The Nazi Officer's Wife Read online

  “Well, perhaps you can find the card of my husband,” I said.

  She looked and immediately found Werner’s card. I could see her mind working. How could a Red Cross nursing assistant, an employee of the Städtische Krankenhaus, the pregnant wife of an Arado supervisor who was also a longtime member of the Nazi Party, not have an index card? Impossible!

  “There has to be some mistake …” she murmured.

  I said nothing.

  “I know what I must do,” she said.

  I waited.

  “Since your card has obviously been misplaced somehow, I will make up a new card for you right now,” she said, and she did. It went into the file: Christina Maria Margarethe Vetter.

  I concentrated every ounce of my emotional strength on not looking happy. But I tell you, if I could have, I would have hugged and kissed that nice fat insecure woman and danced on her spotless desk. Because at last I had a registration card and I could receive my rations in an ordinary, unremarkable way. One of my greatest vulnerabilities, by which the Gestapo could have found me at any moment, had been erased.

  I still had the problem of what to wear. Remember that Herr Plattner, the Sippenforscher in Vienna, had warned me never to apply for a Kleiderkarte, a clothing card. If my shoes needed repairs, Werner fixed them. If I needed a dress, I sewed somebody else’s rags together and made one for myself. Now that I was big with child, Frau Doktor sent me some fabric and I made a pinafore that fit loosely over all my other clothes as they grew tight. Finally I gave up and just wore Werner’s old shirts. But the child—what would I put on the child? After all, I had no soldier in Paris to provide me with silk baby clothes. Christl sent me a knitted bed jacket, so I could rip the wool and make a little sweater.

  Then, out of the blue, Werner received a letter from Tante Paula.

  “What kind of a brother are you?” she wrote. “Your poor brother Robert is at the front, his wife and three children have been evacuated to East Prussia, their flat is being bombed, the doors don’t work, the windows don’t close, every robber and squatter and deserter in the city can just march in there and settle down. Take your tools and your clever hands and go over there right this instant and fix everything!”

  Well, of course my big strong husband could not withstand such a directive from his diminutive aunt. He told some lie at Arado and raced to Berlin.

  His brother’s home was nearly empty. Gertrude had taken almost everything. Only a few items still remained, including a folding crib and forty baby jackets and diapers! Werner wrote to Robert to ask if we could use the baby things, and since Robert’s children were too big for them, he was happy to give us permission. Werner battened down the windows, fixed the doors, and locked up the flat. In the end, with all the bombing in Berlin, this particular flat was never touched.

  IN A MATTER of a little more than a year, I had gone from being the most despised creature in the Third Reich—a hunted Jewish slave girl dodging a transport to Poland—to being one of its most valued citizens, a breeding Aryan housewife. People treated me with concern and respect. If they only knew who I had been! If they only knew whose new life I was breeding!

  The insanity of it all made me a little hysterical.

  I looked up at the American bombers that passed over every day on their way to nearby Berlin. I saw them as though the sky were a huge movie screen, on which some great fictional epic were being played—planes flying in formation like big ducks across the clouds, black puffs of flak and antiaircraft fire rising up to engulf them. I sent messages of victory skyward to my saviors. When I saw an American airman go down, my heart fell to the ground with him. I prayed for a glimpse of his parachute; the possibility of his death made my bones ache with mourning.

  The appearance of the Allies in the sky, the real possibility of a German defeat, the autumn weather, my new sense of safety, all combined to put dangerous thoughts into my head, thoughts that I had long repressed: the Jewish holidays, my father, my sisters, my Mama, my family in Vienna. Where was everybody? Was anybody out there? Did the others long for me as I longed for them?

  Alone in the house, cooking, cleaning, I listened to the BBC and suddenly, to my astonishment, I realized that instead of the usual news, I was hearing a message meant precisely and particularly for me. It was part of a sermon that the British Chief Rabbi Hertz was giving with the approach of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. He spoke in German.

  “Our utmost sympathy goes out to the remnant of our brethren in Nazi lands who walk in the valley of the shadow of death,” said the rabbi.

  He means me, I thought, me and my baby. But why does he say “remnant”? Are we all that is left? Can it possibly be that everyone else is dead?

  “Good men and true the world over remember them in their devotions and ardently yearn for the hour when the land of the destroyer will be paralyzed and all his inhuman designs frustrated.”

  They remember us, I thought. Those of us who are hunted, stalked, hiding in the darkness, are in the prayers of our brothers and sisters. We are not forgotten.

  “And I know that my Jewish listeners will, in anticipation of the Day of Atonement, fervently join with me in the ancient prayers. Remember us unto life, O King who delights in life, and inscribe us in the Book of Life, for Thine own sake, O living God!”

  Werner came home and asked me why I had been crying. I suppose I said it had something to do with the mood changes of pregnancy—anything not to burden him with my true thoughts on the eve of Rosh Hashanah 1943.

  WHEN I WAS about six months pregnant, in the winter of 1944, a great sadness came over me. It disturbed Werner; he liked to see me happy.

  “I’m just so homesick,” I wept.

  Without a second thought, he said, “Pack.”

  He biked over to Arado, and I imagine that he told them that his mother’s house had been bombed and she had been evacuated and now the house had been broken into by a gang of deserters who stole everything and broke all the windows and doors, and so he had to go and fill out a police report, or some such thing, and they believed him—and we went to Vienna.

  Everything was the same, but everything was different. The Austrians had begun to suffer now. Their little dictator from Linz had not proved to be the military genius everyone thought he was in 1941. They were losing sons, enduring air raids. They had liked it when they could just loot the lives of a helpless civilian population, but these enemy armies—this Zhukhov, this Eisenhower, this Montgomery—this was not what they had in mind when they voted for Anschluss.

  During this second trip Werner and I made to Vienna, I walked slowly on the Ringstrasse, trying to summon memories of my girlhood. The police had the whole place cordoned off because Hitler was coming to stay at the Hotel Imperial and there was to be a gigantic rally.

  A policeman approached me. My stomach tightened. My throat went dry. Frau Westermayer has spotted me, I thought, and fulfilled her threat to call the police.

  “Perhaps you would like to walk over there, madam,” he said, “because we are expecting masses of people to come here very shortly and a lady in your condition should not be caught in such a great crush.”

  I walked off several blocks and waited for the masses, but they did not come. I suppose the local Nazis felt frightened that the Führer might be displeased with empty streets and take it out on them, so they finally bused in a lot of schoolchildren who were instructed to scream “Wir wollen unser Führer sehen!”—“We want to see our Führer!”—so the madman would be “compelled” to appear on the balcony, like royalty.

  The next day Pepi and Werner and I met in a café. These two men of mine had developed a certain rapport, not exactly a friendship but more like an alliance. Everyone in my Vienna group had admired Werner’s ability to supply Christl with printed souvenir scarves that her customers bought up eagerly. Now it was Pepi’s turn to ask for help.

  He looked awful—older, shabby. “Men are deserting,” he said softly. “The worse things go at the front, the more
hostility the regime turns on its own people. So they send out the police, even the SS, to find the deserters. Any young man who is not in uniform can be picked up at any time.”

  I had never seen him so grim, so scared.

  “What shall I do when they stop me and demand to see my reason for not being in the army? Pull out my blue identification card that disqualifies me from the draft because I am a Jew?”

  “You need an excuse,” Werner said thoughtfully.

  “Yes.”

  “An official excuse …”

  “That I can carry in my pocket …”

  “Attesting that you are doing some important work required for the war effort.”

  “Yes. That’s it. Exactly.”

  We sat in silence in the café, all of us thinking. Then Werner said: “Go and get some pieces of letterhead stationery from your stepfather’s insurance company, and a sample of the chief executive’s signature.”

  “There must be a stamp as well,” Pepi added nervously. “From the Labor Ministry or the Interior Ministry or …”

  “This will not be a problem,” Werner said.

  Pepi laughed without mirth. “Not a problem? My dear fellow, everything is a problem.”

  “You can trust Werner,” I assured him. “He has golden hands.”

  When we returned home, Werner went to work. He bought some ready-made office stamps with date, invoice number, “Received with thanks,” and such already on them. Then he removed some letters from one stamp and cut out new letters from another stamp; fitted the second into the first; and soon had a brand-new stamp that said what he needed it to say. With his tiny knives and chisels, he carved the right design, then with a tweezer inserted the letters and the date. At Arado, he typed a letter on the stationery Pepi had brought from Herr Hofer’s company. It stated that Dr. Josef Rosenfeld was Unabkömmlich—busy—needed by the Donau Insurance Company to do vital work on behalf of the Reich. Then he forged the signature of Hofer’s boss. Then he added the incredibly believable, official-looking stamp. Then he leaned back and gave his work a narrow-eyed, critical last look.

  “Pretty good, huh?” Werner said.

  “Absolutely wonderful.”

  In my eyes, it was perfect, a magic document that would keep Pepi secure for the duration of the war. I don’t know whether he ever used it, but he had it, you see. It gave him confidence that he was protected; and that was half the battle for U-boats like us who were hiding among the enemy. If you had confidence, the terror and stress of daily life would not show on your face and give you away.

  “I’ll bet I could have made a lot of money doing things like this back in the thirties. Papers people needed, documents …”

  “Yes, I suppose you could have.”

  “Damn. Just my luck. I’m always too late to cash in.”

  “But you are my genius,” I said, kissing him.

  He was something special, Werner Vetter. A truly gifted man. I wonder if anybody again ever appreciated his talents as much as I did.

  IT WAS APRIL. Werner had begun to travel a lot to find supplies for Arado because the war had disrupted normal deliveries. He was tired. We played a little chess, listened to a little news, then went to bed, and he fell asleep instantly.

  I felt the first pains of labor. But I didn’t want to wake him right away. I walked back and forth in the bathroom, then went back to bed, then back to the bathroom. About eleven, I woke him up.

  “I think I’m having the baby, Werner.”

  “Ah. All right. I will read you what happens.” He pulled a book from the bookshelf. “First, the pains are widely spaced apart and very gentle. Then as the baby positions itself …”

  “Fine fine, it sounds great in words and sentences, but now let’s go to the hospital.”

  We walked through the quiet streets of Brandenburg. I held his arm. It took us almost an hour because I moved so slowly. At the hospital, the nurses put me into a large room with other women in labor.

  The clocks on every wall ticked loudly. They were mad for clocks, the Germans. I could hear the other women groaning. The doctor came in to take a look at me. He said to the nurse: “Wait a little while. Then we’ll give her a sedative.”

  I was concentrating on managing the pain, and so I did not say anything right away. But then I began to remember all the patients I had seen who had come out of surgery or had been sedated during childbirth, and who said things that could incriminate them and their loved ones. Suddenly I realized the predicament I was in—I could not take anything for the pain, because if I did, I too might become delirious. I might mention names. “Christl,” “Frau Doktor.” God forbid, I might say “Jew.” I lectured myself like a propagandist.

  “All the people you adore will be dead because you were a weakling and could not stand the pain of childbirth. For thousands and thousands of years, women have gone through this ordeal without anesthetic. You must be one of them. You must be like your grandmothers and great-grandmothers and have your baby as an act of nature.”

  When the nurse came with her needle, I croaked: “No. No. I am young and strong, and I do not need anything for the pain.”

  She did not argue. She packed up her needle and left. As long as I didn’t scream and make a commotion, what did she care?

  And after that, for the only time during that terrible war, I really wanted to die.

  On Easter Sunday morning, April 9, 1944, my child was finally born. The doctor came in during the last few crucial minutes and tugged her into the world. When I saw that she was a beautiful girl, that she had a sweet little face and two good eyes and all the right fingers and toes, I was overjoyed.

  “My husband wanted a boy,” I said to the doctor. “He may be very unhappy about this.”

  “So what shall we do, Frau Vetter? Shall we push her back in and hope that she will be reborn a male? Tell your husband that to have a healthy child at such a time is an even bigger miracle than it usually is. Tell him to thank God and be grateful.” He started to leave and then turned back to me and said: “And remember, it is the man who determines the sex of the baby. So your husband cannot blame you for this lovely girl. It is all his fault.”

  They laid her in my arms. I was torn and bleeding, in pain, but I took a deep breath of peace and happiness.

  All of a sudden, the sirens screamed—an American air raid. The bombers were in the air above us, and this time it looked as though they were going to bomb not just Berlin and Potsdam, but Brandenburg as well.

  Everybody who could walk ran for the shelter. Somebody pushed the gurney on which I lay into a dark, airless place. How lucky that my baby was with me just at that moment, that they had given me a little bottle of water for her, to teach her how to suck. We all listened in the blackness, with the practiced ears of people who had been bombed before, to hear where the bombs were dropping.

  I thought: “Stupid girl! What have you done? You have brought a doomed child into the world. If you are not buried by the American bombs, you will be discovered by the Nazis! Your whole family, everything you once knew, could be lost and gone. And when you die, who will sit shiva?”

  I was so lonely at that moment, so scared. And all I could think of was my mother.

  Werner tried to make his way to the hospital, but he was stopped because of the “all points” warning in the streets. It took some time for the all-clear. As it turned out the Americans did not bomb Brandenburg but went to Berlin as usual.

  When I saw him wandering through the bunker, calling my name, my heart melted with affection. He looked so sweet. He had not shaved. His face was lined with sleeplessness. His hair, usually perfectly combed, was all messed up.

  “Grete!” he called softly. “Grete, where are you?”

  I thought that I answered him loudly and strongly. But probably my voice came out in a whisper because he passed me by a couple of times before he saw me.

  He leaned over me, smiling, his blue eyes sparkling with pleasure. He picked up the baby, unwrapped th
e blankets, saw that she was a girl, and turned to stone.

  “This was your idea! This whole pregnancy was your idea! And what do I have now? Another daughter! Another daughter!”

  Werner was in a fury. It seemed to me that his eyes turned white. The flame of love that I had felt for him moments before went out. A Nazi husband: What could I have expected? Was this not a regime which despised women and prized only their ability to breed? Was this not a country that had made a religion of twisted, primitive virility? He paced back and forth by my gurney, fuming and sputtering with anger. I hated him so much at that moment, I never wanted to see him again. And I said to myself, “This is my child, my child, my child. This child is only mine.”

  The next day, I received a letter from Werner apologizing for his bad behavior in the bunker.

  You know, we have moments of passion when we are in pain. And then of course the moment ends, and with it the passion and the pain, and we forgive and forget. But I think that every time you hurt somebody you care for, a crack appears in your relationship, a little weakening—and it stays there, dangerous, waiting for the next opportunity to open up and destroy everything. Still, I was not in a position to hold a grudge against Werner. He was the father of my baby, my protector, her protector. So when he returned again to the hospital and held my hand to his lips, I allowed my heart to soften.

  “You will see,” I said. “She will bring you joy.” He smiled a little and tried to look fondly on the new baby; he really tried. He made a lovely birth announcement and sent it to many friends. But it was like the garland of fruit and flowers in our kitchen, only a decoration to mask more serious matters. The truth was that Werner was deeply disappointed and would be for the rest of his life. He had wanted a son.

  As the days went by, he looked more and more disheveled. He was getting thinner. I honestly believe he was completely incapable of feeding himself. He had grown used to having a woman to take care of him, and he couldn’t manage on his own. Maybe he thought that if he appeared like a derelict at the hospital, with his shirt dirty and his face gaunt from hunger, I would be sympathetic, stop bleeding, recover quickly from the birth, and come home. If that’s what he thought, well, he was absolutely right. Every time I looked at him, my heart turned, and I did not stay in the hospital for nine days as I should have. I went home in a week because my husband was so lost without me.