Jewish woman lived secretly upstairs from Nazi officer

Elsa Koditschek was living in a prosperous section of Vienna near the foothills of the Alps when the Nazis, who had annexed Austria, confiscated her home in 1940. A German officer, a squad leader in the SS, soon moved in.

Koditschek, who was Jewish, was allowed to stay on in an upstairs apartment, a tenant in her own house for about a year, until a deportation edict arrived ordering her to a Polish ghetto. She fled instead, leaving behind her life’s possessions, including the only major artwork she had ever bought, a landscape by Egon Schiele.

For years, she hid in the homes of non-Jewish friends, according to an account she gave in dozens of letters written during and after the war. But she was ultimately desperate enough to seek refuge in the house the Nazis had seized from her, sneaking back in to live there in secrecy and silence with an upstairs tenant.

From there, she spied on the SS officer, Herbert Gerbing, watching through a window as he sat in the garden with his family. Probably unbeknown to her, while she hid upstairs, he was helping with the deportation of Jews across Europe.

“Who would think I would find myself sharing a roof with an SS officer?” she wrote later in a letter to son Paul, who had moved to New York years earlier.

Steven Luckert, a historian with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, said Koditschek’s experience stood out even among the startling tales of Jews who had lived through the war hiding in Nazi-occupied cities. “The fact that she was living in the same house as someone who was in charge of deportations makes it even more extraordinary,” he said.

Koditschek’s Schiele was ultimately sold during the war, while she struggled to survive, and it has been sold several times since.

But her letters, handwritten on onionskin and intact after having been carefully packed away in a relative’s basement, helped the Koditschek family and researchers at Sotheby’s piece together the provenance of the painting. So this fall in New York, when it goes up for auction with an estimated value of $12 million to $18 million, Koditschek’s heirs will share in the proceeds with its current owners.

“It’s so unusual to have a victim of Nazi theft or expropriation who writes everything down,” said Lucian Simmons, the worldwide head of restitution at Sotheby. “Usually you’re trying to join the dots, but the dots are far apart.”

Mentions of the Schiele painting in the letters buttressed the provenance research by Simmons, who had approached the family in 2014 after independently finding indications that it had lost an important painting during the war. What followed were several years of negotiation with the current owners of the Schiele: Europeans who had bought it in the 1950s. An agreement will govern the sale next month of the work, “City in Twilight (The Small City II)” painted in 1913.

Koditschek, the widow of a banker, had sent her son and daughter away to safety before Europe became engulfed in war. Her letters do not indicate that she was particularly fearful of the Nazi she was living with. He occasionally summoned her to explain how things in the house worked. She described his demeanor as civil. Elsa Koditschek, shown in the 1920s, wrote letters during and after World War II detailing her hiding with a tenant in her own home in Vienna during the Holocaust. The letters helped establish her descendants as heirs of a lost painting soon to be auctioned with an estimated value of $12 million to $18 million.