The Lady in Gold (34 page)

Baldur von Schirach had alternate offices in the Belvedere, and as the bombing intensified, these elegant digs became much more attractive. Schirach had a deadly fear of bombings, and a love of bunkers—and this new refuge was designed to be impregnable.

A National Socialist daily called the Belvedere the “
Castle of the First Reichsmarschall.” Prince Eugene's Belvedere had become a true palace of war.

As the days grew shorter in the autumn of 1944, perhaps the comings and goings at the Belvedere relieved the endless monotony of Elisabeth's days at Jacquingasse.

What was left for her? Her mother had not lived to see the Jewish citizens
of Budapest deported to Auschwitz. Her mother's sister,
Aranka Munk, had been expelled from her Austrian country villa at Bad Aussee, now just a few miles from the vacation homes of Nazi leaders at Alt Aussee.

Aranka had been arrested in October 1941.
By then deportees were driven away in open-air trucks while Viennese on the streets yelled obscenities and catcalls. Onlookers laughed at old people who couldn't walk, who had to be lifted into the deportation trucks in chairs. Jeering crowds was their last sight of their beloved Vienna.

Aranka died a few weeks later in Lodz, Poland. Her daughter was murdered at the Chelmno camp in 1942. Someone carted away the painting Klimt had done of Aranka's daughter Ria after her death, in which the fading Klimt had struggled to infuse his subject with life.
The man Ria had killed herself for, Hanns Heinz Ewers, the German writer of popular vampire novels, was by then penniless and dying of tuberculosis, following a Nazi flirtation that had not ended well.
He earned the Führer's approval with a biography of a Nazi martyr,
Horst Wessel, a young brownshirt who had been shot by the supposedly Communist pimp of his prostitute girlfriend and was nonsensically celebrated as a Nazi everyman. But the writer found himself banned when he created a valiant Jewish mistress in his novel
Vampyr.
Revelations of his support for a homosexual literary magazine sealed his exile.

Amalie Zuckerkandl, the white-shouldered model for the unfinished Klimt masterpiece, whose father had written a play with
Mark Twain, had been deported in 1943 with her daughter
Nora Stiasny. They were believed to have died in Belzec.

Authorities had also deported
Samuel Morgenstern, the Jewish gentleman who had taken pity on the down-and-out young Hitler and bought his mediocre Vienna paintings.
Morgenstern wrote Hitler a desperate letter. There was no reply.

Morgenstern, sixty-eight, died of exhaustion in the Lodz ghetto in August 1943. His widow probably died in Auschwitz.

In this bleak Vienna, there was almost no one left who had not betrayed the decency of Elisabeth Bachofen-Echt.
She made a final foray to the Bachofen-Echt
schloss
in Nusdorf, the home of her brother-in-law Eberhard and the seat of the beer fortune Elisabeth's father had bailed out. She walked into the great house. The servants knew Elisabeth well. They were shocked to see her. They stared at her as if she were a ghost. But they made no effort to stop her as she made her way to the nursery of her nephew, Eberhard's son.

He was a little boy, his age close to that of Elisabeth's son, August, when
he died. Trying not to cry, Elisabeth told her small nephew that she loved him very much. But these were very hard times, and they would not see each other for a long while. She stooped down to hug him and kissed him goodbye.

Eberhard was furious when he found out. Relations like Elisabeth were hardly an asset for someone in the SS.

By October 1944 air raids were taking a toll on Vienna. As fierce battles raged, turning the tide of World War II, the forsaken Elisabeth succumbed to deep depression until finally,
Gustav Rinesch wrote, she “
died of a broken heart.” Another piece of Klimt's painted mosaic had crumbled.

At the Zagreb prison, Nelly, at fifteen, was becoming a young woman. She angled for the chore of emptying the chamber bucket because it was the social event of the day, where prisoners chatted and got to know each other.

Some partisans befriended her, and asked her to help them. Nelly got permission to see a dentist. A prison guard had to accompany her, and since Nelly had promised him a mushroom omelette, he looked forward to it. The dentist belonged to the Communist Party. Once in his chair, Nelly took off her shoes and stockings and handed him the letters hidden there: important partisan mail, messages to prisoners' families, and letters from her parents to family members.

Nelly asked to stop down the street at a tiny store where an old lady sold buttons. There she delivered more letters while the guard smoked outside. Nelly returned to prison with correspondence passed along by the dentist and the button lady. Authorities eventually arrested the dentist and sent him to a concentration camp, but he never implicated Nelly or the button lady.

Nelly had reached the age when she wondered if boys found her pretty. Nelly did not possess Luise's soft baby face. The solitude of her childhood had not encouraged her to cultivate the teasing banter or the sultry gaze with which Luise had entranced young men in Vienna. Physically, Nelly
took after her father: her face lean, her cheekbones high. But she had none of his easy confidence. Nelly was reserved and wary, with watchful eyes.

Still, Nelly had admirers, among them the Croatian former policeman imprisoned for his letter of outrage at Jasenovac. One day at sunset, he led the prisoners in a courtyard serenade of Nelly. She smiled down from the window of her cell, thrilled.

Perhaps the Croatian policeman had learned Nelly was Jewish: Jewish women were fair game, lucky to be alive.
The Croatian no longer felt obligated to court Nelly, or win her heart. One day, while cutting cooking greens on a table, throwing bits to the ducks that quacked noisily for scraps at her feet, Nelly heard footsteps. Before she could turn around, someone grabbed her in a tight embrace. It was the Croatian. He was strong. He shoved her against the table, running his hands over her body. Nelly, clutching her knife in her hand, warned him that if he didn't stop, she would cut him. He ignored her. Nelly raised the long knife and brought it down on his hand. Yelping in surprise and pain, the Croatian scurried away, clutching his bleeding hand.

Nelly proudly told her parents that she had defended her virginity. They exchanged worried glances. Jewish girls did not stab Gentiles with knives. But days went by, and nothing happened. The Croatian wore a thick bandage wrapped around his hand. He no longer met Nelly's eyes, but he had not told how he was injured.

If he had, he might have doomed Nelly's whole family.

Then, one day, the family was sent to live in a sanatorium and the restrictions on them eased. Luise sent Nelly to live with a woman who hid Jewish children, but then she brought her back and Nelly later heard the woman was deported to a concentration camp. Then the family was allowed to live in an apartment, under the supervision of police detectives who kept an eye on them when Nelly's father was ordered on trips.

Her father told her little about his trips to Hungary and Switzerland. Viktor knew what would happen to his family if he used the trips as a chance to escape.

In the woods, the partisans drew closer.

By the fall of 1944, the Allies were closing in. They had invaded France, liberating Paris. The
Red Army was pushing into Yugoslavia, forcing German troops to withdraw. The Japanese were under pressure.

Astute observers in Vienna could see that it might be time to hedge their bets.
That September,
Erich Führer, Ferdinand's lawyer, rolled up Kokoschka's portrait of Ferdinand with lederhosen and a hunting rifle. He brought the painting to the Vienna offices of a state culture official he knew, and asked him to confirm that it was “degenerate.” Führer didn't want to be accused of exporting patrimonial art from the Reich.

Nazi bureaucrats did not consider Kokoschka's works valuable. They had so much trouble auctioning confiscated Kokoschkas that Göring had tried to sell one to a foreign correspondent. The Vienna official obligingly stamped the back of the canvas “
Degenerate Art” and handed it back to Führer.

Führer made his way to Zurich. Ferdinand met him in the lobby of his hotel. “
Herr President, here is your painting,” Führer said to Ferdinand, with a respect he did not feel.

“He was very content,” Führer would tell a judge years later.

Ferdinand was prouder than ever to have been immortalized by Kokoschka. The artist, now in London, was a fervent and vocal critic of Nazism. The long-ago protégé of Klimt had not changed his principles to suit the times. Earlier that year, Kokoschka had complained publicly that schoolchildren asked him to show them his country on a European map, but the only maps that he could find showed Germany seamlessly encompassing the invisible borders of Austria. “
Will it be of any interest for British readers to know the embarrassment I felt?” Kokoschka wrote in a letter to the
Forward,
a socialist newspaper. “Is it incidental that ‘the first free country to fall a victim of Nazi aggression,' according to the statement of the Moscow conference, should be the only one not marked?

“How will future British tourists find their way to the country, traditional here for its ‘
Gemütlichkeit,
' if Austria has been wiped off the British globe?” Kokoschka wrote.

Ferdinand donated Kokoschka's portrait of him to Switzerland's national
gallery, the
Zurich Kunsthaus. The work by Austria's best living painter would not return to the Vienna that had put a bounty on Ferdinand's head. Ferdinand made sure it would remain forever in the country that had given him refuge.

Führer would later testify that he had risked his life to bring the painting to Ferdinand.
But archives that surfaced after the war suggest Führer actually made the trip to spy for the SS in Switzerland.
And that Führer made as much as a million reichsmarks in 1938 alone—on an annual salary of 1,000 reichsmarks—profiteering at the expense of dispossessed Viennese like Ferdinand.

Hitler's last feverish thoughts were of art.

In the wee hours of April 29, 1945, Hitler, the failed artist, raved into the night about the great Führer Museum he planned in Linz to showcase his assemblage of stolen masterpieces.

By then, Hitler's army had stolen 20 percent of the artworks of Europe. The art was hidden in salt mines, monasteries, and convents across Europe, and hanging in the estates of Nazis who were now on the run. “
My pictures, in the collections which I have bought in the course of years, have never been collected for private purposes, but only for the extension of a gallery in my home town of Linz,” Hitler wrote in his will from his underground bunker in Berlin.

Two hours later, he and
Eva Braun committed suicide.

The towers of the Schloss Immendorf still sheltered the greatest single collection of works by Gustav Klimt. But the German soldiers guarding the castle were nervous. Their leaders had surrendered. Russian forces were a day away. Even the Jewish slave laborers knew of the German defeat.

One by one, the German army soldiers abandoned their posts. They headed for rural hamlets where SS officers were burning their uniforms and Nazi identification cards, reinventing their pasts and even their names.

Upstairs, in a castle tower, stood the Klimt paintings. Men had come
and hastily picked up some of the Belvedere paintings. But, curiously, they left the Klimts behind.

Members of cashiered SS units began streaming in from the SS headquarters at nearby Hollabrunn. The belligerence of defeat stared out from their ruddy faces. They barged into the castle, their alcohol-soaked breath reeking of failure. They helped themselves to the baron's liquor and emptied his wine cellar.

Then, according to a police report, the SS officers began an all-night “orgy.” At some point during the bacchanalia, the terrified cook ran out of the castle. The military nurse was seen fleeing across the lawn and into the darkness. The police report said the baron himself finally “had to leave” his besieged castle, although according to other accounts he had fled with his children long before. Then it was just the drunken SS officers, fueled by the collapse of the Reich, the memories of the unspeakable things they had done for their Führer, and the price they might pay.

In the morning, the hungover SS men wandered out of the castle, leaving its great wooden door ajar. An hour later an SS officer returned on a bicycle. He ran into the castle. A few minutes later, he reappeared outside, mounted his bicycle, and sped away. The townspeople were startled by loud explosions in the castle towers. Smoke poured from the windows.

Flames began to lick through the turrets where little Baron Johannes had loved to linger. The townspeople saw the blaze against the sky and rushed to the castle with washtubs of water. But as they threw water on the flames, a terrible blast erupted inside, then another, blowing out the walls and making the ground tremble. Heavy stones rained down, and everyone fled. As the townspeople watched, the castle that had cradled the Lederer Klimts became a furnace.

The fire ate away the prized Faculty Paintings that had scandalized officialdom with their images of nude pregnant women. This was the triptych that had gotten Klimt expelled from the academy and pushed him into the embrace of the enlightened Jewish elite.

Now his prescient vision of dystopia had arrived. The “dark powers” were incinerating his art. As the castle caved in, the heat consumed the delicate masterpiece depicting Schubert at the piano, with the apprehensive face of poor Mizzi Zimmermann, now a seraphim of flame and ash floating off in the wind.

The Klimt portrait of
Valerie Neuzil, a teenage mistress of Egon Schiele who died of scarlet fever as a nurse in
World War I, now turned red in the flames and blackened to ash. So did
Girl Friends,
Klimt's rendering of
two women who seemed languidly in love. The ethereal lute-strumming maiden with almond eyes of his
Music II
also ignited into searing flames.