The Nazi Officer's Wife Page 20

  Frau Doktor went out of town for a few days, and I stayed in her flat on the Partenstrasse. Werner stayed in a hotel.

  Pepi took a walk with me down the streets of our youth. The baby was sleeping. Pepi was pale. The dark circles around his eyes told the story of the constant fear under which he lived. His hair had almost completely disappeared. He didn’t look twenty years older than I; he looked forty years older.

  Remind me of the carefree girl I used to be, I wanted to say. Tell me that Mama is safe, tell me that this baby of mine will grow up in freedom.

  But it was too late. He was too old, too beaten. I had always been the student, he the teacher. I had always been the starving prisoner, he the comforter. Now it was my turn to try and comfort him.

  “Everything will be all right,” I said to him. “Just be patient. Be strong. Think of the socialist paradise….”

  Pepi answered with his mirthless laugh. He showed very little interest in my baby.

  WERNER WAS DRAFTED on the first of September 1944, part of a last-ditch conscription of Germans with stomach trouble, asthma, sensory losses, bad feet, and any other ailments now considered too slight to exempt a man from service in a losing cause. Soon the government would be enlisting boys and old men to defend German cities. Werner was part of these cannon-fodder brigades.

  He did not report to the army until September third. If he had dared, he would have pretended that he had never received the draft notice and tried to hide somewhere. But even Werner knew better than to attempt to lie his way out of this.

  The country was falling apart. Sabotage. Desertions. Thousands made homeless by the bombings. And with the last of its strength, this dictatorship could think of nothing better to do than sacrifice my husband.

  He took all our savings—ten thousand marks—out of the bank in case he fell into enemy hands and had to bribe somebody for his freedom. I never dreamed of protesting. I lived handily on his salary from Arado, which was still paid even after he was drafted, and I saved every pfennig I could.

  Werner sighed and hung his head. I knew I was about to hear a confession.

  “Listen, Grete,” he said. “When you go to the pharmacy for the special milk for the baby, don’t be surprised if they treat you as a tragic heroine. Because to tell you the truth, I lied to them. I told them you had already buried three children and therefore they simply had to give you the milk so that this fourth child of yours would not also enter eternity.”

  Even now, I have to smile when I think of this. I tell you, of all the things about Werner Vetter that appealed to me, this most of all warmed my heart: He had no respect for the truth in Nazi Germany.

  All the other men stayed in their barracks. My Werner came home every night on his bicycle and spent the evening hours with me until he had to leave and return to the base. What lie he told his superiors to justify this, I do not know, but I can imagine.

  He disliked wearing his uniform and always changed out of it right away when he came home. Symbols of authority irritated him—unless the authority was his own.

  One night when he left to go back to the barracks, he found that a part of his bicycle had been stolen. This was a potential catastrophe. If he didn’t return on time, he would be declared absent without leave, considered a deserter, and shot before he could make an explanation. So what did he do? He found another bicycle belonging to some other citizen, and he stole and installed the part that had been stolen from him. It seemed fair enough.

  He made a friend at the base, a young man who badly wanted to leave his wife pregnant when he went forth into the final battle. The young couple had no place to be together. So Werner, without asking me first, invited them to stay in our little room.

  I was shocked when he appeared at our door with them. To bring strangers! It was so dangerous! What if they were committed Nazis who snooped and pried?

  I sat outside with my baby to give our guests some privacy, and all the while I worried. Would they notice that the radio dial was not set to the government station? Would they notice that we did not have a picture of Hitler on the wall? Did we not hear every day of neighbors denouncing each other for minute infractions in order to win some advantage? How could Werner have toyed with our safety this way, after we had been so careful, so quiet and circumspect, for so long? The answer of course, was that he had never felt as frightened of exposure as I. Why should he? If I was caught, he would deny having known about my true identity—and I would support his denial. He would come out all right. Angela and I would disappear.

  The sweet young couple thanked me for my hospitality, wished me well, and went on their way. I suppose they would have been horrified to know that I was afraid of them. I sometimes wonder if they ever had the child they wanted so much.

  Around Christmas, most of Werner’s unit was shipped west to confront the Allied invasion. But Werner—who was clearly brighter than most, had supervisory experience, and was a good enough shot to win an award for marksmanship even with only one eye—was sent to Frankfurt an der Oder for further training before he went to the Eastern front.

  They had decided to make him an officer.

  “Come and spend New Year’s with me,” he said. I could hear the urgency in his voice—one last weekend before he had to face the Russians. I hastened to make arrangements. Hilde Schlegel said she would keep my baby.

  I waited for Werner at a little inn, really just a private home that sometimes rented rooms to soldiers and their women.

  The innkeeper and his employees behaved deferentially toward me—oh, yes, they treated me with great respect. Because you see my disguise had now reached the outer limits of absurdity, its most fantastic incarnation: I had become the best thing a German woman could be in that time and place, a Nazi officer’s wife.

  When I saw Werner in his officer’s uniform, I did not know whether to laugh or faint. That hateful collar! The brass! The eagle! The insignia of the would-be conquerors of the world! He pulled me to him. But I twisted away, repelled. I could not bear to have that uniform touch my skin.

  “Oh, take that dreadful thing off!” I cried.

  We did not go out that whole weekend. We stayed in our room and told each other jokes. I mean it. We told each other every funny story we could think of. One of them stays in my mind. A German citizen wants to commit suicide. He tries to hang himself, but the rope is of such a poor quality that it breaks. He tries to drown himself, but the percentage of wood in the fabric of his pants is so high that he floats on the surface like a raft. Finally he starves to death from eating official government rations.

  The darkest joke of all was that as Werner was marching east with his comrades into the teeth of the advancing Soviet army, he passed thousands of Germans fleeing for their lives in the opposite direction. They knew the war was over and lost.

  “Keep your fingers crossed for me,” he wrote.

  MY UPSTAIRS NEIGHBOR and her husband left right after the New Year, very early in the morning.

  I saw them leave only because Angela had awakened me before dawn. They were creeping out, carrying with them all their possessions and their sleeping child. I opened my door.

  “Good luck to you,” I whispered.

  “And to you, Grete,” Karla answered. “I hope your husband comes home safely.”

  We shook hands, and they left. But that night, I heard someone moving in their supposedly empty apartment. Footsteps. Shuffling. The clink of a teakettle. The creak of a bed. I wondered who it was. Then I decided it was not my place to wonder.

  The following morning, while I was in the bathroom, boiling diapers, I heard a terrible pounding on my door.

  “Frau Vetter!” a man called. “It is the police! Open the door!”

  It was the young couple, I thought—they had turned me in because Hitler’s picture was not hanging on the wall. It was Frau Zeigler across the hall, I thought—she had turned me in because she heard a tone from the BBC and knew I was listening. It was the registrar, who had always suspec
ted me; or Elisabeth, who had always wanted me out of the picture. It could be anyone. What mattered was that we had almost reached the end of the war, and in the last moments, somebody had denounced me. I had been discovered.

  My stomach knotted. My legs turned hot and trembled. My throat felt dry. The story I had rehearsed a thousand times flew through my head.

  These papers belong to Christl Denner, Fräulein. She lives in Vienna. Who are you? How did you get these papers?

  I stole them. I was walking on the path by the Alte Donau, and Christl was out on the river rowing, and I saw that she dropped her handbag in the river and then she and her companions rowed away, and as soon as they were out of sight, I jumped into the river and swam to the place and dove down again and again until I found the handbag and I retrieved the papers and made them into false papers for myself. This was my crime. My crime alone. No one helped me …

  I closed my eyes, pictured my mother’s face, held it before me like a light, and then I opened the door. A policeman was standing there. He was not such a young man. He looked tired.

  “Good morning, Frau Vetter. We have reason to believe there is a deserter hiding out in the vacant apartment of his sister and her husband in this building, right above you. He would have been here last night. Did you hear any noise?”

  “No,” I said. “Nothing.”

  “Maybe you slept through it.”

  “No, I would have heard because I am up so often with my baby in the night.”

  “Ah, well, if you hear anyone moving about in that apartment, please call this number.”

  “Yes, of course, officer. I certainly will.”

  He bowed politely and left.

  THE BBC PROGRAMS best suited my work schedule. I tuned in one evening and found myself listening to a broadcast by Thomas Mann, the Nobel laureate, author of masterpieces like The Magic Mountain and Death in Venice. He had lived out the war in California and had been making anti-Nazi broadcasts to the German people for years. This was the first time I had heard him.

  “German listeners!

  “If only this war were at an end! If only the horrifying things that Germany has done in the world could be set aside….”

  If only, I thought.

  “But one thing is necessary for a new beginning…. It is the full and absolute realization of the unforgivable crimes, which you indeed know very little of, in part because they locked you out, forcibly consigning you to stupidity, … in part because you concealed the knowledge of this horror from your consciousness through your instinct of self-preservation.”

  I thought, what is he saying? What is he talking about?

  “You, who are listening to me now, do you know of Maidanek at Lublin in Poland, Hitler’s extermination camp? It was not a concentration camp; rather, it was a huge murder complex. A huge building of stone with a factory chimney stands there, the largest crematorium in the world…. More than half a million European people—men, women, and children—were poisoned with chlorine and then burned, fourteen hundred daily. The death factory worked day and night; its chimneys were always smoking.”

  No, I thought, this is impossible. This is someone’s propaganda.

  “The Swiss rescue mission … saw the Auschwitz and Birkenau camps. They saw things that no feeling person is ready to believe who hasn’t seen it with his own eyes: the human bones, the barrels of lime, chlorine gas pipes, and the burning facilities. In addition they saw the piles of clothing and shoes, which they took off their sacrifices, many little shoes, shoes of children…. In these German facilities alone, one million seven hundred fifteen thousand Jews were murdered from April 15, 1942, up until April 15, 1944.”

  No. It can’t be. No.

  Turn it off! I said to myself. Make him stop!

  But I could not move. And Mann did not stop.

  “… The remains of the burned were ground up and pulverized, packed up and sent to Germany to fertilize the German earth …”

  Mama.

  “I have given only a few examples of the things that you will discover. The shooting of hostages, the murder of captives, the torture chambers of the Gestapo … the bloodbaths which took place in the Russian civilian population … the planned, wanted, and accomplished deaths of children in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Greece, and especially Poland.”

  Inside myself I felt a terrible silence, as though I had been hollowed out and become a cave.

  Angela began to cry. I did not go to her to comfort her. I sank to the floor.

  My blouse felt so tight at the throat that I tore the collar, just to breathe. But I could not breathe. I lay on the floor; I could not get up.

  Angela was screaming now. And then I was screaming. But I could make no sound. Because the Germans would have heard me.

  I lay on the floor, unable to absorb the horror of what I had just been told. Who can imagine a living, breathing, laughing mother as smoke and ashes? No one can imagine that. My mind shut down. I sank like a rock to the bottom of my soul.

  The true meaning of the term “U-boat” came clear to me in that moment. I felt myself buried alive, in silence, under an ocean of terror. I was living among accomplices. No matter that they looked like housewives and shopkeepers, I knew that their acquiescence with Hitler’s war against the Jewish people had led to the nightmare Thomas Mann had described.

  I don’t know how long I lay there. I don’t know when Angela fell asleep, worn out from screaming.

  The next day came and the next day, the weeks went by, and then Mama returned to me in my imagination. She sat on my bed at night and reminded me of poems long forgotten that I had recited for my grandfather. It must have been so, because the following morning, I knew them once again and could say them for Angela. When the baby started crawling, I imagined that Mama clapped her hands with happiness. “You see, Edith, she’s a clever girl. Soon she will be running across the bridge at Stockerau….”

  AN OFFICER OF the Wehrmacht sat at the kitchen table. He held his hat in his hands. I thought he was going to tell me that Werner was dead. Hot tears rolled down my neck.

  “No,” said the officer. “Don’t cry. Werner is not dead. He is a Russian prisoner of war. His unit was attacked at Küstrin. They pulled back until they could go no farther. They were surrounded, and they surrendered. They were all taken.”

  “Was he wounded?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Oh, thank you for telling me this!” I cried.

  “He’ll go to a prison camp in Siberia. You won’t see him for a long time.”

  “Thank you! Thank you!”

  He put his hat on and went to notify the next woman.

  As far as I could see, this was the best possible outcome. Not only was Werner safe, he had been captured whole, not wounded, and I had no doubt that he would manage as well as any German soldier in the Russian prison camp. I thought of him as I thought of my sister Hansi—safely stowed in the hands of an ally. His brothers, Gert and Robert, would not be so fortunate. They would die of their wounds in battlefield hospitals.

  Hilde Schlegel’s husband, Heinz, had been killed in one of the last battles on the Eastern front. She had sent her baby girl Evelyn to stay with her mother, and anticipated with grave fears the occupation of the city.

  “Everybody says the Russians are monsters who will rape us all,” she said. “I have heard that before they shoot off a cannon, they tie some poor old woman across its mouth so that she is blown to pieces when the cannon goes off.”

  I no longer responded with disbelief, no longer countered with “Ah, this is someone’s propaganda.”

  “Maybe you should do what Werner did—take out all your money so that you’ll have something to bribe somebody with if you need to.”

  “Ach, that is a terrible idea, Grete. I am keeping all our money locked up in the bank where they can’t get at it.”

  On Easter Saturday in 1945, Brandenburg was bombed. We lost our electricity and our gas. The SS brought in a brigade of Rus
sian soldiers to dig trenches in front of our houses and defend us. I suppose they were prisoners of war. These men were so afraid of the approaching Red Army that within minutes they were inside our flats, cowering behind the people they were supposed to protect. So the SS took them away.

  We heard a siren that lasted for an hour, and we knew that Brandenburg had fallen. We all went down into the shelters and stayed there with the children, maybe twenty children. One little girl cried and screamed because she had left her doll upstairs and was afraid it would be lost in the bombing. Her mother could not resist her pleas and went back up to get the doll. The minute she came down again, a bomb hit the roof with such a loud explosion that the mother got scared and dropped the doll, and that was the end of that. The little girl was crying; the mother was crying. Everyone was tense and frightened.

  I went to sleep on my mattress, holding my well-behaved Angela in my arms, certain that our saviors would soon arrive. One of the old men working in civil defense came down to tell us that a supply train loaded with food had stopped on the tracks. Many people went out to loot it; they shared the food they brought back.

  A German soldier awakened us. “The Russians have broken through,” he said. “Time to evacuate the town.”

  So I did what everybody else did: I put my baby in her carriage and I ran. There were soldiers all over telling us which way to go, and we ran and ran; everybody was running. The city was burning. We could hear the bridges exploding behind us as the Wehrmacht blew them up to slow the Russian advance. By the time it grew dark, I had reached a little town on the outskirts of the city. I ran into a barn and found a corner to hide in. I wrapped Angela in my coat, and we both fell asleep. When I woke up, the sky outside was on fire. So was Angela. She was covered with red spots and running a high fever—measles.

  I didn’t have anything with which to care for her, no water, nothing. I went from house to house, weeping, begging to be allowed in because my child was so ill. A neighbor from Brandenburg saw my distress and pleaded on my behalf. Everybody said no. Everybody was afraid. Finally, in the last house, the smallest house, a woman and her daughter let me in. They had both had measles. They told me to keep Angela in the shadows and give her water.