The Lady in Gold (36 page)

In despair, Nelly trudged up the road to the lumber factory. The workers were getting off a shift. One of them, a big older man, recognized Nelly. He hugged her warmly, and proudly led her to his house. He set a plate of fresh sausage before her, then rushed to tell his neighbors that the baron's daughter was alive.

As the men filed in, Nelly's burly host drew up a petition declaring that the “
workers of Belisce” supported Baron Gutmann. The old man was excited: Tito's Yugoslavia was now a Communist workers' state, and he had a say. The other workers weren't so sure. You sign it, one said. No, you sign it. Finally, the old man picked up a pen, and with the grandiose flourish of a man who felt his opinion finally counted, he signed his name. One after another, the other workers signed on the kitchen table.

Then the old man took Nelly by the arm and led her up the rutted dirt road to other workers' houses. It was pig-slaughtering time. Each family sat the baron's pretty daughter down and served her sausage as the workers washed their hands and signed the petition. Nelly gingerly ate platter after platter of greasy sausage, feeling increasingly sick to her stomach.

At the train station, Nelly was met by a demonstration of Communist youth militants who knew the daughter of the “Jewish collaborator” was coming. Her father's former manservant, Jozo, waited with Nelly behind some bushes near the train station. When the train passed, Jozo helped Nelly board the slowly moving train, with the signatures in her pocket.

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:

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

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.

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 embraced 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.