The Nazi Officer's Wife Page 3

  So you see, we had all the burdens of being Jewish in an anti-Semitic country, but none of the strengths—the Torah learning, the prayers, the welded community. We spoke no Yiddish or Hebrew. We had no deep faith in God. We were not Polish Chasidim or Lithuanian yeshiva scholars. We were not bold free Americans—remember that. And there were no Israelis then, no soldiers in the desert, no “nation like other nations.” Hold that in your mind as I tell you this story.

  What we mostly had was intellect and style. Our city was the sophisticated “Queen of the Danube,” “Red Vienna,” with social welfare and workers’ housing, where geniuses like Freud and Herzl and Mahler whirled in the ferment of their ideas: psychoanalysis, Zionism, socialism, reform, renewal—throwing off lights for the whole world to see by.

  In that respect, at least—that “light unto the nations” part—my assimilated Vienna Jews were as Jewish as anybody.

  THREE

  Pepi Rosenfeld’s Good Little Girl

  MY FATHER’S DECISION to let me go to high school had a monumental effect on my life, because for the first time I had friends who were boys. It had nothing to do with sex, I assure you. Girls from my social group felt obligated to remain virginal until they were married. No, it was about intellectual development.

  You see, in those days, boys were simply better educated than girls. They read more, traveled more, thought more. So now, for the first time, I began to have friends with whom I could really talk about the things I cared about—history, literature, society’s many ills and how to cure them completely so that everybody would be happy.

  I loved mathematics, French, philosophy. I took class notes in shorthand and knew them completely thereafter; I never had to study them again. One girlfriend, a terrible math student—Mama dubbed her “Fräulein Einstein”—arrived at my doorstep every morning before school seeking help with her math homework. I tried to explain without making her feel worse than she already did. The reward I received for my delicacy was a bitter complaint: “How come you Jews are always so smart?”

  I was a teenage bluestocking, passionate about ideas, dreaming of adventure. I would travel to Russia and live among the peasants and write best-selling novels about my romantic liaisons with commissars. I would be a lawyer, maybe even a judge, and dispense justice to the common man. This notion first occurred to me in September 1928, during the trial of young Philippe Halsmann, sometimes called the Austrian “Dreyfus case.”

  Halsmann had gone hiking with his father in the Alps near Innsbruck. He pulled ahead, lost sight of his father, and returned to find him fallen from the trail and dead in a brook below. The son was accused of murdering his father. The prosecution—lacking any motive or proof—based its case on anti-Semitic slander, for Halsmann was Jewish and many Austrians were prepared to believe that the Jews were murderers by inclination. A preacher declared from the pulpit that by insisting on his innocence and not repenting, young Halsmann deserved worse hellfire than Judas. A policeman said that the father’s ghost had appeared to him like King Hamlet to accuse his son.

  Philippe was wrongly convicted and sentenced to ten years’ hard labor. He served two years. Then, through the intervention of people like the Nobel Prize-winning author Thomas Mann, his sentence was commuted to time served and he was allowed to leave the country. He ended up in America, where he became a famous photographer.

  His trial inspired me. I fantasized about sitting on the bench, dispensing justice to all. In the court of my dreams, the innocent would never be convicted.

  I did not break any rules, never, except that I cut gym all the time. Nobody cared because nobody could imagine a situation in which a girl like me would have to be physically strong. I was a little zaftig—that was considered lovely then—and the boys liked me.

  I see them before me. Anton Rieder, handsome, tall, impoverished, a strict Catholic. We eyed each other from a distance. Rudolf Gischa, smart, ambitious; he called me his “witch” and made me promise to marry him right after he finished his studies. I said of course I would marry him, but right now we should just keep it our secret. Actually I knew that if I told my father I was going to marry a non-Jew, he would lock me in the house and never let me go to university, a privilege for which I lobbied ceaselessly and which had become much more important to me than any boy.

  Out of thirty-six students in my class, three were Jews—Steffi Kanagur, Erna Marcus, and I. One day somebody wrote on their desks: “Jews, get out, go to Palestine!” Nobody wrote on my desk, because those girls came from Poland and I came from Austria and they seemed (actually they were) more overtly Jewish than I was.

  It was 1930.

  Erna Marcus was a Zionist. My father had once allowed a Zionist meeting in his restaurant, and he had concluded that the whole idea of rebuilding a Jewish state on its original soil in Palestine was a pipe dream. But with so much anti-Semitic propaganda in the air, many young Viennese Jews were drawn to the Zionist plan, among them my little sister Hansi. While I was reading Kant and Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, while I was lost in a dream of Goethe and Schiller, Hansi was joining Hashomer Hatzair, the left-wing Zionist youth group, and planning to take the hachshara course to prepare her for life as a pioneer in Israel.

  Steffi Kanagur was a Red. So was her brother Siegfried. On a certain Saturday, I told my parents that I was going to attend one of his communist demonstrations against the Christian Democratic government. In truth, I was going to meet Rudolf Gischa in the park.

  “How was the demonstration?” Papa asked when I arrived home.

  “Marvelous!” I exclaimed. “There were bunches of red balloons. Everybody was carrying a red flag! The Communist Youth League chorus sang beautifully, and there was a band with many horns and a big drum … and … what’s the matter?”

  Papa was scowling. Mama had buried her face in her apron, to stifle an explosion of giggles.

  “There was no demonstration,” Papa said. “It was canceled by the government.”

  Banished to my room, disgraced, I played chess with Hansi and wondered why in the world the government would cancel Siegfried Kanagur’s demonstration.

  You see, I had no head for politics. For me, political activity was fun, an ideological romp with smart kids. When Mimi and I joined the high school socialist club, it was not for the sake of ideology but to get ourselves a new social center, where we could listen to lectures on the plight of the workers and learn socialist songs and meet some new boys from other schools—like “Lugubrious” Kohn, who was studying to be a doctor; and “Jolly” Zich, who was planning to go skiing for the rest of his life; and Wolfgang Roemer, short, dark, charming; and Josef Rosenfeld, whom everyone called Pepi.

  Pepi was only about six months older than I was, but a full year ahead of me in school and much more mature. A lithe, slender young man, he had—at age eighteen—already begun to lose his hair. But he had bright blue eyes and a sly pussycat smile, and he smoked cigarettes. And of course Pepi was brilliant, absolutely brilliant; there was that too.

  While we danced at the high school ball, I talked his ear off about the plays of Arthur Schnitzler.

  “Meet me in the park at the Belvedere next Saturday at eight,” he said.

  “Very well,” I answered. “See you then.” And off I waltzed with Zich or Kohn or Anton or Wolfgang or Rudolf.

  Well, along came Saturday. I decided to go shopping and asked Wolfgang to come along. He agreed. It began to rain, and I got all wet. So Wolfgang took me home to his mother, Frau Roemer, one of the sweetest women I have ever known. She dried my hair and fed me strawberries in cream. Her husband and his happy-go-lucky brother Uncle Felix arrived. Then Wolfgang’s younger sister Ilse came in, shaking out her umbrella. They pulled back the carpet, rolled out the gramophone, and put on some new swing records, and we all started to dance. And in walked Pepi Rosenfeld, soaked to the skin.

  “That girl from the socialist club—she agreed to meet me at the Belvedere and I waited for her for an hour and finally I gave up. I
am so annoyed! Mother was right! Girls are impossible!”

  He stood there looking at me, dripping. The music was playing.

  “I’m sorry,” I said sweetly. “I forgot.”

  “Dance with me,” he said, “and I will tell you how angry I am with you.”

  The next day a boy named Suri Fellner came to our house with a letter, signed by both Wolfgang and Pepi. Apparently they had discussed the situation and had decided that I must choose between them. The one I selected would be my boyfriend. The other would withdraw, brokenhearted.

  On the bottom of the letter, I wrote “Wolfgang,” and I sent my answer back with the dutiful emissary. A few weeks later I went on a holiday with our family in the mountains and completely forgot that I had “chosen” Wolfgang Roemer. Luckily, so did he.

  In my last year of high school—it was 1933—I wrote a final essay on Thus Spake Zarathustra by Nietzsche. For my research, I decided to go to the National Library. (I also agreed to pick up my sister Mimi in front of the twin columns at the Karlskirche on my way home.) Pepi Rosenfeld appeared suddenly, out of nowhere. He had a way of doing that, coming upon you like a cat or a sprite, on silent feet, with his subtle smile. Without a word, he seized my heavy books and fell into step with me.

  “Have you ever been to the National Library before?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Well, I go there very often now that I’m enrolled in the law program at the university, and I can tell you, it’s extremely gigantic. As you are unfamiliar with the layout of the place, you may not know which entrance to use. Why, you could become lost even before you get inside! Better let me lead you.”

  So I did. We walked and walked, past the palaces, through the parks, scattering the pigeons, not even hearing the tolling clocks of the city.

  “My paper has to be very long and complex,” I said. “I shall cite all the great thinkers—Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud.”

  “What about Adolf Hitler?”

  “Oh, him. He’s not a thinker. He’s just a ranter and raver.”

  “There may come a time,” said Pepi, “when people cannot tell the difference.”

  “Impossible,” I solemnly predicted. “I have read Hitler’s book Mein Kampf and also some works by his colleague Herr Alfred Rosenberg because I am a fair-minded, objective person and I believe one should always hear out all sides before making a decision, and so I can tell you from firsthand knowledge that these men are idiots. Their ideas about how the Jews have poisoned their so-called superior Aryan race and caused all of Germany’s troubles are utter nonsense. No intelligent person could possibly believe them. Hitler is laughable. He will soon disappear.”

  “Just like all your old boyfriends,” Pepi said with his sly smile.

  We stopped for cake and coffee, as people of our type habitually did in the midafternoon. He told me about his studies, his professors, his great future as a doctor of jurisprudence. The sun sparkled on the spires of the churches. In the park at the Belvedere, he interrupted my chatter with a little kiss. I completely lost my train of thought. He set down my books and took me in his arms and kissed me properly. We never did get to the National Library. I never did pick up my sister Mimi (who complained about my lack of consideration for years afterward). But by the end of that afternoon, what Pepi Rosenfeld had said came true: all my old boyfriends had just disappeared. Poof. Like that. Gone.

  Pepi could always get my attention. I’d be in class, in a bookstore, in a café, and suddenly I would feel a tingling on my scalp or at the nape of my neck. I’d turn around and there he would be, staring at me. He never talked nonsense. He always had a point to make. I felt that my long search for someone to share my passion for ideas and books and art had finally ended. Soon I was madly in love with him and could think of no one else. When my old amour Rudolf Gischa wrote to me from his university in the Sudetanland, Czechoslovakia, declaring that he had decided to join the Nazi Party, that Adolf Hitler was obviously right about everything, including the Jews, and that I should please return to him his promise of love and marriage, I did so with pleasure.

  BY THE TIME I met Pepi, his father had died—in Steinhof, the famous insane asylum that the Kaiser built. Pepi’s uncles, important men in the city of Eisenstadt, provided a monthly pension for Pepi’s mother, Anna. She had converted to Judaism in order to marry but had really always remained a candle-lighting, mass-going Catholic. After Herr Rosenfeld’s death, Anna pretended to continue to be Jewish so his family would continue to support her. She also kept it a secret when, in 1934, she married Herr Hofer, an insurance man from Ybbs—so that the money would keep coming in.

  Pepi had a sort of bar mitzvah; really it was just a party which his mother gave in order to elicit some presents. She was disappointed because, instead of cash, his uncles gave him a set of beautifully bound books by Schiller and Goethe. Strange—but I think that if Pepi felt any connection to things Jewish, it may have been because of those wonderful German books. He knew he would never have received them from his mother’s family. He knew that, intellectually, he was connected to the Jewish side. And Pepi’s whole personality was his intellect—remember that.

  Anna wasn’t a stupid woman, but she was uneducated, full of superstitions and unveiled fears and desires. Hefty, always short of breath, florid, she dressed with unsuitable flash for a woman of her age and size. She wore a big false smile full of big teeth. Set her reddish hair in little pin curls and used beer as a lotion. She spent her days gossiping and read nothing.

  She slept in the same room with her son, even when he was fully grown. She waited on him as though he were a king, serving him lunch on the good china every day and hushing the neighbors’ children when he took his daily afternoon nap.

  She always knew which child in the district had been born with a deformity, and she always had a theory as to why: a harelip because of the mother’s vanity, a gimpy leg because of the father’s philandering. She told Pepi that his father had suffered from dementia at the end—a sure sign of syphilis, she said. I don’t know to this day whether it was true. Maybe she got the idea from the same wellspring of Austrian poison that caused Hitler to believe that syphilis was a “Jewish disease.”

  Anna bought “new wine,” which she said “had not yet aged” so it “contained no alcohol and could not make you tipsy.” At the end of the day, Pepi and I would find her in the living room of their flat at Number 1 Dampfgasse, drinking the “new wine” and listening to the Nazi radio station with a worried look on her face.

  “For heaven’s sake, Mother!” Pepi protested. “Why do you distress yourself by listening to that irrational propaganda?”

  Anna turned to us with wide, frightened eyes. “We have to pay attention to them,” she said.

  “Oh please …”

  “They are very very dangerous, my dear son!” she insisted. “They hate the Jews. They blame the Jews for everything.”

  “No one listens,” Pepi said.

  “Everybody listens!” she cried. “In church, in the marketplace, I hear people talking and I know, everybody listens and everybody agrees!”

  She seemed intensely emotional, close to tears. I assumed it was because of the wine.

  MY FATHER GAVE IN. He sent me to the university. I decided to study law.

  In those days, those who hoped to be judges and those who hoped to be lawyers took the same course of study, and specialized only after they had taken their final examinations. We studied Roman law, German law, and church law; civil, criminal, and commercial procedures; the Law of Nations; political science; economic theory; and also certain new subjects, like psychiatry and forensic photography, pertaining to criminal behavior.

  I bought a little box camera and took snapshots of people.

  Pepi’s mother bought him a Leica. He set up a darkroom at home and took soulful pictures of objects: dominos spilled on a table, arranged in a slanting beam of sunlight; books and fruit.

  While Hitler was coming to power in Germany, I was hik
ing in the mountains with the girls from the socialist youth group. I remember Heddy Deutsch, the daughter of a Jewish member of parliament; and Elfi Westermayer, a medical student. We slept in the hay in farmers’ barns near the lakes at Saint Gilden and Gmunden. We wore blue shirts, hammered studs into the soles of our boots for better traction on the pebbly trails, and went out singing in the brittle mountain air. I remember all the songs. The “International,” “Das Wandern Ist des Müllers Lust,” “La Bandiera Rossa” (“The Red Flag”).

  During the school year, my friends and I gathered at the socialist hall and concentrated on saving the world. In those tumultuous days, other young people lived politics; they were ready to die for their beliefs. But our group mostly talked.

  There were two boys, Fritz and Franck, who played Ping-Pong incessantly but never too strenuously. The steady, indolent beat of their game captured nothing of the outside world’s mad rhythm. A couple of the girls brought cake that their mothers had baked. Another boy brought records for dancing. Pepi contributed his chess set. He and Wolfgang and I played all the time. Occasionally, I even beat them.

  “Oswald Spengler says that our great cultural achievements are over,” Pepi mused, moving his rook. “He says we’re all just sinking into materialism and becoming philosophers instead of men of action.”

  “Ah, the Nazis must love him,” Wolfgang said, looking over my shoulder, silently planning my next move, “since they consider themselves men of action.”