The Lady in Gold (23 page)

This train was not filled with huddled masses of poor Viennese from Leopoldstadt. The passengers were clergymen, entertainers, decorated
World War I veterans, hostages from wealthy families. This train carried celebrities like
Fritz Grünbaum, the Groucho Marx of Vienna. This Dachau would house child psychiatrist
Bruno Bettelheim.

Some gentlemen eyed the windows. Men had come into their homes, stolen their silverware, and dragged them off. What had become of their wives and daughters? But the guards watched them closely. People had already tried to jump from the train.

Outside, the train rolled through a spring landscape Fritz knew by heart, a riot of Austrian wildflowers that Klimt had immortalized in his paintings. In the humid air, red poppies rested alongside lacy spikes of bouquets in every shade of purple and lavender. The grass was the pale green Klimt had captured so vividly, and the rich soil was fecund with beets, wheat, and barley. It was an unseen paradise, and Fritz, who had been in jail since the first chestnut trees bloomed, could tell when they passed through farmland by the smell of moist earth.

Dawn broke. The train slowed to a stop. Fritz was shoved off the train, as cramped and stiff as a crab. Guards met them with angry faces, barking orders: “Line up! Get your head shaved there!” Fritz stood exhaustedly in line.

The Fritz who had once risen at dawn to secure good standing room for
La Bohème
at Vienna's elaborate, angel-bedecked State Opera now looked around, amazed, at a very different architectural tableau. Dachau, Germany's original concentration camp, was outfitted for another kind of theater. The camp was surrounded by a deep trench and a high fence of barbed wire. Its stark yard was designed to make prisoners feel as insignificant as insects. This was the stage of deliberate cruelty. The SS held absolute power over the prisoners, who were humiliated, degraded, and crushed. Dachau would be the model for the camps of the Reich. As Fritz passed through the black iron gates, he saw the words spelled out, in twisted metal: work makes freedom.

Was there anyone less suited to withstand the rigors of life at Dachau than the golf-playing, waltzing former playboy Fritz Altmann? His brother Bernhard fought the family battles. His mother, Karoline, had founded the business. If Fritz worried about clean handkerchiefs and pressed shirts in jail in Vienna, such niceties were now left behind.

The Nazis had already seized Bernhard's Vienna factory and arrested its two dozen managers. Bernhard still held cash from the factory's earnings in foreign bank accounts. To force Bernhard to transfer the accounts to them, authorities had adopted “
the gangster's method, and took a hostage,” Fritz realized. “I was taken for the hostage, and was imprisoned. Nobody told me why, for how long, or to what purpose.”

The Nazis were in a stalemate, chasing their infuriating prey.
They set up a meeting in Paris. Bernhard arrived in an impeccable suit. Outwardly, it was like a business meeting, albeit a rather coercive one. The emissaries told Bernhard that if he wanted to see his brother alive, he should sign his client payment accounts over to them.

The Reich also demanded his Paris assets, with an arrogance that the canny Bernhard noted with great interest. The Germans were not yet in France, yet they already felt entitled to Jewish businesses in Paris. Interesting.

They ordered Bernhard to promise never to produce his well-known brand,
Bernhard Altmann, anywhere else, to avoid competition with the
factory they had confiscated. Bernhard wanted to laugh out loud—who the hell did they think they were? But he maintained his stern poker face, puffing on his cigar. “I'll do as you wish,” Bernhard lied. “But first you must release my brother.”

Since Fritz's last name began with an A, he was among the first to have his head shaved.
As the afternoon wore on, the prisoners were registered, shaved, and insulted, until they stood exhausted before the camp commander in their baggy tunics with Stars of David fashioned with red and yellow triangles.

The men had not slept in thirty hours. Fritz stumbled to the barracks where he would sleep. Sunburned, dazed, and numb, he lay down on his wooden plank and passed out. At 3:30 a.m., the men stood before the guards as they took roll call, punctuated with “Jewish swine!”

“
Everything in Dachau is prohibited,” a commander told new prisoners. “Even life itself. If it happens, it happens by accident.”

Fritz and the other men dug ditches and carted cement. The day went on endlessly into the evening. Those who fell down were flogged. Finally, at 9 p.m., they were relieved. They staggered to dinner. Men in their sixties and seventies—as old as his father-in-law, Gustav, Fritz shuddered—appeared near collapse. Fritz wondered how long they could make it. A few days after they arrived, they were forced to stand at attendance for hours while guards searched the camp and its surroundings for a missing prisoner. They finally found him. He was an old man, dead in his bed.

Work makes freedom!

What a lie, thought Fritz, who had never in his life performed arduous labor.

In Fritz's experience, the people who extolled the virtues of work were people who wanted other people to toil for them.

They're going to work us to death, the “Jewish swine,” Fritz thought.

But the prisoners were not all Jewish.
Some of the five hundred men at the camp were gay, with pink triangles,
Communists and socialists with red triangles, while black triangles were used for “anti-social elements.”

The deposed mayor of Vienna,
Richard Schmitz, a Catholic, was in the camp for refusing to hand over City Hall. Also in Dachau,
unbelievably, were Ernst and
Maximilian Hohenberg, the sons of the last heir to the Habsburg throne,
Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination in 1914 had set off
World War I. The other prisoners, startled to be mingling
with Habsburgs, addressed them as “Your Royal Highness.” The men bore their ordeal stoically, their stony faces doing little to disguise their disdain.

Fritz was delighted when Grünbaum, the social satirist, was assigned to his barracks. Grünbaum was well-known in the cabarets of Berlin and Vienna. One of the letters asking for Grünbaum's release was written from the Chateau Marmont hotel in Hollywood. Like those of the Marx Brothers, the targets of Grünbaum's humor ran the gamut, from politics—meaning, of course, the Nazis—to himself. Grünbaum was irreverent, wicked, and an astute mimic. He reduced the guards who terrorized them by day into buffoonish, goose-stepping cartoons by night.

But as the days passed, he did it more discreetly.

The camp guards had it in for Grünbaum.

They weren't ashamed to imprison talented people. A Nazi propaganda pamphlet circulating in Vienna had photos of “
Jews and Jew Lackeys at the Dachau Resort”—celebrities in uniform. Poor Grünbaum was featured prominently, his famous beloved face squinting into the Dachau sun in a white camp tunic. The Viennese were accustomed to seeing posters of Grünbaum in a dapper smoking jacket, smiling under his mustache and comically raised eyebrows, with his glamorous blonde wife,
Lily Herzl, at his side. This new vision was bizarre, another sign of their upside-down world.

Another camp luminary was
Herbert Zipper, a former student of
Richard Strauss. At the time of his arrest, Zipper had been conductor of the
Vienna Madrigal Chorus and the
Dusseldorf Symphony.

Now these men, accustomed to applause and autograph seekers, were themselves the audience, for sadistic political theater.

One morning, at roll call, a guard called out a prisoner's number, and added: “
Your mother croaked.”

Now it was Fritz's turn to soft-pedal reality. He wrote Maria on June 1:

Ridiculous, Maria thought. He makes it sound like he's on holiday.

In Vienna they were unfurling banners of Jewish Shylocks with hooked noses on public buildings. She tried not to imagine what might really be happening in Dachau.

“
I'm fit as a fiddle,” Fritz wrote on June 6. “Knowing that my delightful Marienkinderl and family are doing well gives me strength, courage and balance,” he wrote. “Maria, we have been married for half a year. I am so happy to have you! I can feel your love so strongly, and it keeps my spirits up.” He asked Maria not to worry about him, and “don't think about coming here, or trying in Vienna.” Fritz joked that Therese was “very unlucky with sons-in-law . . . I will always be totally yours, beloved wife.”

The camp guards deliberately set out to dehumanize and disorient the privileged prisoners. Well-to-do scions like Fritz dug trenches, and composers cleaned latrines.
On this level playing field, comedians cheered up depressed prisoners, and a kindly grocer with a fourth-grade education became the de facto camp therapist for those who were suicidal. Soccer games matched gays against Gypsies, or Jews against
Communists. Fritz found himself befriended by burglars who bragged in meticulous detail of their heists at factories, banks, and jewelry stores. One night, smiling meaningfully at Fritz, one of the thieves described
Bernhard Altmann's textile factory: where the cash was hidden, when workers were paid, even the watchman's dog. The burglar was one of the thieves who had broken into the factory a decade before. They had stolen so much from its safe that his accomplice had moved to America.

Fritz, sitting on the dirt floor of the barracks, felt a strange lack of outrage. These criminals practiced their vocation—stealing—without disguising their crime with “legal”
Aryanization or self-righteous rhetoric about a German “homeland.” Fritz felt only envy, “
that I was the person from whom he had stolen, and not the one safe in the States.” In a netherworld in which social roles had been stripped off like carnival masks, Fritz and the burglar became fast friends.

Maria's letters filled Fritz with tenderness. “
My beloved husband,” Maria wrote on June 17, “Yesterday evening Thea gave birth to a healthy boy.
She and Robert are overjoyed! From Landau and his friends we were told that [you] will soon be on [your] way home. I'm with you every hour, and I dream about our reunion when I'm awake and when I'm sleeping.” At the grave of Fritz's father, Carl, “I prayed for you,” Maria wrote. “In spite of everything, I'm so incredibly blessed to have you. Your Maria.”

Your Maria.
Fritz knew things were not fine. He knew he and Maria might never see each other again.

But he clung to her gentle fictions as he drifted off to sleep, exhausted, listening to his bunkmates murmur about a rumor they would be sent to a place called Buchenwald.

Instead, the guards sent Grünbaum.

Maria's letters began to worry Fritz. She must stop going to the
Gestapo headquarters at the Metropol to ask for permission to visit him. What if some bored bureaucrat decided to arrest her?

“
After your last letter you must have been especially impatient,” Fritz wrote on July 3. “Don't let Landau get to you! We didn't mind the time before our engagement, and now we know how much we love each other, even if it takes three times longer” to be reunited, he wrote. “Shame on you, Duckling!”

He reminded Maria that they had been married six months, and joked that if they were lucky, they'd be together again by their first wedding anniversary. “I want you to drive immediately to join your parents in Ischl, you hear me? I will address the next letter to Ischl!”

“I have only one worry: If Peps is going to be well soon. Maybe he can write a few lines?”

A few days later, Fritz's burglar friend asked him if he wasn't married to one of the Vienna Bloch-Bauers.
He held up a newspaper obituary for Gustav Bloch-Bauer. He had died on July 2. Peps! His merry father-in-law, who had cried when Maria married but had opened his big heart to his Galician in-laws.

Why hadn't Maria told him?

It was terrible to be unable to speak with her. Fritz was marooned, in an endless limbo. Day after day, he woke to dig ditches in the hot summer sun and then fell into bed for another day of toil.
As he worked, he began to sing, over and over, a poem by
Wilhelm Muller that Schubert had set to music. It was called “Courage.”
“When your heart within you
breaks, sing serenely and brightly,” he sang to himself. “If no God is here on earth, let's all be gods together!”

There were many things Maria had not told Fritz.

At the Stubenbastei, Gustav had declined precipitously after the Gestapo stole his Stradivarius and suicide took his best friend. It was as if all the losses of old age had happened overnight. One day, Therese asked Georg, the butler, to go to the butcher. Georg gave her a hard look. “
Things will be different now,” Georg said, and walked off the job. Emma was ill. So Therese ventured out, looking away from the swastikas hanging from stores. One day she asked the baker for Gustav's favorite pumpkin-seed rolls, but the shopkeeper only glared.

The Gestapo had arrested Maria's brother, Leopold, as a hostage for the assets of his father-in-law. Leopold had managed to flee abroad with a promise of shares of the sugar factory, which Ferdinand had protected in a Swiss bank trust. The “sudden deaths” continued. An entire family committed suicide with weapons the sons had once proudly displayed with their
World War I medals.

Gustav begged Therese not to go out again, even for a walk. He was afraid his indomitable wife would never come back.