Life on the Ringstrasse and a Ritchie Boy Discovered

This year, I read two books that reveal the opulent life of many Jewish families living in Vienna, Austria before World War II. Both books are well worth reading for their intimate view of these families, the leaders of Austrian business, thought, and artistic culture in the first four decades of the twentieth century— of how they lived in Vienna and of how they escaped to find new lives flung across the globe.

Many of these influential Jewish families lived in large homes known as Palais, or palaces, on the Ringstrasse. In 1857, Emperor Franz Joseph ordered the demolition of the Vienna’s old city walls and moats to make room for an encircling boulevard and the new buildings he wanted built along it. He intended this majestic setting to be a showcase for the grandeur and glory of the Hapsburg Empire. Wealthy families flocked to build palatial homes beside the opulent state buildings being erected. At the turn of the century, Vienna had the fourth largest Jewish population in the world. The Jewish elite of Vienna, families like the Rothschilds, lived on the Ringstrasse where Sigmund Freud was known to take a daily walk on the avenue.

Ferdinand and Adele Block-Bauer, newlyweds in 1899, made their home on the Ringstrasse. Adele is probably best known to you as the iconic lady of Gustav Klimt’s famous golden painting. One of the books I read this year was The Lady in Gold, by Anne-Marie O’Connor. The acclaimed movie, Woman in Gold, is based on the book, which more fully describes the affluent and influential lives of the Block-Bauer family before the horrific events of the Anschluss.

Another newly married couple in 1899, Victor and Emmy Ephrussi, also lived on the Ringstrasse. Their Palais, almost a block square and five stories high, with sculpted caryatids on the top level and a tower on each corner, is described in Part II of Edmund de Waal’s The Hare With Amber Eyes, A Hidden Inheritance. Victor and Emmy had a balcony view onto the Ringstrasse, and soon enough, four children—two girls and two boys, one of which was Ignace Leon Ephrussi (called Iggie). It is Iggie who becomes of special interest to me.

Forced to dress in velvet suits with lace collars as a toddler, Iggie left Austria in the mid-1920s to pursue his education. World upheaval and the Nazi takeover of his homeland made it impossible for him to return. Iggie eventually immigrated to the US where he became a naturalized citizen in 1941. After the Anschluss, the rest of his family fled Austria and settled in England. On page 271 of The Hare with Amber Eyes (by Edmund de Waal, published by Vintage Books), I came across this amazing sentence: “In February 1944, to everyone’s delight, Iggie turns up in Tunbridge Wells in his American uniform, an Intelligence Officer with the 7th Corps Headquarters.”

Wow! Could Iggie be a Ritchie Boy?

An e-mail to my source, the knowledgeable Ritchie Boy archivist, Dan Gross, quickly confirmed my suspicions. Iggie enlisted in the US Army in January 1942, right after Pearl Harbor. In July of 1943, he arrived at Camp Ritchie where he attended the 10th Class, the one directly following Herman’s. Because a new class began every few weeks, the two men, Herman and Iggie, could easily have known each other. Both were assigned to German-speaking sections, and they graduated only a month apart, Herman in mid-August and Iggie in mid-September, 1943.

This discovery of another Ritchie Boy should not have surprised me considering Iggie’s background and a childhood switching between his native German, the French of his Paris cousins, and the English of his nanny. But it is always exciting to me to discover another Ritchie Boy.

Over 500 of the men who graduated from Camp Ritchie intelligence training were born in Austria. Another of these was Ernest Wachtel, profiled in my August 2, 2014 blog titled “An Honest Man.” Though Ernest was much younger than Iggie, and certainly didn’t live on the Ringstrasse, his father was a silk-and-lace merchant who might have supplied the lace for Emmy’s gowns and the collars for little Iggie’s fancy velvet suits.

The world is indeed small, and I am continually learning more about the Ritchie Boys.

Photo of Iggie Ephrussi courtesy of Edmund de Waal and Vintage Books.