Finally he said, “This train comes empty to this cursed country every week, to pick up Russian prisoners and bring them home. Here is the schedule. You may take this train at any time when it suits you, and I will guarantee your safety.”
He held my hand until I regained my composure. But in fact, sometimes I think I have never regained my composure since that visit to the transit camp in the French zone.
What you see is a mask of calm and civility. Inside, always, forever, I am still weeping.
The next day my friend Agnes’s husband, the communist, drove me back to the camp and I collected Angela. The attendants were surprised; I suppose they expected never to see me again. But I did not have that baby in the middle of a war in order to abandon her.
ONE NIGHT, SOMETIME in late 1946, I was sitting in my apartment, working on a brief, when a man knocked on my door. He thrust into my hand a case containing eyeglasses. Then disappeared. I locked my door, threw the glasses onto the floor, dug and dug into the lining of the case, and finally found a letter—written in almost infinitesimal handwriting—from Werner.
He was all right. I had been writing to him for more than a year, but he had not received any mail from me until my letter of October thirty-first. In fact, the mail that he had received came from his sister-in-law Gertrude; it was intended for his brother Robert, who was lying wounded in a military hospital.
For a moment, I just looked at Werner’s letter and enjoyed a flood of relief. Then I read …
“I send you and our Angela best greetings and wishes. I hope that fate will keep you from poverty and give my dearest Grete a strong heart … to endure this time of separation …”
On March 10, 1945, he had been wounded by shrapnel in the right arm. On March 12, he was taken prisoner. After a hellish ride on a military transport, he ended up at a hospital in Poland, where he tried to heal despite near-starvation rations. In May he was brought to a prison camp in Siberia, a miserable, frozen, ugly place, every bit as harsh as I had imagined.
But Werner was a talented man. His virtuosity made him useful, and he found inside work. He did carpentry, repaired locks, wired lamps, decorated the grim Russian offices, painted portraits that the Russians sent home. Just like the French prisoner who made me the beautiful inlaid box, Werner knew that the way to soften a superior’s heart was with a charming gift for his wife.
His letters ached with the fears that came with isolation. How well I recalled them! Was I trying to get him out? Could I pull any strings? Did anyone in Germany remember the prisoners of war? Would they just be a burden to the Fatherland?
He begged me to tell the Russians the circumstances of our marriage, “which clearly depict my anti-Fascist behavior long before the fall of Hitler’s system.”
He asked me to watch over Bärbl.
Now that I was a judge, would I still need a husband to take care of me? Would there be anything for him to do when he got home?
“What an indescribable torment it is,” he said, “to not know whether loving hands are waiting to comfort you after the torture of imprisonment.”
I knew exactly how he felt. I remembered writing to Pepi in Vienna. Are you there? Do you remember me? Do you still love me?
I imagined the screaming Arctic winds, the white wasteland, the endlessly lit sky and then the months of darkness.
“Please,” I said to the court director, Herr Ulrich, “use your influence. Bring my Werner home.”
I imagined the prison rations, the hard bread. I saw Werner shivering under thin blankets, wearing all his clothes to bed as I had done, his capable hands wrapped in rags of gloves.
“Please,” I said to the lawyer, Schütze, “you know some of the Russians. Tell them what a good man he was, how kind to the Dutchmen and Frenchmen at Arado, how they loved him and sent him gifts.”
I imagined the snow. Deep. Up to his knees. I imagined him working next to SS men, butchers from the death camps. “Get him out,” I begged the Russian commandants. “He’s not like the others. He deserves to come home to his wife and his child. Please.”
The Russians looked at me without expression, denying me nothing, promising me nothing. I did not stop asking. I sent letters to Berlin, petitions to every office I could think of. “Please,” I begged.
Even as I begged for Werner’s release, I feared his homecoming. No matter how deftly I limited my social life to the Victims of Fascism and other anti-Nazi survivors, I knew I was still living among the most virulent anti-Semites the world had ever known, and one of them—albeit the least virulent—was Angela’s father. I had often heard Werner’s views about the “power” of “Jewish blood.” What if he refused to accept our beautiful, lively three-year-old because of this? I felt that I must do something to neutralize the effects of the Nazi propaganda, to make sure my Angela had a loving father. So I arranged for a Lutheran minister to come to my home, and I had Angela baptized as a Christian.
You will ask why I did not go to church for this ceremony. I will tell you. I felt compelled to do it, but I was miserable about doing it, and I didn’t want anyone to see.
It was an evening in the summer of 1947, about seven-thirty. The streets outside were quiet. The boats on the canal made soft scraping noises at the dock. The trees, which were beginning to grow again, filled the night with a perfume that can be enjoyed only in peacetime. I happened to be alone in the apartment. Gretl was with her little brother at the orphanage. Angela had been taken ill with diphtheria and needed penicillin, which was available only in the west, so she was staying at a children’s hospital in West Berlin.
I heard a gentle knock at the door. I had the chain on, and I opened the door a crack. “Who’s there?” It was dark in the corridor—hard to see. “Who’s there?” A tall, haggard, thin man. Grayish stubble on his face. Too exhausted even to smile.
“It’s me,” he said.
I gathered him into my arms, then washed him with warm water and laid him down to sleep.
“We have made it through the nightmare,” I thought. “Now at last everything will be all right.”
I really thought that.
For the next few days, we were happy. But then, as Werner recovered his strength and got his bearings and understood our position, his anger found its voice.
Nothing about the new situation pleased him. Well, yes, he did like the apartment; he said it looked like something out of a movie. But when he would wake up and find that I had gone to work and my helper was there to make him breakfast, he did not respond well. He wanted me home as before, serving, cooking, waiting.
“But I must work,” I said. “I’m a judge; I have cases …”
Angela returned from the hospital. I had dressed her like a lovely doll, in a pretty dress, with bows in her dark hair. She hung back in the doorway, gazing at Werner with his own large, round light eyes. “Go to your papa,” I said, crouching next to her. “Go and give your papa a big kiss.”
She cuddled close to Werner, seeking to adore him and be adored by him. He patted her absently. To my huge disappointment, it made absolutely no difference to him that she had been baptized. He still said it was “Jewish blood” that counted. I felt lost, brokenhearted, ashamed. I had betrayed myself and contravened the will of my father for nothing.
Werner didn’t like the fact that I had an office with a secretary and a receptionist out front, that he couldn’t just walk into my office but had to be announced. He hated it if somebody was in my chambers with me and he had to wait outside. He had thought he would be treated as a hero, but he was disappointed. Nobody regarded him as a hero. Anyway, there were too many other returning “heroes” to deal with. Of course, I understood his frustration. How could I not understand? Imagine how hard it was for him, to come home in defeat, to a country which had no economy, no opportunities to offer him, and which was being run according to a new system by people who had been despised and imprisoned when he left.
The labor office was ready to put him to work clearing streets
and redigging sewers. He thought that I could use my connections to get him a supervisory job, like the one he had had at Arado. But there were no such jobs for noncommunists. People like Tante Paula advised him to be grateful that he had a working wife who could house him and feed him decently. He did not seem to understand (nor did I understand fully) that getting him out, when others would not come home for two more years or four more or eight more years, was enough to indebt me to the Kommadatura in ways as yet unimaginable.
He expected me to clean and take care of the house and the baby as I had done before, but I had no time for that. I could not do his laundry—he was furious about that. The happy little girls, racing about, shouting and laughing, irritated him no end. He wanted me to send Gretl back to the orphanage for good.
“She’s not mine!” he yelled. “It’s not bad enough that I have two daughters to take care of! Now you foist a third on me, and she isn’t even mine!”
I asked him to go to Herr Klessen, the generous fisherman, and pick up some fish for our dinner. He refused. “This is your job!” he snapped. “I don’t go and collect the food in this house. My job is to sit down at night at my table and eat it!”
“But I have no time to go. There are all these cases …”
“The hell with your damn cases!”
“Please, Werner …”
“I am not going to beg some socialist fisherman for our dinner! This is a woman’s job!”
He was full of energy, and he had nothing to do. He was restless, angry, but there was no one to rage at. His old friends at Arado could not help him. The plant itself was an empty ruin. It had been bombed repeatedly, and the Russians had dragged off any equipment left standing. In later years, Angela went back there and asked where the Arado plant was, and the citizens of Brandenburg had no recollection that any such place had ever existed.
One night I came home late from work, tired, my mind crowded with the sad stories of German women and their children. Werner had been working himself into a fury all day because he had found a hole in his sock, and his pent-up rage burst over me like an American bomb.
“Did you forget how to sew?”
“No, I … I still sew … It’s just that …”
“It’s just that you are a big judge under the Russian regime and you have no time for your husband.”
“Stop it! Don’t you understand that the reason you were able to return home so soon is that I have begged and pleaded and worked for the Russians? Don’t bother me about a hole in your sock! You are home! You are safe! Try to count your blessings!”
“What blessings? An overeducated wife who is nothing like the woman I used to know?”
“I am the same woman … Oh, God, please darling, try to understand …”
“No, you are not! My wife, Grete, was obedient! She cooked! She cleaned! She ironed! She sewed! She treated me like a king! And I want her back!”
Everything I had so long repressed, my true instincts, my real personality, all my grief and my bottomless rage, roared to the surface.
“Well, you can’t have her!” I shouted. “Grete is dead! She was a Nazi invention—a lie, just like the propaganda on the radio! And now that the Nazis are gone, she is gone too! I am Edith! I am Edith! I am who I am! You cannot have a meek, scared, obedient little slave laborer like H. C. Bestehorn anymore! Now you have a real wife!”
He hit me. I went flying across the room. I literally saw stars. My brain rattled.
Werner walked out. I felt as though my heart would break.
He came back several days later, looking content and smug. I knew he had been with a woman. He took some money and went to his first wife, Elisabeth. And a few days after that, he came back again.
“Little Bärbl is coming here to live for a while.”
“What?”
“Send Gretl back to the orphanage. I want Bärbl here. Elisabeth needs a break.”
“No. I will not throw Gretl out. Bärbl has a mother. Gretl has no one.”
“I am your husband. You will do what I say.”
“I will not take over the upkeep of Bärbl so that you can renew your romance with Elisabeth in a child-free house, no, I will not. I love Bärbl; I would love to see her again. But this is not fair. This is wrong.”
“I don’t like this person you are now,” he said. “I liked you the old way. I want you to write to your rich relatives in London and get them to send me some paints …”
“My rich relatives? Are you crazy? My family was robbed of everything! My sisters have nothing! You have ten thousand reichsmarks!”
“Oh, that. I threw it away because this Russian was taking me prisoner and I didn’t want him to think I was a capitalist …”
I didn’t know what to say to that. Probably I should have laughed, but I was too unhappy. He told me he wanted a divorce—the faster, the better.
“Are you going back to Elisabeth?”
“Of course. I have to save my little Bärbl.”
I cried and cried when I finally realized I could not keep him. It seemed to me that now I would be alone forever.
Then one day something happened to bring me to my senses. Angela had been naughty—she had thrown a toy, raised her voice—and I scolded her, “Stop that right this minute or I will punish you.”
“If you punish me,” she said, “I will tell Papa and he will hit you and make you cry.”
Right then and there, I made up my mind to agree to the divorce Werner wanted.
A colleague of mine did the work on the divorce. Werner asked me to speed up the process. He had already emigrated to the west with Elisabeth. He wanted me to lie and say they had divorced the first time only “to save me,” that he had never courted me in Munich, or loved me for one minute, that our marriage was all just an anti-Nazi charade.
I told my colleague to say whatever was necessary to make the divorce go like lightning.
In fact, that was how Werner’s second marriage to Elisabeth went, as well. Like lightning. Poof. A flame. Poof. Gone.
Werner.
THIRTEEN
I Heard the Fiend Goebbels, Laughing
AT THAT TIME, the Nuremberg trials were just ending, and the trials of the smaller Nazis were beginning. Judges were needed. The Russians chose me, but I didn’t want to be involved.
“Who will regard a sentence of mine as fair?” I said to them. “Everybody will say: This is a Jewish woman; she is seeking revenge. And I certainly wouldn’t want to bend over backward the other way. I am befangen, not impartial; I am not qualified to do this.”
It meant everything to me not to have my integrity called into question, because, you see, for two years, not one of my decisions had been appealed. I did not want to lose the trust and respect I enjoyed.
The commandants did not agree.
I went to Potsdam and appealed to the superior counselor in the Department of Justice, Dr. Hoenigger. He agreed with my point of view and said he would talk to the Russians for me. But the order to do the work came anyway. I went back to Hoenniger. This time he threw me out of his office.
I went to the Minister of the Interior and waited for hours before he finally saw me. He had no idea why I should be so reluctant. “But since you want so much to be disqualified,” he said, “I will help you.”
I was notified that I would not have to judge the Nazis.
But then I was further notified that I could no longer work as a judge at all. In the future, I would serve only as a public prosecutor.
My sense of safety began to fray and tear. I felt the presence of someone in the shadows of the hall. When I opened my door at night, I was not absolutely sure that I would find everything in order at home. It seemed to me that the letters I received from Hansi and Jultschi had been opened and then resealed.
The Russians called me in for a meeting.
They asked me questions about my life, my relatives, and my friends. They made me write down the names and addresses of everyone with whom I corresponded. They sent me
home. Then they called me in again and asked me more questions, to which I understood they already knew the answers. Something about their tone reminded me of the registrar: “But your mother’s mother, Fräulein. What about her?”
My blood ran cold. My stomach knotted—an old feeling, all too familiar.
“We helped you,” said the commandant. “Now you must help us.”
“But how?”
“We understand that you are a very good listener, and people trust you and tell you the truth about their lives. All we want is for you to tell us what they tell you.”
They wanted me to spy on my colleagues, on Agnes and her husband, on the caretaker and the secretary and Klessen, on the lawyers and the litigants, on everybody I knew. They gave me a telephone number where I could always reach them. “We expect to hear from you in short order,” said the commandant.
The old terror returned. My knees trembled. I heard my voice growing smaller. I mumbled. My eyes grew vacant, and I pretended to understand nothing of what was going on. I didn’t say yes. I didn’t say no. I stalled, hoping they would forget me. But this was the NKVD, the secret police. They forgot no one. They had ways. People disappeared. There were rumors of beatings, of torture. They could make your job disappear, your apartment. Your children.
They interviewed me again.
I couldn’t sleep. I jumped at every sound in the hallway. I began to suspect my friends. After all, if I had been asked to watch them, maybe they had been asked to watch me.
Ulrich said I shouldn’t worry so much.
“So you tell them things. It’s up to you what you tell them.”
“But it’s up to them how they use what I tell them.”
He shrugged. I suppose he thought this wasn’t such a big problem. But for me, you see, for me, it was the same problem, all over again.
“We haven’t heard from you yet, Frau Vetter,” said the commandant.
“Oh yes … yes … I was supposed to call you, that number …” I fumbled in my bag. “I wonder if I still have it …” Did I really imagine that I could convince him I had misplaced his number the way I had “lost” my Nazi Red Cross pin?
The Nazi Officer's Wife Page 23
