The Lady in Gold (33 page)

But Luise told another story. She was escorted to a majestic old place in Osijek that had once been a convent. There she was shown into an apartment with elegant furnishings and liquor.
Here Luise was expected to wait for the Gestapo officer.

There were other things Luise tried to keep from her children.
One day she had opened the door to a cluster of gruff German officers with alcohol on their breath. They pushed past her. Luise ordered Nelly and Franz to play downstairs.

Luise set about being the good hostess she was raised to be, making pleasant conversation in her cultivated Viennese, which they answered in homespun country German. Their conversation deteriorated into off-color jokes, conspiratorial guffaws, leering smiles. One reached for Luise, and his comrades roared with approval.

As Luise endured her drunken rapists, a young, pink-cheeked soldier hung back, clearly shocked by the animal carnality of the scene. He was goaded into taking his turn. When he finished, he looked ashamed. “Did you like me just a little bit?” he asked Luise hopefully.

Luise knew other women suffered terrifying fates. Roving soldiers locked women—Jews, Serbs, Gypsies—into military quarters where they conveniently ignored their doctrine of racial purity. When they finished with these women, they marched them into the woods and shot them.

As the alluring golden
Adele
was admired by strangers in Vienna, the niece of this glamorous daughter of Vienna was at the mercy of passing soldiers.

This was war, and women were the spoils.

It was a warm, blustery day in the spring of 1943 when the youngest baron of Schloss Immendorf, Johannes von Freudenthal, looked out of one of the castle's glorious towers and watched trucks pull into the courtyard.

At ten, Johannes, the inquisitive pet of the family, wasn't much of a baron yet. He still played hide-and-seek with his four brothers and sisters in the nooks and crannies of the castle turrets, imagining himself a dragon-slaying knight in one of the family's old suits of armor.

The eagle's-nest view of the castle took in the mountains northwest of Vienna, the Danubian river valley wine country, and one of Austria's oldest inhabited regions. By 1943, the Schloss Immendorf had long passed its days of feudal glory, though the little baron's father and his young wife had restored the gracefully turreted marvel. Outside were war, scarcity, and other terrible things, but Schloss Immendorf remained the family refuge.

On this cloudy day, Johannes had wandered upstairs, looking for his favorite kitten, when he heard motors outside.

The lovely Schloss Immendorf, which had just been restored, was commandeered to shelter the most important single Klimt collection from Allied bombings.
1936.
(
Illustration Credit 49.1
)

Most strangers came in uniform. Castles were commandeered to house Nazi leaders or SS officers. His father, Baron Rudolf Freudenthal, was an officer in the
Wehrmacht. A succession of German officers lived under his roof. Some were gruff and aloof. Others were kind to Johannes and played the piano with pleasure, filling the house with Schubert, Beethoven, and Mozart, while Johannes's mother set a place for them.

But the strangers downstairs that day wore dark suits, not uniforms. Their workmen brought enormous boxes and panels into the timber-beamed entry hall and carried them up the spiral stairs. Johannes watched them wrestle an enormous rolled-up tapestry into the attic. The men uncoiled a long rope and hoisted wooden crates up the stairs, and Johannes jumped out of the way as they struggled, balancing paintings and stacking them, one by one, against the wall in the tower.

They disappeared downstairs. Johannes examined the paintings. The one in front was as large as Johannes: an enormous tree in bloom, set against a riot of flowers. Nothing as exciting as his father's paintings of men on horses, raising their swords in battle with Napoleon.

Another painting had some naked women in it. Johannes began to pull the other canvases away from it so he could see. But they were heavy, and the whole stack began to slide. The little baron hung on, trying to prevent the paintings from falling down.

A big hand reached down from above and steadied the paintings. Johannes looked up. His father.

These are important paintings, not toys, his father told him sternly. They were painted by a great Austrian artist,
Gustav Klimt. His father told Johannes to leave them alone.

The paintings were in the castle to protect them from air raids. The paintings had been in a big exhibition in Vienna. Baron Freudenthal had been given a choice: either store the paintings or house “war refugees,” which could mean unruly SS officers pushed back at Stalingrad.

The baron chose the art.

There were other eyes watching the comings and goings at Immendorf. At nearby Hollabrunn, a large and infamous SS detachment imprisoned Jewish slave laborers. They sent the prisoners to Immendorf to grow food. One of them was
Anna Lenji, from Hungary. To Anna, Baron Freudenthal “
was very human and tried to do whatever he could, but of course he also was under the supervision of the Nazi superintendent,” so “his power of help was very limited.”

But he was not like the leaders of the two previous camps, who had
made her march naked in public with her husband and the other prisoners, “
which I thought was horrible.” At Schloss Immendorf, the baron sent books to the tiny unheated hut Lenji shared with twelve prisoners, which “meant so much to us because it was a testimony to the fact that we're still humans and not only beasts as we were treated there.”

By the time Allied bombs rained down in Vienna in 1944, Austrian masterpieces, many of them stolen, would be tucked away in the cavernous onetime monastery of Gaming, or in the
Schönborn Castle, not far from Schloss Immendorf. The
Austrian Gallery's
Fritz Novotny sent a typed memo reporting that a painting by
Oskar Kokoschka was being held for safekeeping, along with Klimt's second portrait of Adele, in the stronghold of the massive twelfth-century
Weinern Castle in the eastern Burgenland.

Degenerate or not, Kokoschka was still Austrian.

At Schloss Immendorf, Johannes and his brothers and sisters played near the paintings, shrieking with laughter as they ran past Klimt's
Golden Apple Tree,
avoiding crates that might contain statues.
Their father had warned them of what would happen if they damaged the Klimts.

Croatian authorities sent the Gutmanns to the notorious Savska Cesta political prison in Zagreb. The prison was filled with anti-Nazi partisans. It had a small adjoining hospital, where partisans who had been tortured could be revived for further interrogation.

By 1943,
Josip Broz Tito and the partisan guerrillas he commanded were strong enough to seriously threaten the
Ustasha and the
Nazis. They fought fearlessly, sustaining high casualties but taking a heavy toll on Axis forces. The woods near Belisce were a partisan stronghold.

For Nelly, now fourteen, the prison brought the close family life she had always wished for. She felt safe. Her father spent hours with her, reading and discussing Goethe's
Faust,
teaching her math and languages. Nelly finally had her parents' full attention.

One Croatian prisoner had been a guard at Jasenovac. The Croat said guards at Jasenovac were frightening and brutal. They killed prisoners with axes, sledgehammers, and a special knife they invented, shaped like the crescent moon of the Turks, called the
srbosjek
—“the Serb-cutter.”

The Croat had been a provincial policeman. He was shocked by the stupid, illiterate guards and the ghastly slaughter. He fired off letters to the
Ustasha government, telling what he saw. Surely they would share his outrage.

Instead, they had arrested him and sent him here.

Nelly learned that, for Jews, the prison was supposed to be a way station. Jewish families would appear overnight. They were locked behind the iron grillwork of the small hospital shrine, from which gilded saints had once gazed out mercifully.

One morning, as Nelly walked by the chapel, she saw that a new group of families had arrived. They were rail-thin. They had been stripped of their belongings and were dressed in rags. A father was hugging a small child. The child was only five or six, hollow-eyed and listless, with patchy hair and limbs hanging like matchsticks. This child was barely clinging to life. When anyone walked by, the father raised the dying child in his arms behind the grillwork, his imploring eyes begging each passerby to help. The father must have been starving too. He looked so weak that he seemed barely capable of raising the child. Yet he did.

The sight of the suffering child horrified Nelly. She would have liked to bring soup or water. It seemed incredible that prison guards could walk by, laughing and smoking, ignoring the desperate man and his feeble child. Nelly cringed as she walked by the chapel, and her breath quickened. But she was unable to stop herself from looking up into the pleading father's eyes.

When Nelly awoke the next morning, the man and his child had vanished, along with the rest of the Jewish prisoners.

The chapel was again the empty, silent sanctuary that had once held statues of Mother Mary and Jesus, their faces frozen with mercy.

By 1943, Baroness Elisabeth Bachofen-Echt, one of the dispossessed heirs of the Lederer Klimt collection, was living in desolate isolation. “Beautiful Lisl” spent her days in virtual solitary confinement. As the hours passed, did she sometimes wonder if she was losing her mind?

The Lederer Klimt collection had been seized and sent to Schloss Immendorf. Her mother was eking out a bleak existence in Budapest. Elisabeth was apparently still living at Jacquingasse, though the home was in the name of her “Aryan” ex-husband, Wolfgang. Rinesch said Wolfgang worried about her, even took her to see her mother in Budapest before Serena died there in March.

Wolfgang was also listed as the seller of two Lederer Klimts, the Faculty Paintings
Philosophy
and
Jurisprudence,
to the Belvedere. Thanks to the Nazis, Klimt's shocking modernism was finally making its way into the academy.

Loneliness was Elisabeth's first waking sensation. She flipped through her books at Jacquingasse, or watched the noisy
construction crews that were excavating the garden of the Belvedere outside her window, pouring heavy concrete into an immense underground chamber under the pond.

Her neighbor, a little boy named
Hans Hollein, watched the goings-on with interest: he would grow up to become one of Austria's finest architects.
The composer
Richard Strauss, living nearby with his Jewish daughter-in-law under the protection of
Baldur von Schirach, had to walk around the construction site as he strolled the Belvedere gardens.

There would have been few other witnesses to the mysterious project at the Belvedere, except the leonine stone sphinxes, the guardians of secrets.

The brilliant former director of the
Austrian Gallery,
Franz Martin Haberditzl, was very ill in January 1944 from the complications of his degenerative disease.
He spent the last hours of his life in a chilly apartment at the Belvedere, listening to his daughter Magdalene read the work of the Austrian poet
Rainer Maria Rilke, a fellow soul-seeker whose lover had been a disciple of Freud. “
Think, dear friend,” Rilke had written, “reflect on the world you carry within yourself.”

Haberditzl sifted through a lifetime of memories. He had attained the dream of Austrian art he shared with Adele, at least for a fleeting instant. Now, as a bitter winter wind blew across the snowdrifts outside, Magdalene read from
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,
a story about the meaning of Time as Death draws near:

Magdalene's voice grew fainter as Haberditzl, the gentle visionary, closed his eyes and slipped away from his ravaged world forever.

The
Austrian Gallery's paintings had been carted away to castles throughout Austria. Other works went to the ancient Celtic salt mines, deep in the bowels of the earth, at Alt Aussee, where they were packed like furniture next to art from all over Europe.

By September 1944, as Goebbels waged
Totaler Kriegseinsatz,
or total war, the museum was closed.

In reality, the Austrian Gallery had ceased to function solely as a museum. Now it was also occupied with the administration and protection of stolen art. There had been a Nazi plan for a museum of Prince Eugene's military exploits. But there was no time for that.

The massive fortified bunker under the Belvedere was completed, and a military team moved in. As Allied air raids began, a metal periscope emerged from the ground above the bunker and sounded an alarm.