The Nazi Officer's Wife

by Edith H. Beer

  I burned all of Pepi’s letters except one. It was dated May 26, 1942, and I think I kept it because, with its boundless sympathy, it kept me: “My dearest little mouse! Be courageous and believe as strongly in the future as you have believed so far. My poor child, if I could only assuage your hunger! Please be kissed a thousand times and embraced by your Pepi.”

  MAMA SENT ME TELEGRAMS: “I WILL HAVE TO GO SOON. COME QUICKLY. COME RIGHT AWAY.”

  In Aschersleben, I went to the police. “My mother is leaving! I must go with her!”

  They gave me no answer.

  I pleaded with the supervisor to send me home. I went to Frau Reineke. “My mother cannot go without me,” I wept. “She is old; I am her only child—please.”

  IN VIENNA, MAMA begged the Gestapo to let her stay until I arrived.

  “How old is your daughter?”

  “She is twenty-eight.”

  “Then she is old enough to travel by herself after you.”

  “Please.”

  “No.”

  “Please, sir!”

  “No.”

  I WENT BACK to the police. But they would not give me the papers I needed to travel with, and Jews were no longer permitted to travel without special papers. I felt the door closing between my mother and me, and I was the one locked out.

  SHE LEFT LETTERS for me with Pepi. “Tell Edith I tried my hardest. I hope she isn’t too dejected. She will come on the next train. God will help her and me so we can be together again.”

  And then she wrote: “The Jewish community here tells me to leave Edith where she is. Maybe it is better that way. She must stay, even though it is dreadful for me.”

  HER LAST LETTER: “It is 12:30 at night,” she wrote to Pepi. “We are waiting for the SS. You can imagine what I feel like. Herr Hausner is still packing for me, because at the moment I am just not capable of doing anything. Please, please help Edith do her packing. Please look after my last few things that I have left. There is a suitcase to be collected from Herr Weiss, who is being left here because he is seventy-five years old. It is full of things Edith will have to take with her. May you stay well. May we meet again in health and happiness.

  “Oh, my dear Pepi, I am so sad. I want to live. Please don’t forget us.

  “Kisses again. Klothilde Hahn.”

  MY MOTHER WAS deported on June 9, 1942.

  The Gestapo in Aschersleben refused to let me travel to Vienna until June 21.

  SEVEN

  Transformation in Vienna

  SIX OF US were leaving Aschersleben for Vienna. Our travel permission stipulated that we must report to a certain place on a certain day for Umsiedlung—“relocation”—in the east. But every rumor we had heard suggested that we should not keep this appointment.

  “But how?” asked a girl named Hermi Schwarz, as we packed for the journey. “They’ll see the yellow star and grab us right away.”

  “I’m not wearing mine,” I whispered. “If I wear the star, I’ll never have a chance to see my cousin Jultschi and to hear how Mama was before she left. I won’t be able to spend any time with my friend Christl or with Pepi.” I was imagining the warmth of their welcome, a few days of love.

  “But we can’t even get on the train without the star,” Hermi said.

  “True,” I answered. “But we can get off the train without it.”

  We met in the dark of the early morning, the last Jewish slave girls of Aschersleben. We embraced and whispered good-bye and, so as not to attract attention, agreed to travel in groups of two, each pair in a different compartment. Hermi and I rode together. It was a pleasant train, full of families on vacation. For a people at war, I thought, the Germans seemed awfully carefree. In my isolation, I had not yet learned that they had been winning victory after victory and, in June 1942, fully expected to conquer all of Europe.

  About an hour into the journey I made my way down the train corridor to the lavatory. I shimmed past chatting policemen, murmuring “Excuse me.” I held my coat over my arm and my handbag over the place where the star was sewn. Once inside the lavatory, I tore the loose stitches and dropped the star into my handbag. On the way back, I met Hermi in the corridor. She was on her way to the bathroom to do exactly the same thing.

  You will ask why we did not think of Berta, our friend who had been sent to a concentration camp for doing this. I will tell you that we thought of nothing but Berta, that every uniformed man who passed the window of our compartment filled us with terror. But we tried to appear calm, and we exchanged pleasantries with the other passengers. One of them said she was going to Vienna to visit her daughter. I wished her a happy visit. I turned my face away so she would not see that I was fighting back tears, thinking of Mama.

  At the station, my dear friends melted into the Austrians the way flesh melts into dust. Does anyone remember them? Did anyone see them at the end?

  I stood absolutely still. I had a sense that the holes where I had sewn the star onto my coat were forming a vivid Jewish outline for everyone to see. I expected the Gestapo to spot me and arrest me.

  Pepi came out of nowhere, took me in his arms, and kissed me. For a split second, I lost myself in love again and believed he would save me. And then I saw his mother—the penciled eyebrows, the jowls, the double chin. She charged at me, grabbed my arm, and held me tightly, walking fast, hissing into my ear: “Ah, thank God you didn’t wear the star, Edith; we wouldn’t even have been able to say hello to you if you had been wearing the star. You must go directly to your cousin, take a nap, have a meal, then go tomorrow as soon as you can to Prinz Eugenstrasse because they are waiting for you. So is your mother—for sure, she is in the Vartegau in Poland. She wants you to join her for sure.”

  “She wrote to you! Mama!”

  “Well, not since she’s been gone, no, but I am absolutely sure she’s there. You must join her right away. Don’t even think of not reporting to school because they will hunt you down and find you, and your mother will be punished, and so will all the other people you know. You wouldn’t want to put people you love in mortal danger, would you, Edith? Look at you—you’re so thin! Make sure your cousin gives you a nice hearty meal.”

  Pepi finally pried her off my arm. He was white with anger. She hung back, frightened by his fierce glare. He walked beside me, carrying my bag in one hand, holding my hand in the other. Our shoulders touched. Pepi Rosenfeld had always been the perfect size for me. Anna hustled after us, torn between trying to hear what we were saying and not wanting to walk on the same street with a Jew.

  We went to Jultschi’s building. She was sitting on the steps with her little boy, Otto, an adorable child with huge, tender, dark eyes and big ears just like his father. With a cry of happiness, I started to scoop him up. I wanted to throw myself into Jultschi’s arms.

  “Ah, come in, Fräulein Ondrej,” Jultschi said politely, shaking my hand. “How nice to see you again.” One of her neighbors came down the steps. “This is my husband’s cousin from Sudentenland,” she said.

  The neighbor smiled warmly.

  “Welcome to Vienna. Heil Hitler!”

  I had heard the phrase before, but only now did I realize that it had become a common greeting among ordinary people.

  “Tomorrow five P.M., at the Belvedere,” Pepi whispered. “I love you. I will always love you.”

  His mother pulled him away.

  I sat down in Jultschi’s kitchen. She was making tea and talking the way she always had—an outpouring, an explosion. I fell asleep at the table.

  LITTLE OTTO TODDLED about with a smelly diaper and sticky fingers. I washed him in the sink and played the game of stealing his nose and then putting it back, making him howl with laughter. He seemed to me the most beautiful, angelic little child in the world. Jultschi sat at her machine and sewed. The covering noise of the machine made it possible to talk, she said. You couldn’t be too careful. People listened and denounced. Their neighbors disappeared.

  “Every week the Nazis bring me piece
s of wooden cases that I must glue together. I think they hold medals or revolvers. I have a quota. I live on Otto’s pension, which is not so bad. But of course, I am a Jew and so my little Otti is considered a Jew as well. According to the Nuremberg Laws he would have to wear the yellow star, but he is under five years old so they don’t bother him yet. Pepi has helped me with the application to have him declared a Mischling—that’s what they call an officially recognized mixed-race person. Then they may give him more to eat and let him go to school and let me go on living here outside the ghetto. They leave a small remnant of us here, so our neighbors will see us and not be bothered about the deportations. How long do you think you’ll stay? Two days? Three?”

  “Actually, I thought I would stay for the rest of the war,” I said, tickling Otti’s toes.

  Jultschi uttered a little scream. I laughed.

  “Don’t be funny, Edith. There’s a time to be funny, and this is not it.”

  “Tell me about Mama. And her Herr Hausner.”

  “He’s a darling man. His first wife died. They sent him to an Arbeitslager at the beginning, then they let him out so he could go to Poland. You know, back in February, we heard they took twelve thousand Jews out of the German factories and sent them east because there were so many prisoners from occupied countries to replace them. Oh, Edith, this Blitzkrieg makes me so nervous; nobody else in Europe seems to have an army—only Germany. What’s going to happen when they conquer England?”

  “They won’t conquer England.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Now that our little Hansi has joined the Jewish Brigade, the British army is invincible.”

  She laughed at last. She made her sewing machine roar.

  “Now, remember, you mustn’t talk about the Jews, Edith. Nobody speaks about them anymore. You mustn’t say the word. People hate to hear it.”

  At the back of the Jewish ration station, Liesel waited for me, all confidence and smiles as always. She gave me rations for bread, meat, coffee, cooking oil.

  “If you give me your rations, how will you eat?”

  “There’s food here. I take enough. Give the coupons to your cousin and Pepi. Let them buy for you. Come back every day. I will always have something for you to eat. But don’t come at the same time two days in a row. And change the way you look. Keep changing.”

  I did not dare walk in my old neighborhood—someone there might recognize me. So I wandered through the Kohlmarkt, past Papa’s old restaurant, past the place where I had first heard the radio, which was now being used to destroy my world. I sought a feeling of nostalgia. But toward Vienna, at that moment, I felt only rage. In this, my own city, I had become a hunted fugitive. If I was seen by someone who knew me, I might be denounced. If I did not go to the people who knew me, I would starve.

  Pepi met me the next day in the park. He brought with him the things my mother had left for me: a suitcase with six summer dresses, and a little leather packet of jewelry that included my father’s gold watch chain. He gave me a pawn ticket which my mother had received when she pawned her old fur coat.

  “Do we have to meet here?” I asked. “I thought I could go back to your house.”

  “No, that’s impossible,” he answered. “Mama always prepares lunch for me and then I have to have my nap in the afternoon; otherwise I am no good for anything. I’ll always meet you late in the day and we’ll eat supper here together.”

  He reached for me. I pulled away.

  “Are you completely without feeling?” I cried. “How could you fail to know that I was expecting to stay with you? Why do you think I defied the Gestapo and became a fugitive? So we could have supper in the park?”

  He started to say something. I slapped him in the mouth.

  “For fourteen months, I was so lonely, so desperate, and the only thing that kept me going was the thought of you! Why have you not arranged to be alone with me? Do you love someone else?”

  “No!” he whispered hoarsely. “No.”

  Inflamed by my desire, he pulled me to him. Proper Viennese Aryans glared at us, shocked that we should kiss in public.

  “I will find a place,” he said.

  I WENT TO see Maria Niederall at the Achter Delivery Company on Malvengasse in the Second District. An office assistant named Käthe recognized my name. “It’s Edith, Frau Doktor!” she called. “Mina’s friend!”

  From the back of the store, there emerged a tall, dark-eyed woman. She looked me up and down, then flashed a big grin. “Come on in,” she said. “Käthe, bring coffee and sandwiches.”

  Frau Doktor wasn’t beautiful, but, oh, did she have style! A sporty dresser, elegant as Dietrich, she had long fingernails, long legs, chestnut hair wrapped in waves and curls against her face. She wore real gold earrings, and on her bosom a special swastika honor badge to show that she had joined the Nazi Party early in the 1930s. She had married a lawyer with a doctorate like the one I had not been able to receive. So she was the wife of the Doktor—thus, Frau Doktor. She watched me eat, noticing my famishment and how my battered hands shook from tension. “Looks to me as if you need a vacation,” she concluded.

  “I thought I would have a few days with my boyfriend. But his mother won’t let me in the house.”

  “And he obeys her?”

  “In all things.”

  “Is he a man?”

  “He’s a lawyer and a scholar.”

  “Ah, well, that explains his docility. Did you sleep with him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then he belongs to you, not to his mother. Käthe, bring some of those gooey cakes.”

  I ate every crumb, then wet my pinky and mopped up the last essence of the icing from the flowered china plate.

  “My girl Käthe here has an uncle in Hainburg with a big farm—lots of food and fresh air. I’ll arrange for you to be his guest for a week so you can get your strength back.”

  “But, Frau Doktor, how will I travel? They so often have a razzia—a raid—on the train. They’ll find me.”

  “You will travel by night. You will have a party membership card with your picture on it just in case anybody checks. But nobody will check, I’m certain. Have some more coffee.”

  “I was hoping you would have heard from Mina.”

  “Nothing,” Frau Doktor said. Suddenly her eyes glistened with tears. She shook them away. “I could have helped her, you know. She could have stayed in Austria.”

  “She wanted to be with her family,” I explained. “If I could have been with my mama, I would have gone as well.”

  She took my hands in hers. “You have to soften up these hands,” she said, and rubbed sweet-smelling lotion into the cracked and callused palms. The feel of her strong fingers on my wrists, the smell of the cream—it was such an urbane comfort, so civilized. “Take this cream with you. Put it on your hands every day, twice a day. You’ll soon feel like a woman again.”

  The next evening, to Jultschi’s vast relief, I boarded the train for Hainburg, in a beautiful area near the Czech border, famous for its spectacular birds, misty forests, and luxurious farms. I had in my handbag whatever papers Frau Doktor had given me. But I did not trust them. I sat rigid in my seat. Mentally I rehearsed what I would say if the Gestapo found me.

  I got the money for the ticket by accumulating my pay since Osterburg. The Nazi Party card I stole from a complete stranger somewhere on the train from Aschersleben. Then I pasted in my own picture. I have no family or friends left in Vienna. They are all gone. No one helped me. No one helped me. No one.

  In the midst of this anxious reverie, I arrived in a fairy tale by the Grimm brothers, lit by a gentle summer moon. Käthe’s boisterous uncle was waiting for me with a horse and buggy. He was fat and hairy and friendly, and so was his horse. The uncle had been told that I suffered with an intestinal ailment and needed some fresh air and good food to recuperate. As we clip-clopped through the lovely town, he told me all the marvelous things his wife was going to feed me. Pork chops and
skewered chickens, dumplings and sauerbraten, pickled cucumbers and potato salad.

  “Sounds delicious,” I murmured, feeling sick.

  I slept in a large bed under a pile of quilts. On the dresser there was a little shrine—fresh flowers and miniature Nazi flags surrounding a framed portrait of Adolf Hitler. The Führer watched me sleep.

  At the breakfast table, looking at the eggs and bread and bacon and smelling the porridge, I became nauseated. I ran outside, gasping. Later on the robust farmer took me and his other guests for a hayride in the blooming countryside. The other people at the farm—a man, his wife, and their two pale-eyed grandchildren—had come from Linz, on a trip supported by Hitler’s “Strength Through Joy” program, which encouraged citizens to visit sites and shrines throughout the Reich. Our host rolled out a lavish picnic for us.

  I nibbled, breathing deeply, thinking: “Get your strength back. Heal your body. Use this chance.”

  The farmer had begun to talk about the greatness of the Führer. What a man he was! A lover of little children, a patron of the arts! What a future lay before us all because of his inspired leadership! Lebensraum—space to breathe, to move outward. The green fields of Russia, the “empty” plains of Poland. Had we seen the newsreel of Hitler marching triumphantly through Paris? What glorious days for Austria, finally united with her brethren in Germany, finally enjoying the world leadership which the demonic Jews had snatched from her by duplicity and cunning.

  He lifted his glass of beer. “To the health of our Führer! Heil Hitler!” And they all cried with one voice, there by the babbling brooks among the breathtaking forests and the warbling birds, sated by their delicious meal, as content as cats in the sunshine: “Heil Hitler!”

  I rushed to an embankment of bushes and retched helplessly. I could hear the Nazi farmer whispering behind me: “Poor girl. A friend of my niece Käthe. Sick as a dog. Some kind of stomach trouble.”