It was not what was supposed to happen. As they were leaving Berlin, SS Untersturmführer Werner handed them off to another grim-faced SS escort, name unknown. Fritz and Louise, with their mountain of baggage, were escorted to a private car on another train. Their train finally left the Anhalter Station in Berlin about an hour later, southbound for Dresden and then on to Prague and Vienna.
From Vienna they were to connect with the train to Florence.
It is impossible to know exactly what went wrong and on whose orders. Certainly the Italian ambassador and others in his government thought that all was in order. They were unaware that the Nazis had no intention of letting the Gutmanns escape. Perhaps Reichskommissar Seyss-Inquart thought that Fritz would be more cooperative—that he would finally sign over what remained of the Gutmann family fortune. Perhaps Himmler had grown tired of the Italians’ weak and sentimental concern about these Jews and decided at the last minute to put them in their place. Most likely, though, it was Hermann Göring, who was never going to allow Fritz Gutmann and the Gutmann silver collection to slip out of his hands.
Whatever the reason—the train suddenly stopped just east of Dresden, in Bautzen, and Fritz and Louise’s car was uncoupled on a sidetrack. The train chugged off, leaving their car behind. After the war, in his book Ghetto Theresienstadt, Zdenek Lederer described the incident in detail. The SS officer insisted that nothing was out of the ordinary. Next, drowning out Fritz’s anxious questions, was the sound of their carriage being hooked to a different train. Louise clutched Fritz’s hand as the new locomotive lumbered on through most of the night. At dawn, the shabby transport train rumbled into the little Bohemian town of Bauschowitz. From the platform a harsh metallic voice bellowed, “Aussteigen!” The SS officer echoed the command: “You will exit now.” Horrified, Fritz and Louise stepped out onto an empty platform. The officer pointed to a black SS car at the side of the station. Fritz and Louise, confused and no doubt terrified, were loaded aboard with as much luggage as the car would hold. They drove two to three kilometers along a narrow, tree-lined road before reaching the gates of the fortress. They had arrived at the Theresienstadt concentration camp.
Their arrival caused some consternation among the inmates. Egon “Gonda” Redlich, a Czech who had arrived in 1942, wrote tersely in his diary, “A man and woman came from Amsterdam, only the two of them. She is elegantly dressed in an expensive fur!” Fritz, too, was impeccably dressed in a well-tailored three-piece suit under his astrakhan coat. Louise, in a long dress and fashionable hat, was indeed wearing a full black-mink coat—no doubt to ward off the late-spring chill. For a moment, the Baroness Louise Gutmann von Landau stood bewildered in the grimy camp courtyard as inmates gawked at the incongruous vision in furs. Then quickly, the SS escort handed them over personally to the SS camp commandant, Hauptsturmführer Siegfried Seidl.
The method of their arrival, too, was remarkable. Most of the ghetto inmates arrived at the Bauschowitz railway station packed inside “transport” cars with little or no food or water, and no sanitation. Normally, the platform at Bauschowitz thronged with deportees clinging to their bags, while goaded by the rifles of the SS guards and the Czech police. They would then be forced to walk the two to three kilometers, in single file, to the Theresienstadt ghetto. Old and young alike, exhausted from the frightening journey, would clutch their meager belongings—the little that had not already been stripped from them. Fritz and Louise, by contrast, had arrived at the ghetto in a German staff car, with an embarrassing overload of luggage.
The inmates found it incomprehensible that transport train number XXIV/Ez1 had made the journey carrying just two passengers. The next train bringing Jews from Holland would have 305 souls crammed in a few wooden carriages—the one after that carried 870 men, women, and children.
The elaborate ruse of promising Fritz and Louise refuge in Italy was sadly just another case of the Nazis’ perverse and cruel tendency to lull their victims, to raise their hopes before sweeping them away. The same twisted logic led them to call gas chambers “shower rooms” and those gassed as receiving Sonderbehandlung, or “special treatment.” Concentration camps derisively put up signs declaring “Arbeit macht frei,” or “Work Makes You Free.”
However, Theresienstadt was rather unusual among concentration camps. The ancient town was originally an eighteenth-century walled military garrison, a star-shaped enclosure surrounded by wide earth ramparts and moats. In late 1941, the site was personally selected by the Deputy Reich-Protector of Bohemia and Moravia Reinhard Heydrich, an SS general. Heydrich was also known as the “Butcher of Prague.” The Gestapo and the SS converted the Kleine Festung, or “Little Fortress,” into their prison. Meanwhile, the walled town was designated a “ghetto” for Jews, starting with those from Prague. As a result, the town’s five thousand or so Czech inhabitants were unceremoniously kicked out of their homes. Barbed wire was strung around the walls. Then Jews, by the tens of thousands, were moved in, crammed into overcrowded quarters that were soon teeming with vermin and disease. At its peak, well over sixty thousand Jews were crammed into the ghetto. From there, the next step was transport to the extermination camps farther east that the Nazis were busy building.
Theresienstadt also served another, rather uniquely cynical, Nazi purpose. The Nazi high command had always gone to great lengths to try to conceal from the world and from their allies, and even from the German people (who may, or not, have actually cared), the true nature of the vast network of slave labor and extermination camps. The fiction that millions of Jews deported from Germany and the occupied countries were being sent to “resettlement” camps in the east became increasingly difficult to sustain. What was needed was a “model” concentration camp, a kind of showpiece that could demonstrate to the world that the tales of mass extermination and deadly hard labor were only so much enemy propaganda.
On the orders of Göring, SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich convened the Wannsee Conference, in January 1942. Before the war, Wannsee had been a pleasant suburb of Berlin. The conference was held at a grand villa in close proximity to the golf club founded by Herbert. (The SS villa was also directly across the lake from the Arnhold Villa, which had been the home of Gutmann cousin Hans Arnhold. Hans and his family, fortunately, had fled to New York in 1939.) Here Heydrich, and his assistant Adolf Eichmann, along with other high-ranking SS officers and members of the Nazi government, established the blueprint for the “Final Solution” to the so-called Jewish Question in Europe. Over a buffet luncheon lasting barely an hour and a half, they agreed on an event of unparalleled evil in the history of mankind: the annihilation of an entire people. Even Hitler was heard to describe Heydrich as “the man with the iron heart.”
At that infamous meeting, Heydrich also announced that Theresienstadt, while still being used as a way station for death camp transports, would concurrently be maintained as a “privileged ghetto” for certain Jews. Those Jews who were most likely to elicit sympathy from their fellow Germans, such as the elderly and decorated World War I veterans, were to be sent to the Theresienstadt ghetto. Certain prominent and well-known Jews from Germany and throughout the occupied territories would also be selected.
Unlike in other concentration camps, Theresienstadt inmates wore civilian clothes, albeit graced with the yellow Jewish star, and men and women prisoners would not be so rigidly segregated. Internal ghetto affairs and operations were to be managed, within limits, by a council of Jewish elders. Despite the appalling circumstances, schools for children and cultural events, such as music concerts and theatrical productions, would periodically be tolerated.
Fritz and Louise even found friends and acquaintances that they had known before the war. The elderly playwright Elsa Bernstein-Porges was one. Her animated reminiscences about prewar theater in Berlin and Vienna were a welcome diversion. Another friend, a Dutch cartoonist, Jo Spier, even introduced a few, but extremely rare, hints at humor. As a popular satirist for De Telegraaf, his parody of Hitler had landed Spier (who was also Jewish) in the Westerbork camp. In April 1942, he was transferred, with his wife and three children, to Theresienstadt, where he survived by illustrating whatever the German commanders ordered.
At times, Theresienstadt almost appeared to be a functioning Jewish town. Astonishingly, the subterfuge actually worked. The first name the Nazis gave the camp was Theresienbad, or “Spa Theresien.” Some unsuspecting elderly Jews in Germany actually paid for an apartment in the “spa” camp. In 1944, the Nazis even allowed a Danish and Swedish Red Cross delegation to visit Theresienstadt, guiding them through carefully rehearsed interviews with temporarily well-fed ghetto inmates and conducting them on a “Potemkin village” tour of faux ghetto restaurants, parks, and sports fields. The “Boy’s School” had a sign: “Closed During the Holidays.” The ghetto “bank” even printed ersatz currency bearing the likeness of Moses. The Red Cross was unaware that, just before their arrival, the Nazis had sent seventy-five hundred inmates to their deaths. The three transports to Auschwitz-Birkenau included most of the sick and all the orphans. The Germans needed to relieve the unsightly overcrowding.
The Nazis were pleased with the results and ordered a documentary film to be made by ghetto inmates, depicting similar staged scenes. The notorious propaganda film was officially entitled A Documentary Film of the Jewish Resettlement, but became better known as Theresienstadt: Hitler’s Gift to the Jews. Colonel Karl Rahm of the SS chose the talented actor and director Kurt Gerron to make the film. Gerron, who was a distant relative of the Gutmanns’, even sang “Mack the Knife,” which he had originally made famous in Berlin. In October 1944, immediately after the film was completed, Gerron and the jazz band, euphemistically named the Ghetto Swingers, were shipped off to Auschwitz. Gerron was gassed on October 28, 1944.
Despite all the Nazi lies, the numbers tell the true story of Theresienstadt. More than 35,000 Jews died within the ghetto walls of starvation, disease, overwork, or brutality at the hands of the SS guards and their Czech Kapos. Another 88,000 died after being transported from Theresienstadt to the death camps at Auschwitz and elsewhere. In all, of 140,000 Jews sent to Theresienstadt, barely 17,000 were alive at the end of the war.
The inmate population of the camp was, by Nazi design, divided into classes. The majority lived in crowded barracks, basements, and casemates within the earthen walls, with as many as fifty people occupying a space designed for three. They worked at various menial tasks such as hoeing in the fields, cleaning latrines, or laboring in the mines outside the town. They existed in constant terror of being included in the next transport east—a fear that for most of them would tragically come true. Those who did hard labor received better rations, which meant that the elderly got the least. Above them in status were the technicians and skilled workers, who received slightly better living quarters. Those who kept the ghetto operating—engineers, electricians, architects, members of the “ghetto” government and their families—were temporarily protected from the dreaded transports.
Then there were the Prominenten (prominent figures), also known as the “special cases.” Just one or two hundred were classified this way. Most of them were Jews who, because of their status, could not just simply disappear. Their immediate murders might excite protest in the outside world, and some were still politically useful to the Nazis. Among these were the Danish chief rabbi, a German ex–minister of the interior, a Czech minister of justice, the mayor of Le Havre in France, and the Dutch ambassador to the League of Nations.
Also among the Theresienstadt Prominenten were well-known musicians, artists, and academics, as well as members of the ghetto council of elders. Dr. Leo Baeck, an internationally renowned rabbi and former leader of the Reich Association of German Jews, was a Theresienstadt “special case,” as were Franz Kafka’s sister, Ottilie, and Sigmund Freud’s sister, Esther. Others included Ellie von Bleichröder, the granddaughter of Bismarck’s personal banker, and businessman Arthur von Weinberg, founder of I.G. Farben (which had regrettably developed the poison gas Zyklon B). There was even an Olympic gold medalist.
Fritz and Louise were assigned to this group of concentration-camp Prominenten. Fritz was number I/34 and Louise I/35. They were given a one-room billet, at No. 8 on the Neue Gasse, just a few doors down from the ghetto café. Their quarters were generous by ghetto standards, and they could also expect somewhat better food rations. Most important, being on the Prominenten A-list was supposed to exempt them from transport to the east—or at least until the Nazis changed their minds.
Nonetheless Prominenten privileges were only relative. Theresienstadt remained a concentration camp, with all that that implied. Like any other prisoners, the Prominenten were often cursed at and reviled by their SS guards as “filthy Jews” or “Jewish scum.” At the Nazis’ whim they could be, and often were, subject to physical abuse. Prominenten who had outlived their usefulness, eventually including almost all of the council of elders, were regularly taken away and hanged, shot, or sent off to extermination camps. Prominent status was at best a temporary pass, not a guaranteed ticket to survival.
Fritz and Louise were subject to the same treatment. Their luggage and all they had brought with them—cash, jewelry, clothing, and food—were taken away by the guards as soon as they arrived. The few clothes they were left all carried the yellow Jewish star. Technically, as Prominenten Fritz and Louise were supposed to be exempt from work. However, Fritz, who had a heart condition and was now fifty-seven years old, helped shovel coal. He also volunteered to dig for potatoes in the fields, while Louise, now fifty-one, distributed bread rations and taught English in the ghetto children’s school.
A Czech survivor, the writer Anna Aurednícková, later reported that their sensational arrival had caused some understandable resentment. On top of which their Prominenten status created inevitable jealousies. Despite all this, Fritz and Louise were well liked, even respected, by the other prisoners. They were said to be dignified but amiable and generous—willing to share their meager rations with others in need.
Fritz was even, to the extent possible in a Nazi concentration camp, defiant. A quarter century earlier, when he had been imprisoned by the British for the crime of being German, he had refused to speak English. Now, imprisoned by the Germans for the crime of being Jewish, he refused to speak German. Accordingly, Fritz and Louise spoke only English to each other and French, Dutch, Italian, or English, even a little Czech, to everybody else. Fritz encouraged his fellow inmates to do the same.
There was no comparison between a British internment camp on the Isle of Man and a Nazi concentration camp. Nevertheless, Fritz had learned from his first time being locked behind barbed wire the importance of not giving up hope. As the months went by, even as the world beyond the ghetto walls grew ever more distant, he was said to have remained optimistic, certain that someday, perhaps even soon, the locked gates would fly open and they would all be free.
Louise, on the other hand, was perhaps more perceptive. The Baroness Louise Gutmann von Landau, it was reported, was often seen weeping.
• • •
avendo ricevuta notificazione ufficiale decisione favorevole del DUCE per la vostra entrata del regno. ho telegrafato ad ALFIERI A BERLINO intervenire presso le autorità tedesche e bisogno agevolare vostra lecita uscita dalla GERMANIA.
facci sapere quando e dove sarai in ITALIA
saluti luca
I have received official notification of the favorable decision from Il Duce for your entry into the kingdom [of Italy]. I telegraphed [Ambassador] Alfieri in Berlin to intervene with the German authorities and that he should facilitate your lawful exit from Germany.
Let us know when and where you will be in Italy.
Greetings, Luca [Orsini]
While Fritz hoped and Louise languished behind the ghetto walls, their family in Italy tried desperately first to find them, then to save them. For young Lili, after waiting in vain for days at the Florence train station, an age seemed to pass.
Then in early July, more than a month after Fritz and Louise had seemingly disappeared, the papal nuncio in Berlin, Archbishop Orsenigo, notified Rome that the Gutmanns had finally been located. Despite the Nazi assurances of their safe passage to Italy, the archbishop reported, “The couple Gutmann was in actuality brought to Theresienstadt in May.” With a curious mixture of gullibility and skepticism, the archbishop added, “The place has a relatively good reputation, and some say it is actually controlled by the international Red Cross. I find this doubtful.”
Lili and her mother-in-law traveled to Rome to appeal for help and met with Nicolò de Cesare, Mussolini’s personal secretary. Lili’s uncle, Senator Orsini, got the Foreign Minister Count Ciano involved, and once again the letters and diplomatic cables flew. Brother Max, still living in Italy, also appealed to his contacts in the Vatican for help.
At the Vatican’s urging, Orsenigo pursued the case, requesting from the German Foreign Ministry permission to travel to Theresienstadt to visit the Gutmanns and perhaps even secure their release. But Orsenigo reported in a subsequent message, “Concerning . . . a possible visit to the Internee Camp for Non-Aryans, Theresienstadt, in Bohemia . . . I was categorically told, ‘That is not possible.’ ”
Even if it had been possible, Orsenigo was more interested in preserving the Vatican-Nazi status quo. The last thing the papal nuncio really wanted was to stir up trouble over the Nazis’ “model” concentration camp. The idea that the Gutmanns, or any other prisoners, might actually be released—and then talk—was something Orsenigo’s German friends would never tolerate.
No inmate, no matter how prominent, was ever released to freedom from Theresienstadt until just a few months before the end of the war. Ultimately the Nazis realized it was hopeless to try hiding the secrets of Theresienstadt. In February 1945, the war all but lost, Himmler, Eichmann, and a few other SS leaders agreed to release twelve hundred of the remaining emaciated prisoners to Switzerland. In exchange they received 5 million Swiss francs. A million Swiss francs would go a long way in South America.
However, in 1943 the Nazis apparently didn’t care if any of the Italian authorities were angry or resentful at being double-crossed in the Gutmann affair. Even as the Italians pressed their case, Italy’s fortunes and influence with its Nazi allies were steadily waning.
By mid-1943 Mussolini’s Axis alliance with Hitler had become a disaster for Italy, with hundreds of thousands of Italian soldiers killed or captured in the Balkans, on the Russian front, and in North Africa. Among those interned was young Lili’s husband, Franco Bosi, a major in the Italian army, who spent the rest of the war in a British POW camp in Egypt.
In late July 1943, after the Allied invasion of Sicily, and just weeks after Lili had appealed to the Mussolini government for help, Mussolini was deposed. Count Ciano, the Gutmann family friend, as part of the Fascist Grand Council, had voted for the removal from office of his own father-in-law, Mussolini.
Just a month later the Italian government surrendered to the Allies—an act of treachery in the German view. As British and American troops landed in southern Italy, the German Wehrmacht occupied Rome and all the regions not already under Allied control. Mussolini, after being freed by the Germans, set up a puppet government in northern Italy. With the help of the Germans, Mussolini was able to have Ciano shot for treason.
The country was divided and in chaos. Luca Orsini was forced to retire to his villa, outside Lucca, and keep a low profile. The Gutmann family’s leverage with the Italian government suddenly evaporated. Their contacts could hardly concern themselves with the fate of one poor couple locked away in far-off Bohemia. Even if the Italians had still wanted to help, their influence with the Germans had dropped to virtually zero. The Vatican, too, now found itself surrounded by German troops, and while it remained neutral ground, its influence with the Nazis, never great, was reduced even further.
As the Nazis and the Gestapo took over in Rome and northern Italy, young Lili and Fritz’s brother Max found themselves running for their lives. Italy’s fifty thousand Jews had remained mostly unmolested in the early years of the war. Lili had been quite free to travel about and even seek out government officials for help. Max, too, had lived quite openly in Rome at the Hotel Excelsior on the Via Veneto. As a result of the loose enforcement of the Fascist Laws for the Defense of the Race, the Gutmanns had effectively been exempt from the gradual segregation of Italian Jews from the rest of society.
The German occupation changed all that. In October 1943, the Nazis began rounding up Jews throughout occupied Italy—they were herded into police transit camps before transport to the extermination camps of Poland. Except by the standards set in other Nazi-occupied countries, the roundup in Italy was less than completely successful. Largely due to the lack of cooperation by the Italians, only eight thousand Jews were deported. Meanwhile, the other forty-two thousand Italian Jews managed to go underground and survive thanks to non-Jewish friends and relatives. Max and Lili were among the fortunate majority.
To Max’s horror, the German Army High Command took over the Hotel Excelsior as their headquarters. Amazingly, he escaped detection in the hotel for a while before going underground. He survived by selling pieces from his prized and valuable stamp collection. Next, Sophie’s widowed husband, Count Sciamplicotti, sheltered Max, until it became too dangerous. Eventually Max sought and was granted refuge in the Vatican.
Young Lili, meanwhile, was preparing to flee Florence and hide in the countryside. Just a few days before she was scheduled to leave, she received a tawdry brown postcard with two Adolf Hitler stamps. Dated October 5, 1943, it had the preprinted message “I gratefully acknowledge receipt of your package, letter to follow.” Fritz had been allowed to just sign his name and add, by hand, their billet address: Number 8, Neue Gasse, Theresienstadt, Bohemia.
With her three small children, Lili hid in one of her mother-in-law’s medieval towers in San Gimignano. When the German Gestapo and the pro-Nazi local police began searching the town for Jews, Lili and her children spent days hiding in a hunter’s shack, in the woods of her in-laws’ country estate in Massa Marittima, before sneaking back to San Gimignano. Lili and the children remained hidden in the tower for more than a year, in virtual solitary confinement, until Allied forces arrived in the spring of 1945. Strangely, during all this, Great-Aunt Lili Orsini continued to live comfortably and somehow undisturbed in her sumptuous villa (which had once belonged to Napoléon’s sister).
• • •
Fritz and Louise were, I imagine, at least vaguely aware of events in Italy. Despite the camp administration’s best efforts, news had a way of seeping into the ghetto. While the collapse of Mussolini and the Italian Fascists was a positive development in the war against the Nazi terror, for Fritz and Louise, personally, it was a near-catastrophe. One of the primary reasons the Nazis had been keeping them alive had just been eliminated. Only the Vatican connection remained as a source of help from the Italian front, but it was at best slim.
I imagine my grandfather out in the potato fields looking to the horizon and trying to imagine escape. His prospects were next to nil. Anyway, Fritz realized that he could never leave Louise. Back to earth, he tried to think of the best way to smuggle an extra potato or two into the camp—which in itself was extremely risky. If one was caught, the punishment was usually a severe beating by one of the Kapos, sometimes with clubs, even whips.
Among the tiny handful who did actually escape, one notable hero has to be mentioned. After attempting to escape from Theresienstadt, Siegfried Lederer was transported to Auschwitz in December 1943. Not only did he escape from Auschwitz, but he then broke back into Theresienstadt to warn the ghetto elders what awaited them in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The reality was stark: all escapees from the camp were easily rounded up, thanks to a network of Gestapo informants and collaborators in the surrounding region. Meanwhile, the Little Fortress was considered virtually “escape-proof.” Punishment was usually by firing squad. On occasion, though, reminiscent of a more ancient barbarism, the unfortunate ones were stoned to death by the guards.
Against this bleak reality, Fritz had perhaps only one possible card left to play in the deadly game of survival at Theresienstadt.
• • •
The perverted Nazi compulsion to wrap even their most heinous crimes in a cloak of technical legality extended to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. German Jewish inmates arriving at the camp often were required to sign papers “voluntarily” committing themselves for life to what was described as the Theresienstadt “old people’s home.” Meticulous inventories of the possessions stolen from them—described as “donations” to the Reich—had to be signed, in triplicate. While shipping thousands of people east to certain death, SS guards might spend days writing reports to prove that a prominent prisoner executed in cold blood had been “shot while trying to escape.” It was a kind of small madness within the greater madness.
The Nazis’ apparent obsession with the Gutmann silver collection was now thrown into the insane mix. Even though the silver collection (including the Orpheus Clock) had earlier been removed from Bosbeek and sent for “safekeeping” to the Munich warehouse of Julius Böhler, the collection’s legal ownership still hung in the balance. Böhler was eager for a resolution. Even before Fritz’s actual arrest, Böhler had already offered the entire silver collection to Helmuth von Hummel at the Führerhaus in Munich. SS Hauptsturmführer von Hummel was also Martin Bormann’s special adviser and comptroller of all of Hitler’s private funds.
Meanwhile, on Fritz’s earlier advice, Senator Orsini had retained a Munich lawyer, who, in late 1943, started negotiations to try to move the collection to Italy. Böhler and Haberstock countered with a request to get the collection classified as Jewish. Technically, though, all the shares appeared to be in Senator Orsini’s name. By using this device Fritz had avoided having the family trust (and the collection) Aryanized. One half-baked idea was to divide the Eugen Gutmann Silbersammlung along ethnic lines. Böhler and Haberstock would keep all the silver and gold considered German or “Nordic,” and all works of “Latin” origin could go to Italy. Next, however, the Sicherheitspolizei (State Security Police) declared the whole collection a “national treasure,” effectively prohibiting any change in ownership or location. Things had reached stalemate.
Even Dr. Hermann Voss at the Führermuseum appeared stymied. The collection, which had been earmarked for Hitler’s Linz museum, would stay under lock and key in Julius Böhler’s warehouse. It seems astonishing, but the Nazis, and particularly the curators of the Führermuseum, were quite fussy about these things. After the war it would be found that almost 90 percent of the artworks destined for the Führermuseum were accompanied by documents showing that they had been “legally” sold to Hitler—even if it was over the original owner’s dead body.
The Nazis seemed determined to finally wrap up the “Gutmann Affair.” With Fritz and Louise safely locked away in Theresienstadt, all they needed was for Fritz to revoke the transfer of the family shares to Senator Orsini.
At least twice during his months in the camp, Fritz was summoned for interrogation at the dreaded SS headquarters. The three-story brick building had once served as the Terezin city hall. Now it was the headquarters for the German security services. The second interrogation was by SS major Karl Rahm. The Austrian-born Rahm had worked for Adolf Eichmann’s benignly named Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna and Holland. A mercurial figure, he alternated between bouts of murderous sadism and curious incidents of consideration for some of his Jewish prisoners. Those incidents evidently were not sufficient to prevent him from being executed later as a war criminal.
The interrogations in the commandant’s headquarters, presided over by Rahm, were aggressive without descending into outright torture. Fritz was manhandled, threatened, screamed at, and ordered again and again to sign documents transferring to the Reich the legal ownership of the Gutmann Silbersammlung. Again and again, Fritz refused.
Was it honor, naiveté, faith, stubbornness, or bravery? I cannot say. Some in the camp wondered, “Why didn’t you just sign it! Why did you risk your life for that damned silver collection? After all, what difference does it make? They have already taken it. Why suffer over some stupid, pointless Nazi compulsion with legality?” Therein perhaps was the answer. Fritz must have realized that, given the Nazi mind-set, his signature on those Reich documents, or rather the lack of it, was the only leverage he possessed. Once the Nazis got what they wanted, they would have no more use for him. If he signed those documents, he would surely be signing his own death warrant, and of course Louise’s. So he refused and he suffered.
His refusal to knuckle under to the Nazis became the subject of considerable talk among Theresienstadt inmates. Such defiance was rare, if not unique. In ghetto lore he became “the baron who refused to sign over his fortune to the Nazis.” To others the stance seemed both courageous and dangerously foolish.
Then, amazingly, it appeared that Fritz’s tenacity had paid off, that the Nazis had improbably given up. The news, according to survivor Zdenek Lederer, was that the Gutmann family’s connections in the Vatican had finally come through. On April 13, 1944, after over ten months in the Theresienstadt ghetto, Fritz and Louise were ordered to report to the commandant’s office with their remaining luggage. Lederer commented on how the couple seemed impeccably dressed, almost as when they’d arrived. They were quickly piled into a German staff car and driven out the front gate of the walled ghetto. Kommandant Rahm told the head of the ghetto council of elders, Paul Eppstein, that the Gutmanns were bound for Rome.
The news prompted considerable comment, and no small amount of envy, in the camp. Willy Mahler, a young Jewish Czech who would later be transported to Auschwitz, kept a diary of his time in Theresienstadt that was posthumously discovered. His entry that day noted, “Baron [sic] Gutmann and his wife were released from the ghetto today, probably due to some foreign orders.” Another camp diarist, a Dane named Ralph Oppenhejm, who survived the war, wrote of the Gutmanns, “Released! Oh, what one wouldn’t give to be in their position.”
Perhaps for a few moments Fritz and Louise believed it, too. Despite all the lies the Nazis had told them in the past, perhaps they truly believed that this time they were going to be free, that the hell of Theresienstadt was being left behind.
Those moments of hope and belief were cruelly brief. Everyone knew that just outside the Theresienstadt main gate the road reached an intersection. The road that went to the right led to the outside world, while the road that went straight led to only one destination—the Little Fortress prison. Which direction the staff car took after it drove out of the ghetto’s main gate would announce their fate.
The staff car drove out the main gate—and went straight. Inside the prison courtyard, the car came to a screeching halt under the sign “Arbeit macht frei.”
As bad as the Theresienstadt ghetto was, for the Jews imprisoned in the walled city, the Little Fortress was an object of abject terror, feared even more than transport to the east. Norbert Troller, a Czech architect imprisoned in Theresienstadt and later in the Little Fortress, described it this way: “In the ghetto the horrible rumors about the Little Fortress were only described in a whisper. No one who wore a Jewish star had escaped alive from there . . . . [The fortress] was a hellish place, but conceived in a place none of us could have imagined in our wildest nightmares. In short, it was worse than we thought hell would be like . . . . Entering the main gate, crossing a bridge over the foul-smelling moat, one felt and smelled decay, death, hopelessness, despair, and damnation. Everything was built to crush you, to leave you no hope, to convey to you your nothingness, prepare you for annihilation. You are lost!”
The Little Fortress’s reputation was deserved. Operating separately from the Theresienstadt ghetto, it was run by SS troops, Gestapo agents, and pro-Nazi (usually Czech) guards—the sadistic Kapos. It was primarily used to imprison Czech political prisoners in the thousands, but also more ominously as punishment for “Jewish troublemakers,” usually from the ghetto next door. Although not technically a death camp—there were no gas chambers—nonetheless prisoners were sent there to die, by starvation or abuse or outright execution. Prisoners dressed in scraps of old uniforms were crowded by the hundreds into underground casemate cells awash in filth, while prisoners being held for Gestapo interrogation were thrown into dungeonlike solitary cells, hardly bigger than coffins. Club-wielding guards mercilessly beat prisoners to death for the smallest offense or no offense at all. Public hangings and death by firing squad took place against a bloodred brick wall. In a single day, over 250 Czech patriots were shot to death at the execution site between the ramparts. Presiding over this horror, striding about in riding breeches and sporting a Hitler-style mustache, was the Little Fortress SS commandant, Hauptsturmführer Heinrich Jöckel, a notorious sadist and Jew-hater. Jöckel, who routinely beat prisoners to death with his own hands, actually lived in the Little Fortress with his wife and two teenage daughters. Even the daughters would torment the prisoners with their vicious German shepherds. (After the war Jöckel was hanged as a war criminal.)
• • •
Fritz and Louise were now delivered into this hell on earth. Later, Sturmbannführer Rahm would acknowledge to Paul Eppstein the Gutmanns’ true fate. Louise’s close friend Hedwig Eppstein then spread the shocking news back to the ghetto. Those who had envied the Gutmanns’ were suddenly full of pity. The diarist Ralph Oppenhejm noted, with horror and remorse, that the Gutmanns “were not sent to Italy. Instead they are locked up in the Little Fortress . . . . The husband is . . . seriously ill after the treatment they had put him under. And I was so jealous!”
Unlike in the ghetto, in the Little Fortress there was no Prominenten A-list, no special treatment. Every prisoner was damned, and Jews damned most of all. Fritz and Louise would immediately have been separated. There would have been no chance to say good-bye to each other. Louise was locked in cell No. 8, the stifling women’s cell. Fritz went into solitary confinement. His dank cell was No. 2, off the first courtyard and reserved for Jews.
Most of the Nazis’ meticulous records from the Little Fortress were destroyed near the end of the war, for obvious reasons. However, Fritz and Louise were evidently admitted into the Little Fortress under the R.U. designation—namely Rückkehr Unerwünschte, or “Return Unwanted.”
The interrogations in the ghetto would have bore little resemblance to the beatings Fritz suffered in the Little Fortress. They would have been almost indescribably worse. From what I have been able to deduce, Fritz survived two weeks in cell No. 2 of the Little Fortress.
According to Joan Dubova (a survivor of both Theresienstadt and Auschwitz), Fritz Gutmann was dragged from his cell in the late afternoon at the very end of April 1944. The Kapos pulled and pushed him all the way to the foot of the bastion. There Dubova, on her way back from work duty, saw my grandfather beaten to death with clubs by the Kapos below the ramparts of the Little Fortress.
A different version I found was even more gruesome, however. Poor Fritz was garroted with a wire by the Kapo called Spielmann.
Spielmann, reputedly, then took Fritz’s favorite gold cuff links, which had miraculously survived up to this moment. In another of Fritz’s pockets was a visa for Italy, signed by Mussolini himself.
The story goes on that Spielmann later fell out of favor with his SS masters and was sent to Auschwitz. There he met a few of his former victims from the Little Fortress. They clubbed him to death in stages; the torture lasted a week.
• • •
Did Fritz, beaten beyond bearing, refuse one more time to sign over ownership of the Silbersammlung? I cannot know for certain, but clearly, after denying the SS Kommandant at least twice already, he had crossed a line. Nazi law was adamant on Jewish insubordination.
If he had given them what they wanted, might he have been among those emaciated inmates who were still in Theresienstadt when the Red Army, finally, arrived on May 8, 1945?
I do know that after examining hundreds of Nazi-era documents concerning the Gutmann silver collection (documents bearing the signatures of lawyers, German officials, and Nazi dealers), nowhere could I find Fritz’s authority to sell. So perhaps, despite his suffering, my grandfather defied the Nazis and Hitler right up to the end.
Fritz’s final resting place is also beyond my grasp. Does he rest anonymously under that shockingly green grass by the red walls? Does he lie undiscovered in an unmarked grave under one of the earthen ramparts that surround the Little Fortress? Or in a mass grave? Was his body taken to cell No. 18, which led to the crematorium the Nazis built after they ran out of burial space at Theresienstadt, and then rendered like so many others into ashes—ashes that later on SS orders were dumped by the ton into the Ohre River? We searched all these places looking for a clue.
My eleven-year-old, James, ran with a stubborn determination through the entire Terezin Memorial Cemetery looking for Gutmann, any Gutmann. Aisle after aisle, he scrutinized the individual graves, all 2,386 of them. Finally, exhausted, he returned just shaking his head silently.
The scant remains of thousands more, from the Little Fortress, the Theresienstadt Ghetto, and the outside labor camp have been gathered in a mass grave marked by a pile of boulders. Out of the gray pile rises an enormous Star of David, made from steel girders. In all, the remains of some ten thousand victims lie within the Terezin Cemetery.
• • •
Today the town features an occasional shop and café for the benefit of the local residents, and a museum dedicated to the town’s dark history. As I walked about, the clean, quiet, well-kept streets seemed eerily deserted. Even though today some three thousand Czechs apparently live within the walled city, I barely saw a soul. The walled community of Terezin has the feel of a ghost town—literally, a town of ghosts.
On the other side of the river, connected by a narrow bridge, and also enclosed by moats and battlements, is the smaller companion to the garrison town, the Kleine Festung, the once-dreaded Little Fortress. Although initially designed as a bulwark against foreign invasion, the Little Fortress was never called upon to actually repel an invader. No soldiers of any nation ever won any glory there. Instead, for most of its existence the Little Fortress served as a prison, a dungeon, a final destination of the damned. The people who died there—and there were thousands of them—included Gavrilo Princip, the assassin who had the dubious distinction of starting World War I. He died in the cell right next to my grandfather’s. Ironically, also, SS Sturmbannführer Karl Rahm was captured after World War II and sent back to the Kleine Festung, where he was held until he was executed in 1947.
• • •
These days, just outside the fortress, stands a dismal gift shop. It is hard to imagine what trinkets they sell. Improbably, they also offered microwave pizza. We shuddered and moved on. The Little Fortress stood empty, apart from small knots of solemn tourists who had come to see the dark prison cells, the worn set of gallows, and the cemetery. The well-manicured grass is intensely, curiously green. The Kleine Festung is a place of tunnels and underground bunkers filled with the dank odors of earth and stone and seeping wet. Eschewing the guided tours, I found myself in front of Gate No. 17. No. 18 was the mortuary cell, but No. 17 was the entrance to a long tunnel. The tunnel goes through the old fortifications of the Kleine Festung for a quarter of a mile. The long, dark, cold tunnel is almost unbearably claustrophobic, winding endlessly with no end in sight. The sense of dread is overwhelming. I realized my wife, my son, and I were all crying. Finally there is light, but the relief is short-lived. It is the firing range, the gallows, the killing field.
Usually the Gestapo and the Kapos took their victims the short route from the cells to the execution site just outside the walls. The gate they took was known as the Gate of Death. However, the long tunnel also leads to the same place of horror. Taking the long tunnel would have added an immeasurable level of sadism to the Kapos’ routine brutality.
I can’t help wondering if my grandfather took these same steps, the last he ever would, on that day in April 1944, as the Kapos poked and prodded and dragged him. He finally reached the light only to meet his end.
My grandfather, the cultured and dignified man with the wry smile, who stares back at me from the old photographs, the man who loved art and music and beautiful things, died broken and shattered in this forlorn ditch.
• • •
The scant details of Louise’s fate are almost unbearably cryptic. Postwar accounts state that two excruciating months after Fritz’s murder, the Baroness Louise Gutmann von Landau was taken from the Fortress on July 2 and loaded aboard a cattle wagon. With her were just nine other souls. The destination was the extermination camp of Auschwitz.
Compared to the three previous transports, which included over seventy-five hundred condemned, this time the SS ordered a special transport for just ten unwanted prisoners from the Little Fortress.
Immediately on arrival in Auschwitz, my grandmother, the beautiful, elegant woman of the Man Ray portraits, the vivacious, fun-loving woman who tore across Europe, scarf flying, in her LaSalle convertible, was ordered into the “left line.” She had been spared slave labor. This gentle woman was instantly herded into a gas chamber and murdered. Her ashes, like those of over a million others, were next dispersed by noxious black smoke from the chimneys of the overworked crematoriums.
Between March and November of 1944 the German killing machine was at the height of efficiency and the depths of depravity. During these few short months, while the Allies were advancing (and flying overhead), the Nazis disposed of nearly six hundred thousand Jewish lives in Auschwitz-Birkenau alone.
One sad, final irony: I discovered that much of Auschwitz was built on land originally owned by the Laurahütte mining company. The Laurahütte had been founded in happier days by Louise’s grandfather Jacob von Landau. On the board of directors, just before the Nazi takeover, had been Louise’s uncle Eugen von Landau. Fritz’s brother Herbert was another director.
• • •
It was necessary to summon a special courage to retrace the final steps of Fritz and Louise. Unfortunately, I have read much about the complex of Nazi slave-labor and extermination camps known collectively as Auschwitz—the railhead selections, the medical experiments, the starvation, the hangings and shootings, the unspeakable barbarities committed against humanity. The living and the dead were treated like so much industrial waste. Beyond nausea and beyond belief, the mind attempts to grasp the enormity of it, but then recoils.
Nevertheless, on another European trip I resolved to go to Auschwitz, to see the place where my grandmother died. At the train station in Warsaw, I stood on the platform for the train to Kraków. A poster even offered tours of Oświęcim—Polish for “Auschwitz”—just a short ride from Kraków. I tried to prepare myself for what lay ahead: the preserved remains of the death camp, the barbed wire and the gallows, the gas chambers and the crematoriums. I imagined the farm fields and birch forests where my grandmother’s ashes might have scattered. I tried to get some sense of her last days and hours.
But when the train to Kraków came and the passengers, ordinary Poles and a few tourists, climbed aboard, I stood on the platform unwilling, unable, to move. I stood there, unused ticket in hand, and watched as the train pulled slowly away.
I simply could not do it. I could not bear to see the place where my grandmother was murdered. I could not take the train to Auschwitz.
