The Lady in Gold (30 page)

Just down the road was Osijek, with its ancient fort and
Secessionist and
Art Deco architecture. The breakup of the Empire had
long ago dulled its luster. Farther south was the picturesque mountain city of Sarajevo, with its minarets, onion domes, and veiled Muslim women.

Belisce owed its existence to Viktor's grandfather, Aladar, who had founded a timber company and built a railroad line through the forest between Hungary and Yugoslavia. This earned him a title, a visit from Emperor Franz Joseph, and an imperial gold watch.

Here Serbs and Croats intermarried. Gypsies lived peacefully on the outskirts of the village. When dusk fell, they lifted their violins and cimbalos and played the hauntingly seductive music that a Czernin count had likened to “making love standing up.” Nelly volunteered to deliver the charity food and clothes to elderly Gypsy widows so she could listen to their sad, strange songs. Her mother hired the Gypsies to play at parties.

The three branches of the extended
Gutmann family lived together in a great house, each branch with its own apartment, with common rooms for eating and entertaining. Viktor's brother Erno—an affectionate uncle to the children, and a doting father to his daughter, Elinor—amused everyone by doing their astrological charts.

Here, one day had passed into the next like the pages of Nelly's schoolbooks.

Until now.

Viktor and Luise were under strong family pressure to leave Yugoslavia. To Viktor, this was unthinkable.

Erno was less certain. One night, at dinner, he unveiled his latest astrological chart, that of
Adolf Hitler. It predicted a terrible future.

The family shrugged this off. They had rolled their eyes and smiled at Erno's astrology for years. His Hitler chart seemed a reflection of his own fears.

Still, Erno thought his wife should take their daughter to Switzerland. Little Elinor wept forlornly at the idea of being separated from her father. If Belisce was not safe enough for them, why was it safe for her father? As their suitcases were loaded into the train, Erno helped his distraught little girl up the ramp, waving as Elinor pressed her tear-stained face against the window.

To Viktor and Erno, defending their family's business empire seemed more urgent after the sacking of family properties in Vienna. But the dangers of staying were evident.

The Swiss government, citing the threat of war, had already recalled its citizens, including Nelly's Swiss governess. Nelly couldn't have been more delighted. The governess had been cruel, pulling Nelly's long braids to punish her.

When the Germans marched into Yugoslavia, the Gutmanns were still there.

For a while, life for Nelly went on as usual. Her father was so calm in the early days that when a delegation of officials from the Nazi puppet government came by, they were asked to wait while Viktor finished playing a piece on the piano.

Then,
in May, an Ustasha government official drove up to the administration offices of the timber factory. He was furious that most of its shareholders had already fled and registered their shares in banks abroad. He wanted to take control of the factory.

Baron
Viktor Gutmann, Luise's husband, stayed
in Yugoslavia to protect the timber empire his family had spent generations building; shown here ca. 1935. (
Illustration Credit 43.2
)

A few days later, Viktor drove off with some officials and didn't return. The men sent Luise a flippant message, that they were thinking of shooting Viktor “
to settle the matter of the shares quickly.” But it was a bluff. Viktor was worth more to them alive than dead. He promised to try to obtain signatures for the shares. They released him. For now.

In October, the authorities grew impatient.
They summoned Viktor and Erno, and ordered them to speed up the delivery of the shares. Erno, dressed for the meeting in one of his best suits, politely objected. He said he spoke for the entire family when he asked why they should hand over the country's biggest timber concern after the family had spent generations building it and were running it so well.

Why indeed? Authorities said they'd like to talk things over with Erno in Zagreb and would come and pick him up. Erno asked the housekeeper to pack his dress shirts and enough insulin to treat his diabetes for several days. But as they neared Zagreb, the men turned down an unfamiliar road. They drove into a barbed-wire enclosure, where there were crowds of forlorn people with terror on their faces.

Erno stared in disbelief. He was at a secret concentration camp called Jasenovac, a ghastly place where Serbs and Jews were killed by hand, to spare the cost of gas or bullets.
A few hours later, Erno was standing in line, and a guard casually slit his throat.

“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.

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!”