The Lady in Gold (22 page)

“Be embraced by your Maria,” she wrote, signing her letter with a drawing of a little duckling.

Next Maria wrote “my beloved husband” that she had tried to bring him sports clothes, but the police had turned her away. “I'm with you every minute of the day, and walk around as if in a dream,” Maria wrote. “Have patience, love. Our parents are fine. They send you a thousand greetings. I really am bearing up with courage, a real ‘lion-woman.' Keep my loving memory. I love you more every day. Your Maria.”

Fritz's sister Klara wrote Fritz that Maria's little fox terrier, Jahen, was “taking good care of his mistress,” barking at anyone who came near her. “Your wife is the most enchanting creature on earth!” his niece, Lisl, added.

“My beloved Fritzl,” Maria wrote on May 5. “It has been a week since I last saw you. For me, it has been an eternity.” Gustav, she wrote, “
has problems with his nerves.” This was a massive understatement.

“Last night I had a wonderful dream, that we would see each other soon,” Maria wrote. “Do love me. Thinking always of you, your wife.”

On May 6, Thea, the chic and very pregnant young wife of Maria's brother Robert, wrote Fritz that “
the Duckling ruffles her feathers sadly every day, and kisses you, deeply in love.”

“I have to tell you again how incredibly much I love you,” Maria wrote next. “Peps is doing much better with his nerves . . . I'm trying to be brave and patient.”

In reality, Maria's father was having anxiety attacks and chest pains.
Seven close family friends had taken their lives.

Fritz focused on minutiae in his letter, sending Maria elaborate laundry lists. He had four daytime shirts but needed two more. He needed two pairs of pajamas, twelve handkerchiefs, two napkins, leather gloves, terrycloth
towels, a white pullover with sleeves, a gray pullover without sleeves, a cravat.

“My beloved Fritz,” Therese wrote from the Stubenbastei. “
We're thinking of you with much love. Your good, lovely wife is with us often, and is our whole joy. Be embraced with much love, from your Mama who loves you.” Maria's father added: “How much I'm hoping that you will soon, with the help of God, be home with our beloved Baby (Bützel).” On the same card, Maria wrote, “You see, the parents are fine, my love!”

Maria didn't dare tell Fritz that no one was fine. Everyone they knew regretted not trying to escape immediately. Austria's deposed chancellor,
Kurt Schuschnigg, locked in the Belvedere Palace and a nervous wreck, had married a Czernin countess by proxy. On April 27, the Nazis had filed trumped-up charges of tax evasion against Ferdinand. His sugar factory was being run by one of his employees, a cashier who happened to belong to the Nazi Party. Jews had been ordered to register their assets.

“
My dearest Fritzl,” Maria wrote on May 11, “I received your truly precious letter. You write so enchantingly. Your lines keep me going for the whole week, and I live for the next letter. As you know, I can wait, and love you more every day. When someone is loved by you, they are so strong.”

Maria gently noted that
Elsa Kuranda and her journalist son, Peter, “died suddenly.” “You see, I tell you everything,” she wrote. “As an improvement on your food rations, I send you a big pot full of love. Your life, Maria.”

“Died suddenly” was, of course, code for “committed suicide.” Elsa Kuranda had been Therese's best friend. The charmed world the Kurandas shared with the Bloch-Bauers had become incomprehensible, a place where once-pleasant neighbors turned on them, and their beloved city unleashed goons whose hatred they had no means of comprehending. Mother and son decided they could not go on.

Bernhard had tramped through the Hungarian woods and boarded a train to Yugoslavia, paid a seaplane pilot to fly him to Lake Trasimeno in Umbria, and made his way to unoccupied Paris. Now he was bivouacked in the apartment where Maria and Fritz spent their honeymoon just weeks earlier, plotting his family's escape. Ever the tough dealmaker, Bernhard didn't care if he had to beg, borrow, or lie his family's way out of this maelstrom.

Maria could have left on her own. She had a passport in good order, money, the help of Rinesch. But she rebuffed any suggestion that she leave without Fritz. On May 13, Maria wrote to Fritz that she went to the Hotel Metropol to beg the
Gestapo for permission to see him.

A contemptuous desk clerk waved her away dismissively. In his eyes, Maria was no longer a well-to-do lady, or even a fellow Viennese. She was just a Jew. Maria wrote:

On May 15, Fritz wrote back:

Maria and her father “find words that go through the most forbidding walls, straight to the heart.” Fritz wrote. “Your lines are a revelation, a poetic reprieve from daily life.” He asked Maria to send his red cotton scarf and leather gloves, his lederhosen for the high summer, and photos of her.

“Lover!” Fritz wrote:

Maria laughed at this. How could Fritz think she would start dieting at a time like this! “
We both have to be patient,” Maria wrote on May 16. “But these weeks are bringing us so much closer. It won't be much longer before you'll come back to me. Last year, I was much more unhappy, as I waited for an uncertain goal, and this year I know you will come to me. I only live for you . . . A thousand kisses from your Maria.”

On May 18, Maria wrote, “
My love, today your letter arrived. Your beloved, long-awaited letter . . . My Fritzl, what an immense love I have for you . . . I just have one thought, and that is you, again and again you. My whole life long, I will only love you.”

Maria didn't mind that Fritz was seldom allowed to reply. Writing him allowed her to retreat into the romantic dream that shut out the menace closing in around her family.

If there was one thing Maria underestimated during these tender exchanges, it was her resident Gestapo agent,
Felix Landau. Landau still treated Maria with courtly deference. Maria saw him as an errand boy for more powerful evil men. She never imagined she was getting a daily, firsthand look at one of history's monsters.

Landau's origins were pitiful.
He was born in 1910 to a poor young Viennese Catholic woman. Around the time of his first birthday, his mother married a Jewish gentleman who gave the boy his name and raised him as his son, then died suddenly when Landau was nine. His mother sent him to a harsh Catholic boarding school and, when he was fifteen, to a trade school to learn furniture making. There he finally found dignity and belonging—as a member of the National Socialist Working Youth. This led Landau to Austria's Nazi Party.

When Hitler rose to power in Germany, Landau became a member of the Schutzstaffel, the SS, a fascist militia that surfaced publicly in 1934 when Landau and other
Nazis-in-waiting mounted a coup against Austrian chancellor
Engelbert Dollfuss. The coup failed, but Dollfuss was killed. Landau and other plotters were imprisoned, along with the
Viennese attorney who defended them,
Erich Führer.
Released in 1937, Landau headed to Germany for a medal and a Gestapo post.

Like Hitler, Landau returned to his Austrian homeland, no longer a loser, but a victor. Now he ruled the fates of the people into whose parlors he once would have entered only as a workman.

Maria had no way to know Landau had been handpicked for a systematic campaign to rob wealthy Jews.

Landau was playing a stealthy game of cat and mouse with Maria and Fritz. He probably read their love letters. Maria knew nothing of this the day she went to the police to bring fresh shirts to Fritz.

Fritz was no longer there. Landau feigned ignorance.

Of course, he knew Fritz had been transferred to another prison, the Landesgericht Wien, near City Hall. There the Nazis had put a guillotine in an execution room where hundreds would be murdered.

Maria found Fritz by doggedly combing the detention centers of Vienna. She was certain of only one thing: She was first in Fritz's heart. But that meant so much.

“My love!” Fritz wrote Maria on May 22, from his new prison. “
From the post I get I'm the Croesus of the prison! You cannot imagine how my time seems shorter by receiving this precious mail.

“The daily gigantic letters are wonderful,” but if the entire family was going to write, “then I really need to be locked up,” Fritz joked. “The big event of the week is the photograph of the little wife. I laugh with joy just looking at it. The little frau, pensive.” Fritz wrote that his spirits were lifted by the camaraderie of his fellow prisoners, and “sometimes we have great laughs together. I don't sleep on the floor anymore, so I'm really doing well,” he quipped.

He peppered Maria with questions. Could she get his shirt collar repaired? “When is Thea supposed to give birth? I will keep my fingers crossed for her. When will her parents go to Ischl? What about you?”

Go to Ischl for a holiday? Was he mad? Maria thought. They're hunting Jews. One overzealous teenager in uniform on the road could doom their entire family. Her father was afraid to leave the house.

“Please send an honest report,” Fritz concluded.

An honest report? The
Nuremberg laws “for the Protection of German Blood” were extended to Austria on May 20, forbidding marriage between Jews and “Aryans,” and prohibiting Jews from employing women “of German
blood” under the age of forty-five as domestic workers.
There were 170,000 Jews in Vienna, and it was now clear none were welcome. The Gestapo fired 153 of the 197 professors at the University of Vienna
Medical School. One Jewish Nobel laureate,
Otto Loewi, was jailed and forced to transfer his prize money to a Nazi-controlled bank before authorities would let him out of the country.
Sigmund Freud was freed from Gestapo headquarters only through the intervention of an American millionaire who was also a former patient, after being forced to sign a paper testifying to good treatment. “
I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone,” Freud wrote drily, with an irony that would have made
Mark Twain proud.

An honest report would have landed them all in jail.

“
Dearest wife, I'm so happy to be your husband,” Fritz continued.

He was now a number.

Then, suddenly, silence. The letters stopped. Maria went to the Landes-gericht Wien prison and Fritz wasn't there. The guard shrugged. A train had left for Dachau. Maybe Fritz was on it. Dachau! Maria hastily scrawled a panicked note to the Dachau command. “
Desperately begging for information about the well-being of Friedrich Altmann, admitted May 24. Wife and family entirely without notice.”

Fritz was resting in his prison cell on an unbearably hot night in late May when SS officers strode in and ordered him and two hundred other men to get in line. “They're taking us to Dachau,” some of the men whispered.

Dachau.

The SS recruits who pushed them onto the train with their rifle butts were boys. They looked sixteen or seventeen. Their soft faces contorted with hate as they yelled: “Get down!” The teenagers pushed a slow old man onto the floor and kicked him until he curled up in pain. They ordered the men to sit motionless and stare at the light in the ceiling. As the train bumped along into the countryside, older men strained to hold their necks rigid.

As the hours went by, the guards forced elderly passengers to stand. Many were not physically capable of it. A former managing director of the Austrian railways stumbled, and they beat the old man over the head with their rifle butts until blood streamed down his face. He cringed on the floor, clutching his broken spectacles, his eyes bright with bewildered tears.