The Lady in Gold (32 page)

But in Vienna, things had gone terribly wrong.
Schirach had sponsored an exhibition,
Young Art in the German Reich,
with the kind of abstract art that had disturbed Hitler in his youth. Hitler himself had ordered the show closed.

It was an enormous blow to Schirach's career. Now he was struggling to make a comeback. This show had to be a success.

Schirach had no idea of the true significance of the Klimt show. He was presiding over the largest retrospective ever of Klimt's works. Some of these
Klimt masterpieces would be exhibited here for the last time. This show would be the last glimpse ever of the full sweep of Klimt's work.

Baldur von Schirach, the Nazi governor of Vienna, an aesthete who wrote poetry to “my Führer” and posed for photos that resembled Hollywood glamour shots, ca. 1934. (
Illustration Credit 47.1
)

For Schirach, the show would be an impressive display of Germanic culture that could compete with anything in Berlin, justifying the enormous expense in a time of wartime scarcity, when even the paper used to print the catalogue required special permission to obtain.

The philo-Semitic leanings of Klimt were, for the moment, forgotten. For the purposes of this show, Klimt was an
Übermensch,
a “master man,” compatible with Nazi ideals of Germanic masculinity.

Schirach had never taken Nazi art dictates too literally.
Like other top Nazis, he had snapped up for a song art purged as too modern, amassing a sizable collection.
Schirach bought works directly from the Belvedere-based art procurer
Kajetan Mühlmann. Some offices at the Belvedere answered directly to Schirach.

As the
show opened,
Carl Moll, Alma's stepfather, strode in and greeted the Nazi governor. Moll owed his career to the patronage of Jewish families,
but now he was sipping wine in a roomful of paintings stolen from them. Moll entertained Nazi officials, flaunting his close friendship with Klimt and telling anecdotes about his exploits with the famous artist.

Fritz Novotny, a promising young curator at the Austrian Gallery and organizer of the show, was on hand to provide a whiff of academic respectability. Novotny could not have said he was unaware of what was happening to the Jews. The elderly Jewish parents of one of his closest friends, the exiled painter Gerhart Frankl, had written a poignant letter to Novotny, to say they were “
very sad, that you stayed to face such unpleasant things” just before their deportation in 1942.

Novotny would later say he feared that leaving the Reich would endanger his infirm mother and sister. Whatever his rationale, Novotny thanked the “
owners of the Klimt works for making this exhibition—and others as well—possible.”

The owners of the paintings were in no position to give permission. They were on the run or dead. Schirach had sent an official telegram to notify Hitler: “
My Führer, I report to you that Vienna has been cleansed of Jews.”

So there was no need to ask the Lederers. The Lederers did not consent to exhibit
Philosophy
and
Jurisprudence,
acquired to free Klimt from officialdom in his journey to modernism.
Erich Lederer would have treated any pretense to “borrow” the
Beethoven Frieze
to a salty-tongued diatribe. The panel of the
Frieze
's muscular nude man and woman embracing—Klimt's
Kiss to the Whole World
—bore its alternate, biblical title,
My Kingdom Is Not of This World,
which now found a serendipitous use for
Reich,
the German word for “kingdom.”

Ferdinand was trying to recover his
Apple Tree.
Yet it too was in the show.
It hung near
Schloss Kammer am Attersee,
having been donated by Ferdinand to the Belvedere in perpetuity—yet sold by the museum to
Gustav Ucicky.

Now, as Vienna was disavowing, even murdering, the Jewish agents of its cultural brilliance, Nazi art historians omitted their names in order to use their paintings as symbols. Their creations were reduced to stolen baubles, as anonymously valuable as Adele's diamond necklace. Klimt's brilliant portraits of Jewish women were each given a generic title:
Portrait of a Lady.

The shimmering gold portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer was a centerpiece of the show.

The Nazis had smashed Adele's world like a mirror. But Vienna still saw
itself reflected in its shards. Even the Nazis were forced to locate the Viennese essence of femininity in the face of a Jewish woman. To admit this would undermine the greater deceit of Aryan racial superiority. So the gold portrait of Adele became
Portrait of a Lady with Gold Background.

A counterfeit of this magnitude was an odd act for a profession said to be motivated by a love of art. They really had no choice. How could they invoke a respected family that had so recently flourished a short walk down the Ringstrasse? How could a symbol of Vienna's belle époque, however iconic, be revealed as a Jewish woman?

Any clue to Adele's identity would unmask their terrible lie. They needed this icon. A month after the show, Belvedere director
Bruno Grimschitz bought the second Klimt portrait of Adele, from
Erich Führer, for 7,500 reichsmarks, and this too was hung as an anonymous portrait of a lady.

As the Nazi elite admired Adele's portrait, her family in Yugoslavia was in grave danger. Their only bargaining chip was the shares of the timber company, held in banks abroad.

In May 1942, Croatian Jews had been declared stateless.
Among the few exceptions were those designated “honorary Aryans,” most of them wealthy Jews who had contributed to the “Croat cause” by handing over valuable property.
Some were forced to pledge their loyalty to the Ustasha regime.

Authorities were growing impatient with their attempts to gain control over the Gutmann family lumber fortune, and its assets held in banks abroad. They ordered Viktor to travel to Switzerland and to transfer the assets there to Croatian control. Viktor would later say he foiled the plan. But soon they ordered him abroad again. They knew he would come back. They were watching his wife and children in Yugoslavia.

The anti-Nazi guerrilla partisans, commanded by
Josip Broz Tito, sent an emissary to meet with Viktor. The partisan emissary urged Viktor to join them. He considered it seriously. But what would become of his family?

By July, thousands of Jews in the Osijek area had been ordered to a makeshift village in nearby
Tenje. The Gutmanns were arrested and threatened with deportation. Viktor promised to hand over some company shares, and they were freed, at least for the moment, though Viktor would say he eventually foiled the share transfer. In late August, the makeshift village at Tenje was suddenly deserted. The people had been sent to Jasenovac and Auschwitz.

Now Luise and Viktor woke up every morning to a macabre world in which anything seemed possible. They heard terrible stories. The
Ustasha announced that Serbs could save their lives by reporting to a regional church to convert to Roman Catholicism. Families crowded in. Ustasha officers barred the doors and set the church on fire. Luise tried to keep these stories from her children. But it was becoming more difficult. The world was closing in on them.

Brave Nelly, a highly intelligent child surrounded by danger, was too young to fully understand the ordeals of her mother and father; shown here ca. 1940. (
Illustration Credit 48.1
)

One sunny morning, as poppies carpeted the meadows and sunflowers raised their enormous yellow heads, Nelly heard a troop truck roar into Belisce.
At the Gypsy village, it screeched to a halt. Gypsy men were saddling their horses and chopping wood. Women were cooking and hanging laundry in the sun.

Soldiers shouted at the Gypsies to move to the common. The soldiers moved from house to house, yanking the arms of mothers who were still holding babies and dish towels. They pushed out grandfathers, trailed by small frightened grandchildren, shoving stragglers with rifle butts. Finally the Gypsies stood together apprehensively, blinking in the bright sun.

Then the shooting began. Nelly could hear the crackle of automatic weapon fire, and the screams. Oh my God, she thought, her heart pounding.

It seemed to last an eternity, though it couldn't have been more than a few minutes. Then the truck roared away, toward Osijek.

There was a terrible silence. Then the town came alive. Crowds of men and woman swarmed into the Gypsy village. They helped themselves to clothes, silverware, jewelry, tables, and chairs. They haggled over goats, sheep, cows, and the Gypsies' beautiful horses.

A couple of days later, Nelly wandered into the settlement. She ventured between the houses, eerily abandoned, their doors ajar. There was a trench of fresh earth, and village children pointed to it. That was where the
Gypsies were buried. The other children skipped away. Nelly stood alone in the stillness.

Then Nelly heard a plaintive cheeping. She followed the noise to a passageway between two houses. There she spotted a speck of fluff, no bigger than a cotton boll. It was a tiny chick. The chick huddled against the house. Nelly cupped it in her hands and walked home carefully, whispering to the little orphan not to be afraid.

She called her chick Myra, and made her a nest in a small bucket so she wouldn't get stepped on. She fed Myra by hand, petting her gently, hoping she would grow up and lay lots of eggs. But Myra grew into a cocky rooster, with a luminescent, silky tail. He came when Nelly called. This pleased her, because Nelly now had little to do.

Her world was growing smaller.

Nelly only knew bits and pieces of her parents' desperate struggle to survive. Soldiers would show up at the house, and her parents would quietly tell her and her brother to go upstairs. Once the soldiers casually strafed a cabinet filled with antique porcelain. After they had gone, her mother knelt down and picked up all the shards of early European porcelain and stored them as carefully as if they were delicate crystal goblets.

One night in early May 1943, just before midnight, Nelly was awoken by a truck full of soldiers who arrived at the Gutmann manor. Nelly heard Luise speaking to them outside, in her pleasant melodic Viennese German. Luise called Nelly and Franz to come at once, and they all boarded the truck. They wouldn't let Nelly take Myra. They led away her beautiful filly Baba.

Nelly and her family spent the night in a municipal office. The next morning they were taken to a police headquarters at Osijek. There they were herded, with dozens of other people, into a local school gymnasium. Mothers and fathers were huddled on the floor, with frail grandparents, children, and wide-eyed babies.

The Gutmanns were ordered to crouch down with them.
They were told to keep their eyes on the floor. For what seemed like hours, Nelly stared at shoes: the lace-up boots of little children, the heels of women, the heavy men's boots. Her muscles ached. When people involuntarily moved, or fell over, the guards shouted or kicked them.

From her parents' whispered conversations with adults near them, Nelly learned the Ustasha was going to hand them over to the Germans. The Germans would take them to Auschwitz. People who went to Auschwitz never returned.

——

A friend of Luise's ran to plead with the local
Gestapo chief, who had seen the vivacious young baroness around town. Just a few years ago, a man of his background would never have stood a chance with a beautiful, stylish aristocrat like Luise. Things were different now. “
I will help your friend,” the Gestapo officer told Luise's friend. “But will she be nice to me afterward?”

In the gymnasium, the guards ordered the prisoners to line up to buy their train tickets to Auschwitz. Just then a door opened, and an
Ustasha officer ordered the Gutmanns to get up. Nelly silently filed out of the gymnasium with her family. The other prisoners followed them with their eyes, not knowing if the Gutmanns were fortunate or doomed.

Nelly believed the friend of her mother saved their lives.