The Nazi Officer's Wife

by Edith H. Beer

  The rally turned out to be quite different from those to which we had grown accustomed. There were no stirring drums or strident marches, no beautiful young people in uniforms waving flags. This rally had a purpose, and that was to overcome the defeatist mood which had begun to fall over Germany since the debacle at Stalingrad the past winter. Heinrich Himmler had been appointed Minister of the Interior in August with this mandate: “Renew German faith in the Victory!” Speaker after speaker exhorted us to work harder and harder to support our valiant fighting men, because if we lost the war, the terrible poverty which most Germans recalled from the days before the Nazi era would return and we would all lose our jobs. If we had grown tired of our evening Eintopf, the one-dish meal that Joseph Goebbels had proclaimed the proper self-sacrificing fare for a nation engaged in “total war,” we should remind ourselves that after the Victory, we would feast like kings on real coffee and golden bread made with white flour and whole eggs. We were told that we should do everything in our power to keep up productivity in the workplace, and turn in anybody we suspected of being disloyal, especially people who were listening to enemy radio and the “grossly exaggerated” news of German defeats in North Africa and Italy.

  “My God,” I thought. “They are worried.”

  The Nazi “masters of the world” were beginning to quake and waver. I felt giddy, a little breathless. An old song began to sing itself inside my heard.

  Shhh, I thought. It’s too soon to sing. Shhh.

  That night, when Werner and I tuned in to the BBC, I prayed that the news about German military misfortune would mean an early end to the war and, for me, release from the prison of my pretense.

  But I did not dare share my hopes, even with Werner. I kept my elation secret, my voice soft, my persona unobtrusive. Invisibility. Silence. These were the habits that I wore when I lived as what survivors of the Holocaust now call a U-boat, a Jewish fugitive from the Nazi death machine, hiding right in the heart of the Third Reich.

  For a while, in later years, when I was married to Fred Beer and living safely in England, I cast off those wartime habits. But now that Fred is gone and I am old and cannot control the impact of my memories, I put them on again. I sit here as I sit with you today in my favorite café on the square in the city of Netanya by the sea in the land of Israel, and an acquaintance stops to chat and says, “So tell us, Giveret Beer, what was it like then, during the war, living with a Nazi Party member inside Germany, pretending to be an Aryan, concealing your true identity, always fearing exposure?” I answer in a little voice that is dazed by its own ignorance, “Oh, but I do not know. I think I do not remember this anymore.” My gaze wanders and loses focus; my voice turns dreamy, halting, soft. It is my voice from those days in Brandenburg, when I was a twenty-nine-year-old Jewish law student on the Gestapo’s “Wanted” list, pretending to be an ignorant twenty-one-year-old nurse’s aide.

  You must forgive me when you hear this small voice from then fading and faltering. You must remind me: “Edith! Speak up! Tell the story.”

  It has been more than half a century.

  I suppose it is time.

  TWO

  The Hahns of Vienna

  WHEN I WAS a schoolgirl in Vienna, it seemed to me the whole world had come to my city to sit in the sunny cafés and enjoy coffee and cake and matchless conversation. I walked from school past the opera house, the beautiful Josefsplatz, and the Michaelerplatz. I played in the Volksgarten and the Burggarten. I saw dignified ladies with rakish hats and silk stockings; gentlemen with walking sticks and golden watch chains; rustic workmen from all the provinces of the bygone Hapsburg empire, plastering and painting our fancy facades with their thick blunt skilled hands. The stores burst with exotic fruits and crystal and silk. Inventions sprang up in my path.

  One day, I squirmed into a crowd and found myself looking into a store window where a uniformed parlor maid was demonstrating something called a “Hoover.” She scattered dirt on the floor, turned on her machine, and like magic whisked the dirt away. I squeaked with delight and raced off to tell my schoolmates.

  When I was ten years old, I joined a long line before the offices of a magazine called Die Bühne, “The Stage.” Soon I was sitting at a table before a large brown box. A nice lady put earphones on my head. The box came to life. A voice. A song. Radio.

  I raced to my father’s restaurant to tell my family. My sister Mimi, only a year younger than I, could not have cared less. The baby—little Johanna, called Hansi—was too young to understand. And Mama and Papa were too busy to listen. But I knew I had heard something special, the force of the future, a god-to-be. Remember that radio was brand-new in 1924. Imagine what a power it represented, and how helpless people were to resist its messages.

  I bubbled to Professor Spitzer of the Technical University, my favorite customer among the regulars: “The person who speaks can be very far away, Professor! But his voice flies through the air like a bird! Soon we will be able to hear the voices of people from everywhere!”

  Eagerly I read the newspapers and magazines that Papa kept for his customers. What most interested me were the law columns, with cases, arguments, and problems to make your head spin. I raced around our “waltz city,” forever searching for someone to talk to about what I had read and seen.

  School was my delight. There were only girls in my class; Papa did not believe in coeducation. Unlike my sisters, I loved to study and never found it difficult.

  We were taught that the French were our archenemies, that the Italians were traitors, that Austria had lost the First World War only because of a “stab in the back”—but I must tell you, we were never sure who had done the stabbing. Often, the teachers would ask me what language we spoke at home. This was a not-so-subtle way of discovering if we spoke Yiddish (which we didn’t) and were therefore Jewish (which we were).

  They wanted to know, you see. They were afraid that with our typical Austrian faces, we might be able to pass. They didn’t want to be fooled. Even then, in the 1920s, they wanted to be able to tell who was a Jew.

  One day Professor Spitzer asked my father what he intended for my future education. Papa said I would finish grammar school and then be apprenticed as a dressmaker, as my mother had been.

  “But you have here a very bright girl, my dear Herr Hahn,” the professor said. “You must send her to high school, perhaps even to university.”

  Father laughed. If I had been a boy, he would have beggared himself to educate me. As I was a girl, he had never even considered it. However, since the distinguished professor had raised the question, Papa decided to discuss it with my mother.

  MY FATHER, LEOPOLD Hahn, had a beautiful black mustache, curly black hair, and a humorous, outgoing personality well suited for a restaurateur. He was the youngest of six brothers, so by the time he was ready for his education, the family’s money had run out. Therefore, he studied to be a waiter. I know it is hard to believe, but in that time and place, a waiter’s training took several years. People liked Papa. They trusted him, told him their stories. He was an inspired listener. That was his gift.

  He was much more worldly and sophisticated than he ever expected us to be. He had worked on the Riviera and in the Czechoslovakian spas of Carlsbad and Marienbad, and had experienced some wild nights. He fought with the Austro-Hungarian Army in the First World War. He was wounded, then captured; but he escaped and returned to us. The wound to his shoulder caused a loss of motion in his arm. He could not shave himself.

  The restaurant, at Kohlmarkt in Vienna’s busy center, was my father’s life. It had a long, burnished bar and a dining room in back. His customers came every day for years. Papa knew what they wanted to eat before they ordered. He stocked their favorite newspapers. He provided them with service and comfort, a little world of dependabilities.

  We lived in a two-bedroom apartment in what was actually an old converted palace at Number 29 Argentinierstrasse in Vienna’s Fourth District. Our landlord, from the Hapsburg-Lothringe
n Company, came from royal stock. Since Mama worked side by side with Papa in the restaurant, seven days a week, we girls took our meals there. The household help did the cleaning and took care of us when we were little.

  My mother, Klothilde, was pretty, short, buxom, attractive but not coquettish. She kept her long hair completely black. She had a patient, bemused air; forgave people their stupidities; sighed often; knew when to hold her peace.

  I lavished all my affection on Hansi, my baby sister, seven years younger than I. To me, she looked like a cherub from one of our baroque cathedrals, with chubby pink cheeks, delicious flesh, and bouncing curls. My sister Mimi I disliked. The feeling was mutual. She had weak eyes, thick glasses, a sour personality—mean-spirited, jealous of everybody. Mama, intimidated by Mimi’s unhappiness, gave her whatever she wanted, assuming that I, the “carefree one,” could fend for myself. Since Mimi could make no friends, and I was popular, like my father, I had to share my friends with her and take her everywhere with me.

  Papa took care of us all and shielded us from knowledge of the world’s seamy side. He made our decisions, saved for our dowries. In good times, if he was feeling a bit flush, he would stop at an auction house on his way home from work and buy my mother some jewelry as a surprise—a gold chain, amber earrings. He would lean on one of our leather chairs waiting for her to open the package, cherishing her excitement, anticipating her embrace. He adored my mother. They never fought. I mean it: they never fought. In the evening, she did her sewing and he read his paper and we did our homework and we had what the Israelis call shalom bait, peace in the home.

  I THINK MY father knew how to be Jewish, but he did not teach us. He must have thought we would absorb it with our mother’s milk.

  We were sent to the Judengottesdienst, the children’s service at the synagogue on Saturday afternoons. The maid was supposed to take us. But she was a Catholic, like most Austrians, and she feared the synagogue; and my mother—a working woman, dependent on her help—feared the maid. So we went infrequently and learned almost nothing. However, one song from that time stayed in my head.

  One day the Temple will be rebuilt

  And the Jews will return to Jerusalem.

  So it is written in the Holy Book.

  So it is written. Hallelujah!

  In addition to the theme of faith—Shema Yisrael. Adonai eloheynu. Adonai echod—this baby song about the Temple was all I knew of Jewish prayer and practice.

  Too bad I didn’t know more.

  Thank God I knew that much.

  Father’s restaurant closed on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. (Like our home, it did not serve pork or shellfish, but otherwise it was not kosher at all.) On these high holidays, we went to synagogue mostly to meet our relatives. Mama and Papa were distantly related; each came from a family named Hahn. Between Mama’s two sisters, and her brother, and Father’s six brothers and three sisters, there were more than thirty Hahn cousins in Vienna. You could always find some Hahn or other at the third café in the Prater. Each branch of the family observed the Jewish religion differently. For example, Aunt Gisela Kirschenbaum—one of Papa’s sisters, who also ran a restaurant—opened her place to the poor for a free seder on Passover. Mama’s brother Richard, an outright nonbeliever, married a stylish furniture heiress from Topolcany, near Bratislava. Her name was Roszi. She had been raised Orthodox, and she couldn’t stand the Hahns’ assimilated ways, so she always went home to Czechoslovakia for the holidays.

  Sometimes my parents startled me with an outburst of Jewish consciousness. For example, I once ate a blood sausage sandwich at a friend’s house. “Absolutely delicious!” I reported to Mama. She literally gagged. Her sincere horror astounded me. On another occasion—just for the sake of conversation—I asked my father if I could marry a Christian. With black eyes blazing, he answered: “No, Edith. I could not bear that. It would kill me. The answer is no.”

  Papa felt that Jews had to be better than everybody else. He expected our report cards to be better, our social consciousness to be more highly developed. He expected us to have finer manners, cleaner clothes, immaculate moral standards.

  I didn’t think about it at the time, but of course now I realize that my father’s insistence that we Jews must be better was based on our country’s firm belief that we were not as good.

  MY MOTHER’S PARENTS owned a gray stucco bungalow in Stockerau, a pretty little town north of Vienna. We went there on weekends and for holidays and birthdays. That was where my closest cousin Jultschi lived.

  When Jultschi was nine years old, her mother (Mama’s sister Elvira) dropped her off at Grandmother’s house, went home, and killed herself.

  Jultschi’s father stayed on in Vienna. But Jultschi—traumatized by her past, always needful, easily intimidated—remained with our grandparents, who raised her as though she were their own child.

  A soft, large, brown-haired, brown-eyed girl with full, deeply sculpted lips, Jultschi had a big heart and—unlike my sister Mimi—a great sense of humor. She played the piano, badly but well enough for our tone-deaf clan, and we made up operas to her good-natured banging. While I, the “intellectual,” was discovering a passion for gothic novels full of mystery and desire, Jultschi was becoming addicted to movies and swing music.

  Grandmother Hahn—a short, fat, strong woman and a strict disciplinarian—would assign us housework and then go off to the market, and of course we would not do what she asked but would instead spend the entire afternoon playing. As soon as we caught a glimpse of her coming back down the road, we would dive into the house through the open windows and get to work, so that she would find us dusting and sweeping like proper children. I am sure we never fooled her for one minute.

  Grandmother seemed always to be busy adding to the richness of the world, knitting delicate lace doilies or teaching Jultschi how to bake Stollen or tending to her hens and geese, her dog (named Mohrli), and her hundreds of potted plants. She had every sort of cactus. She would notify Mama in advance: “Klothilde! The cactus will bloom on Sunday. Bring the children to see.” And we would stand in the yard at Stockerau, admiring the hardy desert flowers as they struggled to survive in our cold country.

  Grandfather Hahn, a shopkeeper, sold sewing machines and bicycles and served as the agent for Puch motorbikes. Grandmother worked alongside him in the store on Sunday, the big shopping day for the local farmers, who would come from church, meet at the pub, have an early drink, and do their marketing for the week. They all knew my grandparents. Stockerau officials would always invite the Hahns to sit with them at carnival time, to watch as each guild gave its program.

  On Grandfather’s birthday, our task was to copy a poem out of Mama’s Wunschbuch and then recite it in Grandfather’s honor. I remember him sitting like a rotund little king listening to our pretty recitations, his eyes glistening with pride. I remember his hug.

  Near my grandparents’ house was a tributary of the Danube, where Jultschi and I loved to go swimming. To reach the water, you had to cross a high wooden bridge. One day, when I was seven, I got up before anyone else, ran down to the bridge, slipped, and went flying down and down and down into the water. I bobbed to the surface, howling and hysterical. A young man leaped in and saved me.

  After that, I was terrified of heights. I did not ski in the Alps. I did not climb to the top of towering buildings and hang socialist banners from the dome. I tried to stay close to the ground.

  IN 1928, WHEN inflation was so high in Austria that a customer’s lunch would double in price while he ate it, Papa decided to sell the restaurant.

  Luckily, he soon found work with the Kokisch family, who had employed him on the Riviera. They had now opened a new hotel in Badgastein, an Alpine resort famous for its medicinal hot springs. Papa managed the hotel’s restaurant.

  The Hotel Bristol nestled among green meadows, beneath snowy mountains, where springs of healing waters percolated up into marble spas. Wealthy families would walk along the garden pathways, feeding the
fat squirrels, murmuring their conversations in a mannerly hush. Some rich girl whose parents thought she had a little talent was always playing the piano or singing at an afternoon concert in the gazebo. We visited Papa there every summer—a heavenly life.

  As the only kosher hotel in that area, the Bristol attracted Jewish guests from everywhere. The Ochs family, who owned the New York Times, came there; and so did Sigmund Freud and the writer Sholem Asch. One day a tall blond man, wearing lederhosen and a Tirolean hat with a chamois-hair brush, came in for lunch. Papa thought surely he had come to the wrong place. But then the man took off his hat, put on a yarmulke, and stood up to make a brucha.

  “I guess even the Jews can’t always tell who the Jews are,” Papa remarked with a laugh.

  For the first time in Badgastein, we met rabbis from Poland, religious men with beautiful long beards who walked slowly through the halls of the hotel, their hands clasped behind their backs. They filled me with a sense of mystery and peace. I believe that one of them saved my life.

  I was sixteen, unwise and self-indulgent. I stayed too long in one of the baths and developed a chill and a fever. My mother put me to bed, made me tea with honey, and put compresses on my brow and wrists. As night fell, one of the Polish rabbis knocked on our door. He could not reach the shul in time for the evening prayers, he said, and asked if he could say them in our house. Of course Mama welcomed him. When he had finished his prayers, she asked if he would say a blessing for her sick daughter.

  He came to my bedside, leaned over me, and patted my hand. His face radiated warmth and good nature. He said something in Hebrew, a language I never expected to know. Then he left. And I got well.

  In later years, at moments when I thought I was going to die, I remembered that man and comforted myself with the thought that his blessing would protect me.

  Of course there were some things about working in this paradise that weren’t so wonderful, but they were part of life then, and to be truthful, we accepted them. For example, kosher slaughtering was not allowed in the province where the hotel was situated. So the schoichet had to slaughter the meat in the next province and then transport it to the Bristol. To take another example, our grandparents’ generation usually lived in Vienna’s outlying towns—Floritzdorf, Stockerau. It was not until our parents reached maturity that Jews were permitted to reside in Vienna proper.