The Nazi Officer's Wife

by Edith H. Beer

  Mama and I supported ourselves by sewing. Not couturier tailoring, of course, but mending and recutting old clothes to fit the new times. We did a lot of “taking in,” because our Jewish neighbors in the ghetto were growing thinner.

  My cousin Jultschi, however, was growing fatter.

  She sat with me in the park, crying her eyes out, her skin blotchy and broken out.

  “I know I shouldn’t have gotten pregnant in such terrible times,” she wept. “But Otto had been drafted and we were afraid we would never see each other again and we were so overcome. It just happened, and now I don’t know what I’m going to do. Maybe they’ll leave the child alone. What do you think, Edith? I mean, it has to be of some help to at least have a father who is not a Jew, who is a soldier of the Reich.”

  “Maybe it will help,” I said, although I did not really believe that.

  “I tried to get a job as a maid in England. I thought they would just think I was fat. But they knew right away that I was pregnant.” Her large melting brown eyes fixed on me. “I have to not be pregnant, Edith, with Otto going off to war and all these laws against the Jews. I have to go see a doctor.”

  I got in touch with our old friend Kohn. He had just finished his studies and opened a practice—and now the Nazis had revoked his license. He looked awful.

  “Did you hear about Elfi Westermayer?” he said bitterly. “She didn’t even finish her medical studies and she’s taking patients. Apparently all you need to practice medicine in this country now is a membership card in the Nazi Party.”

  He agreed to see Jultschi, but in the end he would not give her an abortion. “I cannot perform this operation safely,” he explained. “I have no surgery, no place at the hospital, no access to drugs. God forbid, you could become infected…. There might be terrible consequences.” He held her hand. “Go home. Have the child. It will be a comfort to you in the days to come.”

  So Jultschi went home to her husband. He was packing his gear, getting ready to go off to conquer Poland. He kissed her, promised to return, and left her to wait alone for her baby.

  Mama and I descended into poverty with astonishing speed. Denied the ability to make a living, working for customers who paid us in groschen (now re-counted as pfennigs by the Germans), we began to barter our possessions for things we desperately needed.

  Mama had a decayed tooth that was killing her. Our Jewish dentist was no longer allowed to practice, but with Pepi’s help, Mama found an Aryan dentist who would pull the tooth. He wanted gold. Mama gave him a gold chain. He wanted more. She gave him another. He wanted more. She gave him her last. Three gold chains for one tooth.

  I tried to collect the installments for sewing machines and motorbikes that had been rented through my grandfather’s franchise. But nobody who owed a Jew money felt obligated to pay anymore. Most of them laughed in my face.

  Mama’s younger sister, Aunt Marianne, had married a man named Adolf Robichek and settled in Belgrade, where he worked for a Danube shipping company. The Robicheks sent food packages to us with the ships’ captains, and we shared our good fortune with Frau Maimon and the two sisters. These packages became a lifeline for us.

  Did the rest of the Austrians understand what was happening to the Jews? Did they understand that we were being dispossessed, that we were beginning to go hungry? By way of answer, let me tell you a story.

  Once, after the Anschluss, I was stopped by a policeman for jaywalking. He ordered me to pay a stiff fine. “But I am Jewish,” I said. That was all he needed to hear to know that I was penniless and could not possibly pay, and he let me go.

  So you see, when they tell you that they did not realize how the Jews were being despoiled, you must never believe them. They all knew.

  CHRISTL DENNER’S LOVE life, always frantic, now became tumultuous because of Nazi politics.

  We were talking in the bathroom, because the other rooms, with their palatial windows, were all freezing.

  “Let me tell you, Edith, this is such a stupid situation that only the SS could have created it. The Nuremberg Laws on race say that you are not a legitimate Aryan unless all your grandparents on both sides are Aryan, right? So if you have even one Jewish grandparent, you are considered Jewish and deprived of all your privileges as a citizen, right? Well, guess what. Bertschi’s father is a Czechoslovakian Jew.”

  “Oh, my God,” I said, appalled.

  “So,” she continued, “my father helped Bertschi’s father buy illegal papers ‘proving’ that he too was an Aryan three generations back. A good idea, right?”

  “Excellent,” I said.

  “The result of this was that Bertschi’s father was immediately drafted.”

  “Oh, my God!”

  “In the army, they discovered Herr Beran’s true identity and put him in jail. But meanwhile they had drafted Bertschi, who now appeared to be satisfactorily Aryan because of his father’s false papers. But then, in short order, the army discovered that Bertschi’s father was in jail, but not why he was in jail, so they slapped Bertschi with a dishonorable discharge and sent him back to Vienna. And, listen to this, Edith, you won’t believe this—”

  “What? What?”

  “While Bertschi was returning to Vienna, his entire unit was blown up by a bomb set by the French Resistance.”

  I felt sad for the unit, thrilled for Bertschi, and delighted to know there actually was a French Resistance.

  “Now they have figured out that Bertschi is half Jewish, so the Gestapo is after him.”

  “Oh, no …”

  “But I have a plan. My father has bought me a formerly Jewish shop. I am to sell souvenirs: coffee cups with maps of Saint Stephen’s imprinted on them, replicas of Nymphenberg statuettes, music boxes that play Wagner. Of course I need a bookkeeper to help me run my shop. So I have hired Bertschi.”

  She smiled. Her dog put his head in her lap and gazed up at her adoringly.

  “Oh, Christl, that’s so dangerous. They’ll come after you …”

  “They already have,” she said. “I must report to Prinz Eugenstrasse tomorrow.”

  “You must not go!” I cried. “You’re an Aryan, you can get out, you have papers, you must leave the city, leave the Reich!”

  “My father has been assigned to work in the antiaircraft unit in Münster, in Westphalia,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  I thought of Hansi, the SS, their brutality to women.

  Christl smiled. “Just lend me your yellow blouse with the appliqued birds, and everything will be all right.”

  The next day, Christl Denner put on the blouse my mother had made for me. It fit her perfectly. She applied her reddest lipstick and darkened her lashes. As she headed down the street, her skirt swinging, her hair shining, she looked as if she were going to a dance.

  She walked into the Gestapo headquarters. Every man in the place emerged from behind his desk to have a better look at her. The Nazi Captain tried to be severe.

  “You have a man working for you, Fräulein Denner, one Hans Beran …”

  “Yes. My bookkeeper. He is traveling in the Reich. I had a postcard from him.”

  “When he returns, we want to see him.”

  “Of course, Captain. I’ll send him right over.”

  She gave him a big smile. He kissed her hand. He asked Christl if he could buy her a coffee. She agreed.

  “You what?! You went out with an SS man?”

  “How can a woman turn down a simple invitation for coffee?” she explained. “It would be rude. It might raise suspicions. When the captain suggested a future meeting, I simply told him that I was promised to a brave sailor on the high seas and could not possibly betray his sacred trust.”

  She grinned as she gave me back my blouse. She had the flair of a Hollywood heroine, my friend Christl.

  In the basement of her shop sat Bertschi Beran, the luckiest of men.

  PEPI VISITED ME every day. He was working as a stenographer for the court, and after work he would go o
ut and have a bite and then come to us, a forty-five-minute walk. He would arrive at seven P.M., put his watch on the table so as not to forget the time, and leave precisely at nine-fifteen so as to arrive home at ten, the hour his frantic mother expected him.

  Our long-delayed, frustrated love affair could find no place, no corner, and we had begun to starve for each other. Even in the coldest weather, we walked outside and found a bench or a doorway where we could kiss and cling together.

  One afternoon we crept into his flat, terrified that the neighbors would see us. He had bought some condoms and hidden them from Anna (who snooped into everything) by putting them in a box marked UNDEVELOPED FILM! DO NOT EXPOSE TO LIGHT! We were wild with excitement and couldn’t wait to get at each other. But no sooner had we begun to undress than we heard men shouting in the hall outside; that horrible Nazi banging on some unfortunate Austrian’s door; the lady of the house crying, “No! No, he’s done nothing! Don’t take him!”—and then the heavy steps of the captors as they dragged their prisoner away.

  Our passion died of fright. We could not revive it that evening. Pepi walked me back to the ghetto.

  He was not fired from his job at the court. He just stopped showing up for work one day, and his colleagues there assumed that, like all the other Jews, half-Jews, and quarter-Jews, he had been arrested or was doing his best to get out. He couldn’t receive Jewish rations because now, with his mother’s machinations, he was not registered as a Jew. If he had tried to acquire Aryan rations, he would have been drafted.

  So Pepi was trapped in his mother’s apartment. He lived on what his mother brought him. She swore to the authorities that she was a big smoker, and so she received cigarettes, which she brought home him to him. He went out during the day to sit in a park where he would not be noticed. He occupied himself by writing laws for the new “democratic” Austria that he felt sure would exist after the elimination of the Nazis. Can you imagine? My brilliant Pepi, pretending not to exist, rewriting the Austrian penal code, for fun.

  In 1939, when the Germans attacked Poland, bringing France and Britain into the war, we had a moment of hope that Hitler would soon be beaten, that our decision to stay in Vienna might work out for the best. But soon enough, we understood that the widening war had cut off all escape.

  The old and the sick saw no way to save themselves. The aged widow of the great German-Jewish painter Max Liebermann killed herself just as the Gestapo came to collect her. My mother’s uncle, Ignatz Hoffman, an eminent physician, had married a young woman and spent some very happy years with her. Before the Gestapo came for him, he took poison. “You must run now, my love,” he said. “Run like the wind. You cannot have an old man to burden you.” He died in her arms.

  We heard that a mysterious Nazi woman helped Uncle Ignatz’s wife smuggle out her possessions before she herself escaped.

  All the Jews of Polish origin were being sent back to the land of their forefathers, and so the two gentle sisters kissed us and packed and left. We sent them packages in care of the Jewish community in Warsaw, but of course the packages were returned because it was illegal to send anything to Jews. So we took the advice of a wily neighbor, wrote the address in Polish, and like magic the packages arrived. I too became wily. I never mailed two packages from the same post office.

  We began to lose touch with all our relatives and friends. They were drifting away like stars without gravity, through whatever hole opened in the wall of Nazi conquest.

  My aunt Marianne Robichek wrote that she and her family were heading west toward Italy. Uncle Richard and Aunt Rozsi sent a postcard from China. Hansi, Milo, and Mimi sent messages through other relatives that they had made it to Palestine. My cousin Max Sternbach, a gifted artist who had graduated from the art school that would not accept Hitler, disappeared across the Alps, headed—we hoped—for Switzerland.

  I borrowed Christl’s lilac blouse and had a formal picture taken of myself for Pepi’s birthday. Somehow I had the feeling that we would need pictures of each other, if we were separated. He said we would never be separated, but so many people were. Look at Otto Ondrej, locked down on the Eastern Front. He had never even seen the little son whom Jultschi had named for him.

  Now all my hopes centered on the defeat of Germany. If only France would hold fast … if only Italy would ally itself with England … if only America would enter the war, I thought, then the Nazis would be destroyed.

  In June 1940, while Pepi and I were walking along the Danube Canal, someone on the far bank called out joyfully, “France has fallen!” The whole city erupted with cheering … and I actually vomited in the street. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t walk. Pepi half-carried me home. His mother had some pills to keep herself calm. Now that I was as hysterical as she, Pepi stole a few from her, put them into my mouth, and watched while I swallowed them.

  When Italy declared war on France and Britain, a clear indication that Mussolini thought Hitler would win the war, I took the pills of my own volition, for I felt now that all was lost. We were trapped in the fascist empire.

  Pepi refused to despair. His punctuality regulated and calmed our lives. His small gifts from the Aryan side—coffee, cheese, books—reminded us of better days gone by. And then, in an unforgettable act of romantic abandon, he pressured his mother into giving him some money, and he took me to the Vachau.

  We had three glorious days in a fairy-tale wonderland. We floated on the crystal blue river. We climbed up to the ruin of the Durenstein castle, where Richard the Lionhearted was held prisoner and Blondl the troubadour sang of his escape. We locked the door of our hotel room and fell on the bed and rolled in each other’s arms. People would ask me why I had married a man so much older than I, for Pepi looked old for his age and I looked young for mine. I said: “Because he is the world’s greatest lover!”

  The Nazis vanished like evil dwarfs under a magic spell. We wandered along the charming paths where Bertrand Russell had walked before us, pronouncing this place the enchanted garden of Austria, and we knew nothing but our delight in each other. Politics, poverty, terror, and hysteria all disappeared into the thin sharp mountain air.

  “You are my angel,” he whispered. “You are my magic little mouse, my darling girl …”

  That was the only reason I stayed in Austria, you see. I was in love, and I couldn’t imagine life without my Pepi.

  WHEN ABOUT 100,000 of the 185,000 Viennese Jews had somehow made their way out, the Nazis decided that all other Jews remaining in Vienna had to be registered, so we were forced at gunpoint to line up in the square. All the F’s had to appear on one day, all the G’s on another day, and all the H’s on April 24, 1941. Mama and I stood in line from early morning on. When people fainted, we helped to pick them up and tried to carry them out of the sun. A unit of Gestapo men cruised by in a truck. One of them jumped out and yanked at my mother and me.

  “Get in the truck,” he said.

  “What? Why?”

  “Don’t ask stupid questions, you Yid bitch, get in!”

  We were pushed up into the truck. I held Mama’s hand tight. They took us to an SS office and put a paper in front of us.

  “You are both needed for agricultural work in the Reich. Here. Sign this. It’s a contract.”

  Instantly, my training as a lawyer came flooding back. I turned into a litigator. I argued as though I were inventing the art of argument.

  “But this woman should not even be here,” I said, pushing Mama behind me. “She’s not a Viennese, she’s not a Jew, she’s just an old maid we once employed, who was visiting and decided to keep me company.” “Sign the paper.”

  “Besides, look at her! She can’t possibly be any good for work. She has bone spurs in her feet, arthritis in her hips. She’s an orthopedic mess, I tell you. If you need workers, go find my sisters. My sister Gretchen is beautiful, only twenty-two years old, and an athlete. Yes sir, the best! If she hadn’t been Jewish, she would have been on the Olympic girls’ swimming team. And my sister E
rika is as strong as two horses. You’ll be able to hitch her to a plow, I tell you. They’re both back in that line; you must have missed them. How could you miss two such strong and robust young women and seize upon this old crone? Is there something wrong with your eyes? Perhaps you need an exam …”

  “All right, all right, shut up!” the Nazi yelled. “Let the old woman go. Go, go, Mother, get out of here!” They pushed Mama into the sunny street.

  I signed their paper. It was a contract obligating me to spend six weeks doing farmwork in the north of Germany. If I didn’t show up at the train station tomorrow, the paper said, I would be treated as a wanted criminal and hunted down without mercy.

  My mother and I slept in each other’s arms that night.

  “Six weeks,” I said. “That’s all. Six weeks and I will be home. By then America will have entered the war and conquered Germany, and it will all be over.”

  I took a knapsack and one suitcase, as my sister Hansi had done. Mama packed nearly all the food in the house for me.

  Pepi came with his mother to the train station. He looked so sweet, so sad. All his adorable debonair patter had abandoned him. He took my hands and put them in the pockets of his coat with his hands. My mother had great dark circles around her eyes. We were silent, we three. But Anna Hofer would not shut up. She was babbling about rations and fashions, full of joy that I was leaving.

  Suddenly, Mama put her arm around Anna and before she could protest, turned her around, allowing Pepi and me one last moment. The salt tears in his kiss stayed with me. I tasted them in my dreams.

  As the train whistle blew, I whispered to Mama that she shouldn’t be sad, that I would see her in six weeks.

  FIVE

  The Asparagus Plantation at Osterburg

  AT FIRST, IT felt like an ordinary journey. I rode in a compartment with several women, and by the time we arrived in Melk, I knew how long they had been in labor with each of their children. A whining frightened girl clung to me. I finally managed to get rid of her. We had a keeper, a bustling German. She looked efficient in her Nazi uniform, but during the long, sleepless night, she wandered through the train in her dressing gown, not really knowing what to do.