The Nazi Officer's Wife Read online

  How can I describe to you our confusion and terror when the Nazis took over? We had lived until yesterday in a rational world. Now everyone around us—our schoolmates, neighbors, and teachers; our tradesmen, policemen, and bureaucrats—had all gone mad. They had been harboring a hatred for us which we had grown accustomed to calling “prejudice.” What a gentle word that was! What a euphemism! In fact they hated us with a hatred as old as their religion; they were born hating us, raised hating us; and now with the Anschluss, the veneer of civilization which had protected us from their hatred was stripped away.

  On the pavements, protesters had written anti-Nazi slogans. The SS grabbed Jews and forced them at gunpoint to scrub off the graffiti while crowds of Austrians stood around jeering and laughing.

  The Nazi radio blamed us for every filthy evil thing in this world. The Nazis called us subhuman and, in the next breath, superhuman; accused us of plotting to murder them, to rob them blind; declared that they had to conquer the world to prevent us from conquering the world. The radio said that we must be dispossessed of all we owned; that my father, who had dropped dead while working, had not really worked for our pleasant flat—the leather chairs in the dining room, the earrings in my mother’s ears—that he had somehow stolen them from Christian Austria, which now had every right to take them back.

  Did our friends and our neighbors really believe this? Of course they didn’t believe it. They were not stupid. But they had suffered depression, inflation, and joblessness. They wanted to be well-to-do again, and the fastest way to accomplish that was to steal. Cultivating a belief in the greed of the Jews gave them an excuse to steal everything the Jews possessed.

  We sat in our flats, paralyzed with fear, waiting for the madness to end. Rational, charming, witty, dancing, generous Vienna must surely rebel against such insanity. We waited and we waited and it didn’t end and it didn’t end and still we waited and we waited.

  The restrictions against Jews spread into every corner of our lives. We couldn’t go to movies or concerts. We couldn’t walk on certain streets. The Nazis put up signs on Jewish shop windows warning the population not to buy there. Mimi was fired from her job at the dry cleaners because it had become illegal for Christians to employ Jews. Hansi was no longer allowed to go to school.

  Uncle Richard went to the café where he had been going for twenty years. It now had a Jewish side and an Aryan side, and he sat on the Jewish side. Because he had fair hair and didn’t look Jewish, a waiter, who did not know him, said he had to move to the Aryan side. But on the Aryan side, a waiter who did know him said that he had to go back to the Jewish side. He finally gave up and went home.

  Baron Louis de Rothschild, one of the wealthiest Jewish men in Vienna, tried to leave the city. The Nazis stopped him at the airport and put him in prison, and whatever they did to him there convinced him that he ought to sign over everything to the Nazi regime. Then they let him leave. The SS took over the Rothschild Palace on Prinz Eugenstrasse and renamed it the Center for Jewish Emigration.

  Everybody talked about leaving.

  “Maybe we could go to a kibbutz in Palestine,” I suggested to Pepi.

  “You? My adorable little mouse? Doing farmwork?” He laughed and tickled me. “You might get blisters on your pretty fingers.”

  I stood in line for days at the British consulate, trying to get clearance to work as a housemaid in England. Every Jewish girl in Vienna seemed to be applying.

  An Asian gentleman approached me and my cousin Elli with a bow and a smile. “If you are interested in seeing the glories of the East … the Great Wall … the Imperial Palace … I am authorized to offer you fascinating work in one of several Chinese cities,” he said. “We arrange passports, transportation, and lodging. I have a car nearby. You could be out of Austria by tomorrow.” I am sure there were some who went with him.

  My cousin Elli got a job in England. I got clearance for a job—but no job.

  One afternoon Hansi did not come home. Mimi and I went out hunting for her. When we returned without her, Mama began to weep. A pretty seventeen-year-old Jewish girl had disappeared in a city crawling with anti-Semitic thugs. We were sick with terror.

  Around midnight Hansi returned. She was pale, shaking, grim, older.

  She told us the Nazis had picked her up and taken her to an SS office and put a gun to her head and ordered her to sew buttons on dozens of uniforms. In the room next door, she saw Orthodox Jews, devout men with long beards, forced to do ridiculous gymnastics by their tormentors, who found the show hilariously funny. Hansi had cried out in protest. Some lout had threatened to beat her if she didn’t shut up and sew. At the day’s end, they let her go. She had been wandering the streets ever since.

  “We have to get out,” she said.

  It was easier to get a ticket out if you were married, so Milo and Mimi decided to tie the knot.

  “Let’s get married, Pepi,” I said.

  He grinned at me and wiggled his eyebrows. “But you promised your father you would never marry a Christian,” he joked. In truth, he was a Christian now. His mother, Anna, in an effort to protect him from the Nuremberg Laws—which denied Jews citizenship in the Reich—had taken her twenty-six-year-old son to church and had him baptized. Then she had used her connections to have the family name erased from the list of the Jewish community. So when the Jews of Vienna were counted—and they were counted constantly by the precise Colonel Eichmann—Josef Rosenfeld was supposedly no longer on the list.

  “It won’t do you any good,” I told him. “The Nuremberg Laws are retroactive. Everything they say applies to people who were Jews before the Laws went into effect, in 1936. So people who became Christians in 1937 don’t count.”

  “Do me a favor, darling,” he said. “Don’t tell that to my mother. She thinks she has saved me from all this foolishness. I’d hate to burst her bubble.”

  He kissed me, making my head spin. Somehow my proposal of marriage was forgotten.

  I refused to let the political situation keep me from my studies. I had taken both state exams and passed with high grades. One last exam, and I would be a doctor of law, qualified to serve not just as a lawyer but also as a judge. I felt that if I earned my degree, if I was trained, qualified, certified, I would have a much easier time emigrating.

  In April 1938, I went to the university to pick up my final exam papers and to receive the date for my doctoral exam. A young clerk there, actually someone I knew, said: “You will not be taking the examination, Edith. You are no longer welcome in our university.” She gave me my papers and the transcript of my grades. “Good-bye.”

  For almost five years, I had studied law, constitutions, torts, psychology, economics, political theory, history, philosophy. I had written papers, attended lectures, analyzed legal cases, studied with a judge three times a week to prepare for my doctoral exam. And now they would not let me take it.

  My legs buckled. I leaned on her desk for support.

  “But … but … this last exam is all I need for my degree!”

  She turned her back on me. I could feel her sense of triumph, her genuine satisfaction in destroying my life. It had a smell, I tell you—like sweat, like lust.

  GRANDMOTHER HELPED THE maid carry some heavy mattresses into the yard for an airing and got a hernia. She had to be operated on, and during this operation she died.

  Grandfather couldn’t quite believe it. He always seemed to be turning around, expecting to find her there, always reminding himself with a heavy sigh that she was gone.

  Right after Grandmother died, the world held a conference at Evian-les-Bains, a luxurious spa in the French Alps near Lake Geneva, at which the fate of the Austrian Jews was up for discussion. Eichmann sent representatives of our community to plead with other countries to pay the Nazi ransom and take us in. “Don’t you want to save the urbane, well-educated, fun-loving, cultured Jews of Austria?” they asked. “How about paying $400 a head to the Nazi regime? Too much? How about $200?”
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br />   They couldn’t get a cent.

  No country wanted to pay for our rescue, including the United States. The dictator of the Dominican Republic, Trujillo, took a few Jews, thinking they might help bring some prosperity to his tiny, impoverished country. I have heard that they did.

  ON NOVEMBER 9, 1938, I did not go to work at the Denner house, because my sister Hansi had received a ticket to emigrate to Palestine. With a feeling of joy mixed with grief, we were taking her to the railway station. In her knapsack and the one suitcase the Nazis allowed her, she had bread, hard-boiled eggs, cake, evaporated milk, underwear, socks, shoes, sturdy trousers, heavy shirts, only one dress, and only one skirt. Femininity and its pretty paraphernalia had declined in importance. Like fruit and flowers, femininity spoiled quickly and cost too much relative to its small utility in wartime.

  Mama and Mimi and I were crying, but Hansi was not. “Come soon,” she said to us. “Get out of this damned country; get out as fast as you can.”

  The train came and took her away. She leaned out the window with the other fleeing young people. She waved. She didn’t smile.

  Mama had emptied the bank account to pay the Nazis the enormous price they demanded for Hansi’s ticket. There was, Mimi and I knew, virtually nothing left to ransom us. “But you have men who love you,” Mama said, holding us close. “They will save you. Hansi was too young to have a man.”

  Walking home from the station, we heard a strange rumble in the darkening streets. On the horizon we saw the orange glow of a fire. A building on the other side of the city was burning. The sidewalks were unnaturally empty. Nazi vehicles roared by, full of excited young men, but there were no pedestrians.

  Mimi and I, our senses sharpened to danger in these past months, broke into a run, dragging our mother along with us. At our house, we found the concierge, Frau Falat, waiting for us, her face drawn and worried. “They’ve been attacking all the Jewish shops,” she said. “One of the synagogues is burning. Don’t go out any more tonight.”

  Milo Grenzbauer arrived, out of breath from a long sprint through the streets. “May I trouble you, Frau Hahn?” he asked courteously. “I need to stay at your house. A friend of my brother who is in the SA says that the Nazis are grabbing all the young Jewish men and taking them I don’t know where—Dachau, Buchenwald. He told me and my brother not to be found at our home tonight.”

  He sagged into one of the leather chairs. Mimi sat at his feet, trembling, holding on to his knees.

  Outside, the streets had begun to roar with the sound of shouting men, screeching brakes, and crashing windows. Around ten o’clock, our cousin Erwin, a medical student, joined us. He was sweating. His face was white. He had come home late from the laboratory, encountered a mob outside the synagogue, and turned around and headed for our district just as the synogogue began to burn. He had seen Jews being beaten and dragged away.

  Pepi arrived right after him. Of the three young men in our house, he was the only calm one—clean, dapper, unruffled.

  “Mobs get tired and go home after a while,” he said. “You’ll see. Tomorrow morning, they’ll all have a terrible hangover and we’ll all have a lot of broken windows and they’ll sober up and we’ll fix the windows and life will return to normal.”

  We sat gazing at him, astonished. Was he crazy?

  “You always keep up such a lovely front, Pepi,” said my mother, greatly amused. “You will make a splendid lawyer.”

  “I don’t like to see my sweet little girl upset,” he said. He rubbed the worry from my forehead. “This furrow in her lovely brow must disappear.”

  He threw his arm around me and pulled me down next to him on the sofa. At that moment, I adored Pepi Rosenfeld. I felt as though his good nature, his fearlessness, would ultimately lead us all out of this inferno.

  And then his mother, Anna, arrived, screaming. “Are you an idiot?” she bellowed at him. “I have bribed half the officials in the city to make you a Christian and get you off the list of the Jewish community! And now, tonight, when the Jews are being carted away and their shops are being torched, what do you do? You come right into their hiding place and sit in their parlor! Get away from these people! These are not your people! You are a Christian, a Catholic, an Austrian! These people are foreigners! Everybody hates them! I will not have you spending another minute in their company!”

  She turned to me, her eyes wild. “Let him go, Edith! If you love him, let him go! If you hold on to him, they will drag him away and put him in prison, my only boy, my son, my treasure …” She began to sob.

  My mother, ever sympathetic, offered her a brandy.

  “Now, Mother,” Pepi said, “stop making a scene, please. Edith and I will soon be gone from here. We’re planning to go to England, possibly to Palestine.”

  “What?! Is that what you are plotting behind my back? To desert me? To leave me, a poor widow, alone on the eve of war?”

  “Now stop this ‘poor widow’ nonsense,” Pepi admonished her. “You are no such thing. Herr Hofer is your husband, and he will take care of you.”

  Having her secret revealed like that drove Anna wild. “If you abandon me, if you take your little bitch Jewess and run away, I will kill myself!” she screamed. And she ran for the window, and climbed onto the sill as though to throw herself out.

  Pepi leaped up, grabbed her, and gathered her big, bulky body into his arms, patting her heaving back. “There, there, Mother …”

  “Come home with me,” she wailed. “Get away from these people! Leave that girl—she will be the death of you! Come home with me!”

  He looked at me across the broad, shaking expanse of her back, and in his eyes I finally saw what he had been putting up with all these weeks since the Anschluss, why he had never quite agreed to leave. I understood that daily, Anna had been in a state of hysteria, pressuring him, screaming, crying, threatening suicide, that she had entrapped him and held him immobile with an iron chain that she called “love.”

  “Go,” I said softly. “Go home with her. Go.”

  He did. And the rest of us sat up together for all the rest of Kristallnacht, listening to the sound of our lives shattering.

  MY SISTER MIMI married Milo Grenzbauer in December 1938. They went to Israel on an illegal transport in February 1939. My mother sold the leather chairs to pay for their tickets. We might have been able to raise the money for a third ticket for me—but to be honest, I couldn’t face the thought of leaving Pepi.

  Events crashed into each other with such speed and violence that we felt as if we were caught in an avalanche with no time to recover before the next mountain collapsed. In March 1939, one year after the Anschluss, Hitler—appeased by Chamberlain—took Czechoslovakia. “If the goyim won’t defend each other,” said my mother, “how can we expect them to defend us?” Then my grandfather had a stroke. Uncle Richard hired a nurse to take care of him, and we all tried to visit him in Stockerau as much as possible. But then the Nazis arrested Uncle Richard and Aunt Roszi too.

  They spent six weeks in prison. To get out, they gave the Nazis everything they possessed: real estate, bank accounts, bonds, dishes, silver. Then they left immediately, heading east. Russia swallowed them. My mother waited and prayed for word of them, but none came.

  One day a young man in uniform knocked on our door. I must tell you, they had a certain way of knocking, these Nazis, as if they resented the door, as if they expected it to disappear beneath their pounding fists. My body could always tell when they were knocking. My skin crawled. My stomach tightened. The Nazi told Mama that Grandfather’s house and shop were being taken over by “good” Austrians, and that he had to go live in a room with relatives.

  That was it. No more Stockerau.

  Grandfather had been living in that house for forty-five years. The dishes, the chairs, the pictures, the pillows, the rugs, the telephone, the pots and pans and spoons, the piano, the gorgeous knitted lace doilies, the Puch motorbikes, the sewing machines, the letters we had written him that
he had saved in his big wooden desk, the desk itself—all of it, every stick and memory, was stolen; and the thieves sold it to his lifelong neighbors for a very good price.

  Mama sent me to take care of him. The stroke, following on Grandmother’s death, had slowed him; but the loss of his home, his place, now crippled him beyond repair. I led him to the toilet; I massaged his feet. Whatever I made for him to eat on his special diet, he would thank me and then say, sweetly, almost apologetically, “Your grandmother made it better.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She’s gone.”

  “Ah, yes, of course, I knew that, I knew that.” He looked at his old hands, worn, callused, scarred from all their work. “When can I go home?” he asked.

  He died one morning.

  I saw his house again, in later years. I believe it was still being lived in. Donaustrasse Number 12, in Stockerau.

  COMPARED WITH GRANDFATHER’S eviction, ours was a triviality. Our concierge stood weeping in the doorway, holding an eviction notice from our noble landlord. “What could he do?” she said. “The regime demanded this.”

  So Mama and I moved to 13 Untere Donaustrasse, in Leopoldstadt, the Vienna ghetto, to the flat of Milo’s widowed aunt, Frau Maimon. Two other ladies were already boarding with her—sisters, one a spinster, the other with a husband in Dachau. We lived, five women in a flat intended for one, and we never argued; we never failed to excuse ourselves when we could not help violating each other’s privacy.