The Nazi Officer's Wife

by Edith H. Beer

  At the Leipzig station, we were herded into a room where we were guarded by two policemen and ordered to remove any lipstick or other makeup. We had to ask permission to use the toilet. We then continued the journey on a local train. By now, our womanly chatter had ceased. After a few hours of being treated like prisoners, we had become prisoners, watchful, silent. I stood the whole time, looking out the window at Germany, at the painfully clean villages and tidy little gray houses, all of a uniform design. The countryside, still spotted with winter’s resilient snows, brimmed with mud.

  “That mud is where I am going,” I said to myself.

  At Magdeburg, we had to haul our luggage up the steep steps. A very slow train took us to Stendahl. We stood on the platform, freezing.

  The farmers came—plain, rough people determined to behave in a superior manner, still a bit uncomfortable with all this new power. They looked us over critically, as though we were horses, then divided us into groups. The smallest farmer took two girls. A few others took eight or ten. I went with the largest group—I think there were about eighteen of us—to Plantage Mertens in Osterburg.

  It was a big farm on six hundred morgens of land. (A morgen, about two-thirds of an acre in Germany, was a measurement invented by medieval farmers, who estimated that this was how much land you could plow in a Morgen, a morning.) The farm had five heavyset horses; a large house, which I never entered; some barns; and barracks for us, the workers. Frau Mertens, a woman in her twenties whose husband had gone to war, expected Jews to be what Goebbels’ radio broadcasts had promised—ugly, crude, ratlike miscreants who would surely try to steal everything she possessed. She seemed pleased that we said “Bitte” and “Danke” and appeared meek and exhausted.

  The next day we started working in her fields.

  Never in my life had I done work of this nature. If only I had not cut gym, I might have been stronger, but it was too late for regrets.

  We worked from six until noon, then from one to six in the evening, six days a week, with a part day on Sunday. Our task was to plant beans, then beets, then potatoes, and to cut asparagus. To cut asparagus we would reach into the ground, feel for the tender white stem, cut it with a knife, pull it out, and fill up the hole—thousands of times a day. Soon every joint and muscle throbbed and burned. My bones ached. My head ached. Herr Fleschner—we called him Herr Verwalter, literally “Mr. Overseer”—was a thin man with dull eyes and a nervous expression. He wore a cap and, under a vest and a jacket, a clean white shirt. He literally stood over us in the fields.

  I had been told at Prinz Eugenstrasse that I would stay at Plantage Mertens for six weeks. On the train, I heard two months. But at the farm, when I said “two months” to Herr Verwalter, he burst out laughing. I remember, he had a high-pitched cackle like one of the lesser devils in hell.

  “It is the role of certain races to work for certain other races,” he would proclaim as he watched us work. “That is the decree of nature. That is why the Poles work for us Germans and the French work for us and you work for us today and tomorrow the English will work for us as well.”

  I was supposed to shovel out a ditch. The loose earth on the sides kept caving in on me. The overseer shouted: “Faster! Faster!” I tried to go faster. “Idiot!” he yelled. “Stupid useless Jewish fool! What good are you?” I burst into tears. However, I could have filled that ditch with my tears and drowned in them for all the sympathy they evoked.

  In my bed at night, I berated myself for behaving in such an undignified manner before such a despicable person. I swore to myself that it would never happen again, and it didn’t. In the following weeks, the overseer found me to be one of his better workers, fast and efficient. He now turned his wrath on an unfortunate Romanian woman. “You old crow!” he screamed. “You dried up stupid useless Jewish fool! What good are you?” Repeatedly, he pushed her face down in the dirt.

  On occasion, Frau Mertens, looking clean and fresh, would walk out into the fields to see how things were going. She had a colonial largesse about her. By way of greeting, she said “Heil Hitler” to us, with a smile. We would straightened up from the muddy earth and stare at her. No one said a word. She seemed disappointed.

  There were five rooms and a kitchen in our brick-and-timber barracks. My room had four inmates: Frau Telscher, aloof and quiet; Trude and Lucy, both eighteen; and me. No one believed that I was twenty-seven and—almost—a university graduate. Across the hall lived a group we called “the Elegant Six,” women from Vienna’s upper class. Next to them lived six other women, among them the poor Romanian; a pretty, high-strung dark-haired girl named Frieda; another girl who was two months’ pregnant; and a woman who had once worked as a maid in homes like those owned by “the Elegant Six.” The former maid loved to watch these pampered women stumble through the rutted fields with the rest of us. But her joy soon ended. Nothing can make backbreaking labor a pleasure for long, even the satisfaction of a victory in the class struggle.

  We each had an iron bed with a straw mattress, blue-and-white checked sheets, and a single blanket. I wore everything I could to bed because it was so cold—two pair of pants, two shirts, my nightgown, my bathrobe, two pair of socks. I wrote to Mama and Pepi and pleaded for them to send me an eiderdown, a warm feather-filled quilt.

  It quickly became apparent that the Germans were interested in using our strength but not in preserving it. We received a ration of “flower coffee”—made not from coffee beans but from flowers, or maybe acorns. We each had half a loaf of bread, which had to last us from Sunday to Wednesday. At midday, we had a cold soup made from broken asparagus that couldn’t be sold, or a mustard soup with potatoes, and maybe a hard-boiled egg. At night, we had a milk soup; on lucky days, it contained some oatmeal. We were always ravenous. Like the Ancient Mariner, surrounded by water and dying of thirst; we were surrounded by bounty and aching with hunger. I began to live for little packages from home that might contain bread or a little cake or that greatest of treasures, some fruit jam.

  Frau Fleschner, the overseer’s wife, supervised us. She had a child, a four-year-old named Ulrike, who played around the farm, a spot of sweet innocence in a harsh environment. Frau Fleschner smoked constantly. She loved her authority. She lined us up outside and read aloud the “Rules for Jewesses Who Are Coming to Work at the Asparagus Plantation.”

  “All inmates must adhere to the rules and be responsible to Frau Fleschner—that is, me,” she said.

  “Every inmate, in the morning when she leaves her bedroom, has got to make her bed, clean her washstand, and make sure that her place in the bedroom is cleaned.

  “The oldest girl in the room must be responsible for the cleanliness and order in the bedroom.” She pointed to me. “That is you.” She continued reading.

  “Meals will be taken in the dining and common rooms. Food may not be taken into the bedrooms.

  “There are special rooms for washing and ironing.

  “Smoking is prohibited.

  “It is not allowed to leave the camp and the environs. It is therefore not allowed to visit nearby towns and villages, or cinemas, theaters, etc.

  “All personal purchases have got to be shown to the manageress of the camp—that is, me—and will be made through her agreement.”

  With a sinking heart, I realized that I would have to ask her for everything—a toothbrush, a sanitary napkin, salt.

  “It is possible to take walks on Saturdays from 1900 to 2100 hours and on Sundays from 1400 to 1800 hours. These walks must be made in groups of at least three persons.

  “And of course, it is not allowed to use certain streets or to take part in any activities in the city of Osterburg. You walk. You walk back. That’s it.”

  The local police visited often. They threatened us with jail should we become disruptive. We listened obediently, and when they left, broke down in gales of laughter. We could barely crawl into bed at night! Who had the strength to be disruptive?

  Regularly the police posted notices to
alert us to some activity, previously considered normal, which had now become a crime. Going to a dance hall, attending the cinema, drinking a beer in a café—all became crimes for us Jews. And the worst crime of all, said Frau Fleschner, pointing to the notice, was Rassenschande, racial disgrace—specifically, sexual relations between Germans and Jews. You could go to jail for that, she said.

  Being sick never worked as an excuse at the asparagus plantation at Osterburg. For example, the pregnant girl wanted to go home. She cried and pleaded. The doctor declared her fit for work. She willfully threw up in the fields every morning. An official from the work department, stuffed into his Nazi uniform, finally gave her permission to leave, but not for home—for Poland.

  The high-strung Frieda made the mistake of telling Frau Fleschner that she had a toothache. She was taken to a dentist. He pulled ten of her teeth! After one day, they put her back in the fields, spitting blood. She was twenty-one years old.

  All through the early spring we cut asparagus. We crawled through the rows, digging, weeding, cutting. My fingers ached as though they were broken. My back would not straighten. We had started out working fifty-six hours a week, but now we were up to eighty hours. All the local farmers met and agreed to stop cutting the asparagus on one certain day, which meant we had to work mightily to cut as much as possible before that date. We were up at four in the morning and in the fields until after six at night. I organized my own campaign of sabotage. When I shoved my knife into the earth, I would cut and destroy as many of next year’s young shoots as I could.

  Once, after I had worked twelve hours in a driving rain, my knees swelled rheumatically, my clothes rotted, and I gave in to self-pity. “Wouldn’t it have been better just to die quickly in Vienna than to die here by inches in this mud?” I wrote to Pepi.

  Immediately, though, I felt ashamed to be complaining, and sought socialist dogma to belittle my own suffering. “Isn’t this the way it is for ninety percent of the people in the world?” I wrote. “Don’t they have to toil from early morning? Don’t they have to go to bed hungry and cold?”

  You see, shame was still a useful psychological tool for me. I still had pride.

  After the harvest, when the workload lessened, some of the girls were sent home. Six of us—considered the “best workers”—remained.

  Warm weather came. The fields rustled in the breeze like a sweet green sea. My body had grown stronger, somewhat adjusted to my labors. I was seized by thoughts of love.

  “I want to press myself against your lips,” I wrote to my darling. “But you are so far away! When will I feel you again?”

  I picked poppies and marguerites and put them in everyone’s hair. I became the camp comforter, affecting gaiety, waltzing with Trude and Lucy among the sugar beets. At lights-out, I recited to my young roommates my favorite lines from Goethe’s Faust, which I had posted on my little cupboard:

  Cowardly thoughts, anxious hesitation,

  Womanish timidity, timorous complaints

  Won’t keep misery away from you

  And will not set you free.

  To preserve all your power despite everything,

  To never bend and show yourself to be strong,

  Brings the might of the gods to your aid.

  Exhausted from encouraging everybody, most of all myself, I would fall asleep in the sun, at lunchtime, with my head on a sheaf of barley.

  THE MAIL WAS our greatest comfort. We lived for our packages. The Nazis kept the mail coming regularly at that time. They knew that every package sent to us made our relatives in Vienna poorer and simultaneously relieved our captors of the cost of feeding us too well. The Ostarbeiter—the Polish, Serbian, and Russian workers—were not allowed to write home at all because the regime was afraid they would tell people how badly they were being treated and future labor deportations would be resisted.

  I wrote to Mama, Pepi, Jultschi, the Denner girls, the Roemers, and the Grenzbauers all the time, sometimes three times a day. Often I said nothing but incoherent babbling or sophomoric expostulating. Sometimes I made precise agricultural records: how many rows of asparagus I had harvested, that the rows were two hundred meters long, that this kind of pest ate the frothy leaves and this kind of grub destroyed the roots, that this was the tool for weeding and that was the tool for chopping. I described how the Serbian prisoners were traded like farm equipment, how Herr Verwalter had swiped the tobacco that Pepi had sent me (which I had intended to give to the French prisoner who helped us all so much), how I had learned to sit down in the rows and inch along on my behind to save my knees.

  To Pepi I tried to write the truth. To Mama I resolutely and consistently lied.

  I told Pepi I was sick with the flu; I told Mama I was strong and healthy. I told him that Frau Hachek, an old acquaintance, was in the camp. To Mama I said nothing of this, for she might write to Frau Hachek and discover that I had chronic bronchitis and an unidentifiable rash, that my teeth were turning brown, that I needed more food. When Frieda, Trude, Lucy, and I walked to work, the German children hooted at us: “Jewish swine!” In town, the shopkeepers would not even sell us a beer. I wrote to Mama that Osterburg was a friendly town.

  I read Nordau and Kästner and Faust and The Idea of the Baroque. I tried to learn a little French from our fellow captives and a little English from a book we called “McCallum,” because it was clear to me that my body, now thin and hard, was being sacrificed in this ordeal and only my mind might be preserved.

  We were completely cut off from the world. We never saw a newspaper, never heard the radio. I wrote to our old friend Zich, now a soldier in the Wehrmacht, hoping to learn something. I even wrote to Rudolf Gischa, my Nazified former beau in Czechoslovakia.

  I begged Pepi for news. “Is it true that Crete has been taken?” I asked him at the end of May 1941. I couldn’t believe it. To me, Crete was a site in Greek mythology. In my mind’s eye, I saw the Germans shooting bazookas at one-dimensional sandaled warriors with curlicue beards and decorative, spindly spears.

  I could not make the war seem real for myself. Even though I had heard about the Nazi bombing of cities in Spain, I couldn’t imagine an air attack on unarmed civilians. Remember, there were still horses on the roads of rural Germany at that time. Very few people understood what modern war would be like.

  One day, as we went into the asparagus fields at six A.M., we saw black clouds gathering on the horizon. We knew it was going to rain, and so did the overseer. “Faster, faster,” he muttered, a worried man with a quota. It began to pour. The earth softened. The knives began to slip. We expected him to say, “All right. Enough.” But he didn’t.

  He stood with an umbrella shielding him, and we put our faces down toward the earth and kept harvesting the asparagus. When the rain was coming down in torrents and the asparagus was beginning to swim like rice in Burma, he finally let us go into the shed.

  We assumed that now he would call for the wagon and send us back to the hut, but no.

  “We shall wait for the worst of the rain to pass,” he said. “Then back to the fields.”

  Frieda, the girl who had lost ten teeth, began to wail: “Why is the asparagus so much more important than human beings? Why are we living at all when the whole purpose of our life is such misery?”

  The overseer, miraculously moved by her outburst, let us go back to the hut.

  You see, even the inhuman ones were not always inhuman. This was a lesson that I would learn again and again—how completely unpredictable individuals could be when it came to personal morality.

  The Frenchman who worked with us, Pierre, was called Franz (short for Franzose or Frenchman) by the Germans because they couldn’t pronounce his name. A winegrower from the Pyrenees, he wore a white patch on his clothes with “KG” (for Kriegsgefangener—prisoner of war) stamped on it. He led the horse and the plow out onto the fields and we followed him, usually on our knees, sowing, weeding, with me shouting out French words so he could correct my accent.

&nbs
p; “Egless!” I would call.

  “Non, non, église!”

  “Palm de turr,” I would call.

  “Pommes de terre!” he corrected me.

  With my box camera, I took a picture of him, then sent the film back to Vienna for Pepi to develop so Franz could send it on to his wife and children.

  Pepi was jealous! Like so many Germans, he believed that the French possessed some erotic advantage over other men and would surely seduce us.

  “Time to give up these stupid stereotypes,” I said to my brilliant boyfriend. “Franz is far too exhausted, too emaciated, and too lonely for his family to have any erotic designs on anybody.”

  Actually, it was the Germans who tried to seduce us. The overseer made crude jokes with Frieda, trying to tempt her with his power. Werner, a local boy who hoped to sign up for twelve years in the army, took every opportunity to grope young Eva, the daughter of the vengeful maid. Otto, the SA man from the neighboring farm, battered us with vile suggestions and vulgar jokes.

  The farmers had grown proud and haughty. They ate better than anyone else in Germany now. And, like Volkswagen and Siemens, they had slaves. All they had to do was feed the local Nazi power elite, and they could have all the slaves they wanted.

  “The city people call us shit farmers,” Otto sneered, “but now they will pay, you watch!” He charged like a bandit for a chicken or a hog, and he loved it when the city people competed to meet his price.

  Rumors of growing hardship in Vienna came to us in between the lines of our loved ones’ letters. I knew what Mama did not have because she always sent exactly that thing to me. When she was cold, she sent mittens she had knitted from some yellow yarn she had found. When she was hungry, she sent me tiny cakes.