The Nazi Officer's Wife Read online

  We believed in the future, you see. We all still believed.

  My friend Mina planned her gifts as though she were Santa Claus and Pepi Rosenfeld were all the reindeer in the North Pole.

  “Now look here, Edith, I’ve saved up eight reichsmarks. So if we send this money to your Pepi, he should be able to buy a small box of herb tea for my mama, and a nice new pen for my papa, and a box of candies for my brothers and sisters. They love sweets! They still have teeth only because the Nazis won’t let them have sweets, so you see, in its way, this regime has done the Katz family a big favor.”

  She actually made me laugh.

  “Frau Niederall will surely send us something wonderful for Hanukkah. My papa used to give each of us kids a box of worthless coins on Hanukkah—we thought they were the greatest treasure—and we would play dreidel games and make bets and eat latkes. Oh, it was so much fun, Edith, such a pleasure to be Jewish. Someday when you and Pepi are married and I am the godmother of your children, I’ll teach them dreidel games and we’ll sing all the wonderful Yiddish songs my father knows.”

  “I’m afraid to hope for so much happiness, Mina.”

  “Don’t be silly. Hope is God’s gift to the world. Look at what wonderful luck I personally have had so far, just because I kept on hoping. Frau Niederall bought the Achter Delivery Company. She kept me and Frau Grünwald when she could have tossed us out. She taught me how to dress nicely, how to dab perfume here and here, how to write business letters and greet customers. I call her Auntie, that’s how much I love her! When you meet her, you must call her Frau Doktor.”

  She reached under her bed, her face shining. “Look, I have a Hanukkah present for you,” she said, “to give you hope.” She brought forth a piece of wood into which she had burned a French saying which our friend Franz had used to cheer us, in Osterburg:

  La vie est belle, et elle commence demain.

  “Life is beautiful, and it begins tomorrow.”

  A few Jewish families were still living in Aschersleben in the late fall of 1941, among them Frau Crohn and her daughter Käthe, a sweet, smart woman about my age. When we girls from the Arbeitslager went out on Saturday or Sunday, the Crohns invited us for “coffee.” I cannot tell you how much these visits meant to me. They brought back a feeling of home, civilized life, Jewish community in a world of hatred.

  One Sunday, we were returning from the Crohns’ house. I remember a girl named Ditha was there, and a girl named Irma, and another named Clair. We walked on the Breite Strasse, a street forbidden to Jews. Some local boys called out flirtatiously, “Hey, there go the lucky stars!” Somehow they did not understand the humiliation and persecution those hateful patches symbolized. We took their friendliness as a good omen.

  Mina and I scrounged everywhere for something to bring the Crohns as the holidays approached and finally, by trading and promising, managed a tiny bottle of cognac. Frau Crohn served it right away, in little glasses she had somehow hidden from the neighborhood looters, who had taken everything else. We toasted the Americans, who had just entered the war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

  When all the Jews in this North German area were ordered to prepare for deportation to Poland, I went to Käthe’s house to help her pack. I remember that she was not allowed to take a knife or a scissors. Käthe gave me one of her books—The First Born by Frischaner—and wrote inside: “In memory of many sunny hours.”

  She was taken with more than a thousand others from Magdeburg to the Warsaw ghetto. I wrote to her there. It struck me as very strange that my good friend did not write back.

  In late November, in the freezing dark before dawn, Herr Wittmann, one of the company managers, marched into the barracks Frau Drebenstadt, frightened, made us stand at attention.

  “You will not go to work today,” he said. “Stay here. Pull the shades. Turn out the lights. Richard Bestehorn, a distinguished business leader and freeman of the town of Aschersleben, has died, and there will be a funeral procession in the courtyard. Under no circumstances should you attempt to watch. If you appear in the courtyard, you will be arrested.”

  He left. We gathered at the window and peeked out. Two French prisoners were sweeping the yard in front of our barracks. They decked the building with pine branches and black mourning crepe.

  “Why don’t they want us out there?” Mina asked. “We could certainly help those Frenchmen, who are not doing such a wonderful job.”

  “We are too despised to join the ‘master race’ in their solemn assemblage,” said Lily with her usual smart bitterness. “Besides, if they don’t see us, they can pretend they never knew we were here.”

  I thought at the time that Lily was just a cynic, but of course she turned out to be a prophet. I understand now that everything was done so that the Germans would never see us; or, if they saw us, would not have to admit it; or, if they had to admit it, would be able to say that we looked fine and would never be irritated by a sense of guilt or pricked by a moment of compassion. I remember reading what Hermann Göring had said to Hitler: These moments of compassion could be a big problem. Every German probably has one favored Jew to pull out of the bunch, some old doctor, some pretty girl, some friend from school. How would Germany ever become Judenrein if all these exceptions were made? So the policy was not to tempt anybody to behave decently, and all the while to keep us in the deepening dark.

  Under such circumstances, no kindness went unnoticed. Herr Gebhardt never said one word to me, but I knew he helped me in little ways for which I will always be grateful. Even the slippery, eel-like Wittmann had a soft spot for one girl. Her name was Elisa. She was beautiful, stately, well educated, a lady. Before she was sent back to Vienna, he called her into his office and said: “If you need anything at all, just ask me. I will help you.”

  I stood at my machine. The cardboard slid, my fingers bled, and I tried to teach Mina the theories that might make our work meaningful. Taylorism in America; Keynes in Great Britain; Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky. Some days I couldn’t remember any of it. “Either you come here stupid,” I wrote to Pepi, “or the work makes you stupid.”

  I told Mina the stories of all the books I was reading. A biography of Marie Antoinette—too proud and beautiful, my cautionary tale. A biography of Isadora Duncan, so wild and free, an inspiration. I told Mina the story of Chaim Lederer’s Return by Sholem Asch, The Gooseman by Jacob Wasserman, and The Legends of the Christ by Selma Lagerlof.

  “Think of our forewoman as Veronica,” I whispered. “Veronica wiped the brow of Jesus as he was carrying his cross to Golgotha, and his face remained imprinted on her cloth. Our faces will be imprinted on the hearts of those who are kind to us, like a blessing.”

  SINCE AMERICA HAD entered the war, and we took this as a sign that we would soon be free, we decided to celebrate Hanukkah, the festival of freedom, in December 1941. One of the new girls, a coloratura soprano, sang for us. She knew arias, Lieder, and also some Yiddish songs that only a few girls like Mina understood. The sound of the old language, just its sound, filled our hearts with happiness.

  We found some candles and made a kind of menorah. But then, to our horror, we found that not one of us knew the prayer—not one. Can you imagine? To be so bereft, so ignorant of our own culture, our own liturgy! This was the legacy of our assimilated life in Vienna. We turned to Mina. She covered her face with her hands. “I can’t remember,” she moaned. “Papa always said the prayer. Papa …”

  We stared at the flickering lights, not knowing how to empower them. Lily suggested that we should just hold hands and close our eyes and say together: “God help us.” So that’s what we did.

  God help us. God help us. God help us. Lieber Gott hilf uns.

  AFTER HANUKKAH, WE got a new camp commander, Frau Reineke, and they raised the quota to 44,000 boxes per day.

  A girl we knew announced with great delight that she was going home to get married. So once again, I proposed to Pepi.

  Of course I will marry you. But i
t’s not possible right now, he answered.

  Why is it possible for her and not for me? If we can’t save each other, at least we could warm each other! I dream of the day when we will live together. Where do you think? In a little villa or in a small castle? In an apartment in the center of town or in a cottage like my grandparents’ house in Stockerau? I’ll cook and clean and bathe the children and go to work in the court.

  Listen to me, Edith, this is foolish talk. We will not be able to marry. Surely you understand how much is against it. (Did he mean Hitler? History? His devoted mother?) I will love you forever. Now you must forget me.

  A girl we knew named Berta had a boyfriend at a labor camp at Wendefurt near Blankenburg. He received permission to visit her, but as a Jew he was no longer allowed to use the train. So in the freezing cold, in the snow, he trudged to Aschersleben. Berta’s joy when she saw him broke my heart, for I knew that Pepi would never have made such a gesture for me.

  One Sunday, I walked with Trude and Mina. The snow was blinding. All white and pure lay Germany in its Christmas mantle. You couldn’t see what lay beneath. I was overwhelmed by my insignificance, feeling myself a black dot on their vast landscape. “I cannot go on,” I said to my friends and turned back, despairing.

  Now, as I stood at my machine in the factory, every story escaped me. Isadora Duncan, Marie Antoinette, Marx, Keynes, Asch, Wasserman, Lagerlof—gone. All I could think about was the truth of our situation. I was a slave, and Pepi did not want me. Pang. Pang. Pang.

  I stopped working. The blades crashed and broke. My legs gave way. I sank to the floor. The other girls didn’t dare look at me. Herr Gebhardt picked me up and led me to a chair. And then our forewoman came over and put her arms around me and spoke to me with so much tenderness and concern that my misery lost its grip and I could go on working again.

  That’s all it takes, you see—a moment of kindness. Someone who is sweet and understanding, who seems to be sent there like an angel on the road to get you through the nightmare. Veronica.

  Upon reflection, sinking into her straw that night, Mina concluded that Pepi was just having a panic attack. “Pay absolutely no attention to his letter,” she said. “Go on writing to him about how you long to kiss him and taste him and all those other romantic things you always say, and it will all turn out wonderful.”

  So I wrote to Pepi that he should breathe hope from my letters, that next year we would surely have peace. “Spend your holiday in joy,” I wrote to him. “Imagine how I would kiss you if I were there with you under the lights of the Christmas tree.”

  I TOLD THE people at home that the work no longer presented any problem for me. It wasn’t a complete lie. You can grow accustomed to anything, to having “Sara” as your assigned middle name, wearing a yellow star on your coat, working endless hours, eating little, sleeping instantly the minute you can.

  We made a million boxes for red compote and millions more for artificial coffee and artificial honey, for macaroni and spaghetti, for chewing tobacco. Every time a German opened one of those boxes, he touched us.

  It was late January 1942. The Nazis would soon resolve at Wannsee to murder all the remaining Jews in Europe, but we knew nothing of such plans. We only knew that now we could not go into town at all, the rations had been reduced again, and the mail had stopped again.

  The girl whose father had been sent to Buchenwald received a letter from a friend of his. “This is the song that we sing together on our way to work in the morning,” wrote the friend. Our coloratura taught us all the Buchenwald song, and we hummed it whenever we had the strength to hum.

  O Buchenwald, I can’t forget you,

  Because you are my fate.

  Those who have left you are the only ones

  Who can measure how wonderful freedom is.

  O Buchenwald, we don’t complain and moan,

  Whatever our fate may be.

  We want to say “yes” to life

  Because the day will come when we will be free.

  The song gave me courage. I went to Frau Reineke, our new camp commander, who was middle-aged and a mother, and who we hoped would prove more considerate than her predecessor.

  “Please, ma’am, even though the mail has stopped, may we have the packages our families have already sent for us? We know our mothers are taking the food out of their own mouths to help feed us. And we know that now the food is spoiling, getting stale, becoming rotten.”

  She looked at me with cold eyes and turned me down. From then on, we no longer received food packages.

  But there are, thank God, other kinds of food. Pepi must have raided a school trash bin, for he sent us some frayed paper copies of Don Carlos, by Friedrich von Schiller. Lily was ecstatic.

  Every night with the last of our light and the last of our strength, we sat and read that eighteenth-century play as though we were girls in a drama class. Another girl came to protest that we were making too much noise. She ended up becoming our audience.

  I played King Philip, the tyrant who has his own son, Don Carlos, murdered rather than liberalize his policies and let his subjects live in freedom. Do you think there was a single one of us who did not identify with the son, who did not hear his words and remember Evian-les-Bains?

  I have no one, no one [cried Mina as Don Carlos],

  In all this great and far-flung earth, no one….

  There is no place—not one—not one

  At which I may disburden myself of my dreams.

  We all understood that King Philip was the progenitor of Hitler.

  The welfare of citizens blooms here in cloudless peace! [I declared, playing the angry defensive monarch.]

  The peace of cemeteries! [sneered Lily, playing the progressive Marquis of Posa.]

  Thousands have already fled from your lands, poor but happy.

  And the subjects that you have lost for the faith’s sake were your most noble ones.

  We thought of Thomas Mann, Freud, Einstein. I thought of Uncle Richard and Aunt Roszi, Mimi and Milo and our little Hansi. Were they all not Austria-Germany’s most noble subjects, fled abroad, poor but happy?

  It seems incredible, but in hindsight I believe Schiller himself was sending us a message, a warning about the Final Solution through his old play.

  Said the king to the Grand Inquisitor:

  Can you create a new religion which will

  Support the bloody murder of a son? …

  Do you agree to sow this notion

  Throughout all Europe?

  And the answer was yes.

  We were Germany’s children. A new religion demanding our “bloody murder” had been promulgated throughout Europe, with the cooperation of the church. Had we Viennese not witnessed the way Cardinal Innitzer, the head of Austria’s Catholics, greeted Hitler with the Nazi salute after the Anschluss?

  I did not realize it then, but through art, we might have understood reality.

  On January 18, 1942, I got my menstrual period again for the first time in almost a year.

  IN FEBRUARY, I came down with scarlet fever. So did a young, chunky girl, Anneliese, who had once led a privileged life.

  For two weeks, I lay sweating and running a fever in the Bestehorn infirmary. I was wild with anxiety. I couldn’t be sick! If I were sick and no use to Bestehorn, they might send Mama to Poland! I said I was well when I wasn’t. I tried to get out of bed. The nurse locked us in. She brought our food and disappeared. If we got better, fine. If we didn’t, so be it.

  Actually, scarlet fever was the best thing that could have happened to me, because I was exhausted and terribly weak. I needed food and prolonged rest, and that was exactly what I got: six weeks of food and rest. I am sure the scarlet fever saved my life.

  By the time I could work again, it was the middle of March. I found the barracks emptier. Mama had been writing cheerful letters; she and a man named Max Hausner were in love, and I had been delighted and hoped she would marry him. But now her letters became fragmented, d
isjointed, as though she couldn’t organize her thoughts.

  Pepi told me that his aunt Susie, the wife of his father’s brother, had been deported; and that Wolfgang’s parents, Herr and Frau Roemer, were also being sent east.

  In Aschersleben, the attrition continued. Berta, whose boyfriend had walked so far to see her, went out without her star and was immediately arrested and sent to a concentration camp.

  We heard that girls who had left to get married were being deported with their husbands. A girl who had a love affair with a French prisoner was sent to a concentration camp, and the Frenchman was executed.

  Our old friend Zich was killed on the Western front.

  Then a package that Mina had sent to her family came back. She was told that her mother and father and her brothers and sisters were being deported and she had to join them.

  We knitted her a sweater from scraps of wool in various colors. I worked on one sleeve; Trude knitted the other.

  The day Mina left, the last light at Bestehorn went out for me. I wrote asking my mother to take care of her; I pleaded with Pepi to see if something could be done to keep her in Vienna. But what could be done, really? A few days before she went away with her family, Mina wrote to me that she had visited my mama and Anneliese’s father too, and both of them had given her something for the journey.

  “Don’t lose touch with Auntie,” she wrote, meaning Maria Niederall, her former boss. “Don’t be sad, dear girl; there is still the possibility that everything will turn out well, so don’t give up hope. Don’t take Aschersleben too seriously. Of course, I will write to you when I can, but don’t worry if you don’t hear from me. Remember that I am always thinking of you with love. Your Mina.”

  I had no way of knowing that Hitler had ordered all Jewish workers to be sent to concentration camps, that we were all to be replaced by slave laborers from conquered countries. But I felt the darkness closing in. I felt ignorant of what was happening and terrified of what lay ahead.