nelly. No one cared if she was born Jewish but celebrated Christmas and Easter. Here Marxists and Zionists mingled with refugees who wanted to be done with ideology and religion. Like Nelly, they were grateful just to be alive, surrounded by friendly faces and smiles as warm as sunlight.

  After years as a pariah, Nelly felt she finally belonged.

  The respite wouldn’t last. Luise’s family implored her to join them in Canada, and she finally listened. In 1950, the battle-scarred little family—Nelly and Franz, Luise and her new husband, the Jewish convert Joseph Gattin—arrived in Vancouver. The Bloch-Bauer brothers had changed their surname to Bentley and founded a timber company. Nelly applied to American medical schools, unaware that most accepted few or no women. She was admitted to only one, the University of Seattle. There, discrimination against the handful of female students was common, but this didn’t discourage Nelly. After all, her old pediatrician, Dr. Bien, had stood up to an entire profession to open the door for young women like her.

  What was to be a secret Nazi bunker under construction at the Belvedere Palace, under the gardens, visible from the window of Baroness Elisabeth Bachofen-Echt, 1943. (Illustration Credit 57.1)

  Austrian refugees were crowding into Vancouver. One of them asked Luise to help a fellow émigré, a young man with a mysterious pedigree who was washing dishes in the kitchen of the Hotel Vancouver.

  Johannes, twenty-one, was a tall, poised youth, with black hair and blue eyes. Luise did a double take as Johannes haltingly traced his complicated journey. Johannes was an Auersperg prince, from an eleventh-century lineage peopled with statesmen, poets, and commanders. In Tolstoy’s War and Peace, even an enemy flattered an Auersperg prince as “Dearest foe! Flower of the Austrian army, hero of the Turkish wars.”

  Luise and her daughter, Nelly, now a beautiful young woman who aspired to be a doctor like her childhood pediatrician, Adele’s good friend Gertrud Bien, ca. 1949. (Illustration Credit 57.2)

  Johannes had spent his childhood in the Czech Sudetenland, a few miles from the Klimt mural at Liberec. The region had been a bastion of fervent Nazi support. At fifteen, Johannes had been marched to Austria on foot when Red Army troops expelled Germanic Czechs.

  Luise listened carefully to the account of this penniless dishwashing prince. She got Johannes a job driving a sawdust truck for the family timber company, and invited him to dinner.

  Nelly came in from Seattle, flushed with the excitement of medical school. Her mother’s dinner guest kissed her hand with formal flourish. He was absurdly handsome, and immediately smitten with shy Nelly.

  Before Nelly married Johannes, she confessed to a priest that after her father died, she had decided there was no God. How could the horror she had lived be part of a divine plan? “I don’t believe in God,” she said. “What can I do?” Never mind, the priest said thoughtfully. “There must be a God. You’ll make a good wife.” So Nelly, persecuted as a Jew and reinvented as a Catholic, became a princess of one of the oldest dynasties in Europe.

  Maria had followed the Altmann clan to Los Angeles. She and Fritz had three boys and a girl. She sold some of Bernhard’s knitwear to a few stores and discovered that she loved to work. She opened a dress shop on Burton Way in Beverly Hills. Fritz became the West Coast salesman for Bernhard, and sang opera with his old friend, the composer Erich Zeisl. They joined the vast Los Angeles community of exiles from fascism: Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann, Alma Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg. Michael Curtiz was there, and Billy Wilder, whose parents had died in Auschwitz.

  A depot of stolen art at Ellingen in Germany, ca. 1945. Allied forces sorted through millions of stolen artworks and returned many to their governments of origin—which often did not get them to their rightful owners. (Illustration Credit 57.3)

  The only Bloch-Bauer work left in Vienna was the portrait of Adele, in the Belvedere Palace, the museum with the colorful history, bomb-scarred roof, and clandestine bunker.

  Provenance

  As Austria emerged from the war, Americans trucked Europe’s orphan paintings from salt mines, castles, and convents in Austria and Germany. In many cases, the owners of the art could not pull their own paintings out of the stacks of assembled artworks. Often, the Allies turned the art over to their governments. In Austria, this practice left Jewish survivors at the mercy of government officials who had collaborated with the Reich.

  The art historians who meticulously catalogued the art to be stolen after the Anschluss gave few clues about the fate of lost and missing works. Austrian officials remained silent about a huge cache of stolen art at the fourteenth-century former monastery at Mauerbach, outside Vienna. The art historians who could have provided answers remained silent, taking pains to cover their pasts.

  Bruno Grimschitz, the dapper Nazi bureaucrat who ran the Belvedere under Hitler, wrote an elaborate history of the museum just after the war. But he ended it in the 1800s, revealing how the Viennese obsession with its glorious past could be used as a psychological refuge from the ugly history so close at hand.

  Grimschitz concealed his role in the possession of the gold portrait of Adele as carefully as Belvedere directors sealed their Nazi bunker. When Erich Führer was arrested by French military police in western Austria in May 1945, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer’s Klimt painting Houses in Unterach on Lake Attersee was hanging on his wall. Führer had kept it for himself.

  Führer was sentenced to three years of hard labor, though he managed to serve only two. He held on to Adele’s books, insisting they were a “gift” from Ferdinand, and they trickled into the black market. Years later, a fine green leather Wiener Werkstatte art book, designed by Josef Hoffmann, turned up for sale bearing the ex libris of SS captain Erich Führer, “who liquidated the assets of Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, including the painting of Adele Bloch-Bauer by Gustav Klimt,” the bookseller noted.

  Adele had been an icon of sophisticated, cosmopolitan turn-of-the-century Vienna, of the illustrious doomed empire, and of the duplicity and lies behind Nazi theories of racial superiority.

  Now she began to acquire a new symbolism: of Austria’s postwar refusal to make amends for its eager collaboration with Adolf Hitler.

  PART THREE

  Atonement

  Historical Amnesia

  It was difficult for the Bloch-Bauers to recover the remnants of their lives after the war.

  Repentance was scarce. Austria was awash in self-pity. Vienna was a ruin. Allied bombings had reduced centuries of architecture to rubble. The city was divided into four zones controlled by the French, British, American, and Soviet armies. Amputees limped through the streets. A hundred thousand women in Vienna hid the trauma of rape. People sold valuables, or their bodies, to buy food.

  More than 65,000 Austrian Jews had been murdered. An estimated 5,500 had survived in Austria. Exiles faced a thicket of unwelcoming laws. Some 130,000 Austrian Jews had fled, and many of the survivors had emigrated. They were required to give up their foreign citizenship if they wanted to recover their Austrian nationality, a slow process that could take years. For some forms of compensation, citizenship or residency was required.

  The 1946 Annulment Act declared Nazi-era legal transactions “null and void,” but in practice, it was very difficult to get back occupied family homes and apartments that had been “Aryanized” during the war. Families that tried to reclaim art collections were told the most valuable pieces were “patrimony,” and were asked to “donate” the works in exchange for exit permits to take lesser artworks out of the country.

  Jewish survivors who returned in this bleak postwar period were tired and saddened. Friends and family had been murdered; strangers were living in their houses, using their silverware, selling their heirlooms on the black market. Austrian officials were often very unwelcoming.

  Few Jews came home.

  Austrians held on to their valuable art. Cultural institutions were led by veterans of the Nazi era. Officials who had played roles in the art theft during the war were now in the position to de
ny exiles their paintings, or the permits to take them to their new homes abroad.

  At the concentration camp where Fritz was imprisoned, American soldiers had forced the well-dressed elite of the town of Dachau, holding handkerchiefs over their noses, to walk through the fetid barracks and look at the smoking crematoriums they had lived alongside for years. But that was Germany.

  The Belvedere Palace, ravaged by Allied bombings, December 1944. Many of the roof statues were lost in the bombardment, so orphaned statues were salvaged from damaged buildings and reassembled on the Belvedere parapet after the war. (Illustration Credit 59.1)

  Austrians were allowed to paper over their pasts and portray themselves as unwilling participants. They felt sorry for themselves, and for the proud family names sullied with the taint of Nazi collaboration.

  The Cold War began in earnest, and the West was eager to hang on to Austria. A 1948 amnesty brought a premature end to Austrian de-Nazification. Austrians began to deny their jubilant welcome of Hitler and to claim that Austria had been “occupied” by Germany, like France or Poland. Thus was born the fictional alibi of Austria as the “first victim” of the Nazis. It was obvious Austrians themselves didn’t truly believe this. Austrian men who had deserted the German army to join the Allies were not embraced as returning heroes who fought the Nazi “occupation”; instead, they were scorned as traitors. Austrians stubbornly remained in houses stolen from Jews, clinging to their furniture, books, and paintings. Of some thirty-five thousand Jewish businesses, only a few thousand would ever be returned to their owners.

  Nazi officials burned records and changed birth dates, even last names. A cloud of secrecy settled over Vienna, the city on the Danube once known for its love of beauty and pleasure. Austrians learned not to ask too many questions.