The Nazi Officer's Wife

by Edith H. Beer

  I had collected a few reichsmarks worth of pay, and I sent the money home to Pepi with instructions for him to buy soap for Mama, some writing paper for me, and even a gift for his mother, whose favor I was still trying to win. At harvesttime, I bought apples and potatoes from the farmers, kilos of beans for pickling, asparagus, and potatoes, and I sent them home to Pepi and Mama and the Roemers and Jultschi, knowing that this bounty would be shared.

  The Jews of Polish origin had already been sent back to Poland. Now, in the summer of 1941, we heard talk that the German and Austrian Jews would be sent there as well. These deportations—or Aktions, as we called them—filled us with dread. We did not know what Poland meant then, but we knew it wasn’t good. We thought of it as a kind of uncivilized wilderness, where Germans went to colonize and subjugate the local peasantry. If Mama went to Poland, I thought, she would have to be a maid for German colonists—do their dishes, scrub their floors, iron their clothes. I could not bear to imagine her in such circumstances. My mother, a maid? Impossible!

  Frau Fleschner and the overseer assured us that as long as we worked here, our families would not be deported. I had the feeling that they tried to look out for us more and more as time went on. One Sunday, the six of us went out for a walk. While we were away, the police came snooping. The overseer said we had gone far out into the fields to work and shouldn’t be bothered. When we arrived home, he grinned and said, “Say thanks, ladies. I pulled you out of the shit again.”

  AN ENCAMPMENT OF Polish slave laborers sprawled on the outskirts of the farms. These men moved boulders for the farmers, rebuilt their houses, cleaned the pig shit out of their barns. The Poles would call to us as we went on our way to work with our hoes and spades.

  “Don’t pay any attention,” I said to my young comrades.

  But a lively dark-haired girl named Liesel Brust, eager to know more about this place where so many Jews were now going, inched a little closer to one of the men and asked: “What is it like, Poland?”

  “It’s beautiful,” he answered. He was young. He smiled. His front teeth were gone.

  “And Warsaw?”

  “Glittering palaces, museums, operas, libraries, universities full of professors—just the kind of thing that a pretty little Jew girl like you would love. Come inside, sweetheart, and I’ll tell you more about Warsaw.”

  I pulled Liesel away from him.

  “I met a Chinese man who talked the same way to me in Vienna,” I warned her. “If I had gone with him, I would be in a brothel in Kowloon at this moment. If you go into that Polish camp, you will never return, I promise you that.”

  I thought I was talking about a bunch of sex-starved prisoners on the German plains. How could I know then that I might as well have been talking about Poland itself?

  The harder I worked, the thinner I became, the closer I came to losing hope and imagining death, the more I was overwhelmed by tenderness for every living thing. I made no distinctions among people anymore; I held no grudges and appreciated everyone. We found mice in the hut. Instead of killing them, we left crumbs for them to eat. An impaired chick was hatched in the egg house. I brought it back to our room and fed it carefully for three days before it died.

  I wrote to Pepi that there were two spirits at war in my breast. The first felt that there would be no end to this suffering, that we would all die here in the mud. The second believed that a miracle would happen: the RAF would drop a bomb right on Hitler and Goebbels, the Nazis would disappear, I would be a free woman again, and we would get married and have many babies.

  I MADE A true friend in Osterburg, Mina Katz. An adorable, lighthearted girl of eighteen, blond and graceful, she was somehow immune to depression and always saw the bright side. She came from a large, impoverished family and brought nothing with her to the labor camp except an inferiority complex. She could have been a fine scholar if only fate had given her an education.

  Mina and her older associate Frau Grünwald had been working for a Jewish-owned delivery company. It had been taken over by a Nazi woman, Maria Niederall, who needed the two Jewish employees to teach her the business. As time went on, this woman grew fond of them and wanted to keep them working for her. However, the Gestapo had other plans. Mina and Frau Grünwald received regular packages from their former employer—sumptuous assortments of food, soap, and clothing that only a well-connected Aryan could have provided.

  Like a candle in the fields, Mina carried a glow of good nature about her. She giggled. She sang silly love songs. She invented stories. She brought little gifts to everyone. We all loved her. She and I began to work side by side at every task, cutting the asparagus canes, binding the huge stacks of hay, and pulling the new potatoes out of the damp black ground. We tossed the potatoes into twenty-five-kilo baskets, then hauled them to a waiting wagon, each of us carrying one handle of a basket. We wore wooden shoes. We told each other about our sisters and our schools. We worked without thinking of our work, so quickly that one girl dubbed us the “racehorses” of the bean fields. While wrestling beets from the ground, while mulching tiny bean shoots, I began to teach Mina what I knew—economy, law, politics, literature. She drank it in. This education in the fields nourished both of us and kept us going.

  In July we baled hay. The sweat ran down our faces. We burned. I smeared mud on my arms and Mina’s arms. I wrote home asking for any kind of skin cream, but of course, there was none to be had, not because it had disappeared from Vienna but because the Jews were not permitted to buy anything anymore, except what their meager rations allowed. You see these spots on my face? They appeared in later years. They are little black reminders of the blazing sun in Osterburg.

  Sometimes, in the wild riot of my thoughts, I had visions of peace, of a perfect rural community, like those in socialist literature, where love of life would lock out war and hatred.

  One day when I was coming out of the bean fields, I saw a group of people taking a rest in the shade of a chestnut tree at the edge of a neighboring farm. There were some old women, Germans with weathered faces and hands like iron. There were some young Jewish girls—“H’s” from Vienna, like me—and some German boys, too young for the Wehrmacht, wearing wide-brimmed hats; and a few Frenchmen. No one looked like anyone’s boss; no one looked like anyone’s slave. They were all just sitting in the shade, drinking from a pitcher of water.

  “Come sit down for a moment, Edith,” one of the girls called. I joined them. A young Frenchman laid before us on the grass a battered photo of a little girl.

  “Elle est très belle,” I said.

  Tears cut pathways through the dirt on his face.

  So much for my vision.

  IN AUGUST THE rains came, again untimely. The harvest, which had started out so well, was now ruined and there was not enough food. We hoped that after the corn harvest, we would be able to use our few marks of “pay” to buy extra food from Frau Mertens. Realizing that if it was bad with us, it must be awful in Vienna, I received permission to go to the post office with a sack of potatoes.

  “You can no longer send potatoes to Vienna,” said the postmistress very loudly, so that her boss in the back room could hear.

  “Why not?”

  “Not enough potatoes to feed the Germans. The Jews will have to eat the rain.”

  I turned away from her. She grabbed my arm and whispered into my ear, “On the outside of the package, say it is clothing. Then it will go through.”

  We now could see that our letters were being opened and read. I was terrified of what I had written, of what my mother or Pepi or Christl might write. We heard about denunciations and deportations. Suddenly there was so much to hide. If my mother wrote to me and said, “Remember, darling, I am saving my fur coat for you,” maybe somebody would read that letter and come and steal the fur coat and hurt my mother. If Pepi wrote to me that he stayed in the little park near the old café and read his paper until the evening, maybe the Gestapo would read the letter and go and find him there.

&
nbsp; “Destroy my letters!” I wrote to him. “Read them and put them in your heart and then burn them! I will do the same with yours. And when you write, use abbreviations. Never mention places or people.”

  We began to call the Gestapo “PE,” for Prinz Eugentrasse, where they had their headquarters. We said “going to school” to signify reporting for deportation, since people being deported were often assembled at school buildings.

  By now I had begun to beg Pepi to marry me, hoping that if he did, we would be able to emigrate like Milo and Mimi, or at least that we might be happy together. “A married woman with a ring on her finger!” I thought. “Able to have children! What unspeakable joy!” I treasured the notion that even if we couldn’t get out, I would be safer married and sharing Pepi’s invisibility. He said he loved me. He spoke of his passion. But in response to my proposals, he said nothing, neither giving me hope nor ending it.

  We all thought about converting to Christianity. What would have once seemed unthinkable, a shameful betrayal of our parents and our culture, now seemed like a perfectly reasonable ploy. I thought of the Marranos in Spain, outwardly converted Christians, waiting for the terror of the Inquisition to end so they could follow their true faith again. Perhaps I could pretend to be a Christian too. Surely God would understand. And it might help. Why not try it?

  I took myself into the town of Osterburg and stared at the statue of Jesus in front of the local church, trying to will myself to love him. It was wartime. Men were at the front. And yet I saw no candles in the church, no kneeling worshipers praying for the safe return of sons and husbands and fathers. The Nazis had done a wonderful job of discouraging faith in anything but the Führer.

  I wrote to Pepi for instructions on how to convert. What papers did I need? What affidavits? What signatures? I read the Parables. I found pictures of the Holy Family. I waxed poetic when I wrote to my lover: “Look how beautiful the mother is! How content and sweet! Look how proud the father is, how delighted with the child, the gift he has been given! How I wish we could have a family as happy and close as this one!”

  Somehow what had started out as praise of the Holy Family had evolved into a celebration of the family Pepi and I might have, if only he would marry me … if only he would say he wanted me … if only he would leave his mother—and if only I would get my menstrual periods again.

  For you see, I had lost my periods. They had gone, disappeared. “You should be happy,” I said to myself. “Think of the convenience.” But in truth, I was in despair. At night, I lay on my straw bed, trying not to think about the pain in my back, trying to force my stiff fingers to make a fist, and I prayed: “Come back! Come back!” But they did not.

  I SAT ON an animal trough, writing letters, the laundry flapping around my head. Trude sat down beside me.

  “Stop writing, Edith; you are always writing. Listen to me. How long has it been?”

  “Since June.”

  “Me too. Liesel and Frieda and Lucy too. I wrote home and told my mother and she asked the doctor and the doctor said it comes from overwork. What does your doctor say?”

  “Dr. Kohn told my mother I must be pregnant,” I answered.

  We laughed until we wept.

  From Vienna, Pepi wrote obliquely in his new code that it was silly for me to think of converting now, that the time when such a gesture might have proved useful had long since passed.

  Frau Mertens lent us to her neighbors the Grebes, who were a little shorthanded. Now we were just like the other prisoners of war, the Serbs, the Poles, the emaciated Frenchmen—except that we were not really like them, because we had no country.

  I clung to the belief that I would be able to go home in October. What was there to do on the farm in the winter months? We were seasonal workers, were we not? The prospective return of cold weather terrified me—the rheumy damp, the frozen mornings. How would we survive here?

  I thought about my mother, with her dark hair and her perky little gait, the marvelous sweet cakes that fell like the food of the gods from her sugary fingers, her wry ironic commentary on the racist fools who were destroying the earth. I was twenty-seven years old, and I still dreamed of her sweet embrace, her gentle voice. You must become a mother, Edith, because obviously you have a gift for it. I thought about home, the warm cobbled streets, the music. My hands cracked the asparagus canes and tossed the potatoes into their bins, and my mind sang waltzes to itself and danced with my true love.

  “Come back, Edith,” said the overseer. “You are in Vienna.”

  He was right. I had learned to fill myself up with memories and lock out Osterburg, a fabulous partitioning of the mind that preserved the soul. When the local police arrived and told us we must wear a yellow Magen David at all times, I imagined that such a silly thing could never happen in Vienna, which I still put on a pedestal as a model of sophistication. And then Trude received a letter saying that all Jews in Vienna had to wear the six-pointed Jewish star as well.

  I couldn’t believe it. Was it possible? Had Vienna descended to the level of an ignorant rural backwater? The idea horrified me. You see how long it takes for us to abandon treasured assumptions.

  The police told us we must write to Vienna for the yellow stars, and that when they arrived, we must wear them at all times. But if we had done so, no shopkeeper in town would have waited on us. So we didn’t wear them. Our supervisors on the farm seemed to care not at all. I believe that in their way they had began to want to keep us content enough to go on obediently working for them, even more than they wanted to please the police.

  PEPI WROTE THAT Jultschi’s husband, Otto Ondrej, had died on the Eastern Front.

  Poor Jultschi, the weakest among us, the most beset by tragedy, was alone again. I could not bear to think of her, and yet she did not leave my mind. “My funeral clothes are still in Vienna,” I wrote to Pepi. “Tell her to take them.”

  Lest I have any doubt that my youthful certainties had changed forever, Rudolf Gischa wrote to me from the Sudetanland.

  “I was surprised to learn that you were still alive,” he said frankly. (Why? Was there a new policy? Were they getting tired of having us work for them? Were the Jews expected to be dead now?) “I feel sorry for anyone who is not a German,” he said. “It is my greatest joy to know that I am privileged to create the great empire of the Reich for the German Volk according to the principles laid down by our Führer. Heil Hitler!”

  One of the girls who had been allowed to leave, Liesel Brust, was more courageous than most of us and had always tried to get to know the foreign prisoners. Now she sent me from Vienna a coded letter with a large package of men’s underwear and asked me to leave it by a certain boulder in a certain field on a certain night and then to tell the French prisoners, who were in rags, where they could find it.

  I had never done anything like this—an act of political sabotage! To be caught meant banishment to one of the proliferating concentration camps, but to refuse meant such dishonor that I could not even bear the thought of it. I waited for my roommates to fall asleep. Softly, softly I slid open the window and eased myself out. It was a hot night, cloudy and thick with tomorrow’s rain. Under my shirt, the package shifted and crunched. It seemed to me a thunderous sound. I took a deep breath and then raced across the open fields and plunged into the corn. The sharp stalks sliced at me. My heart pounded. I did not once dare to look back, for fear of seeing someone behind me. The boulder bulged in the distance at the end of a bean field. I crouched as low as I could, ran, left the package, and took one look around me. I saw no one, no light in the farmhouse, no patch of clear sky to let a star shine through. I heard distant thunder. My hands were slick with sweat. I lowered my head and sprinted back to the workers’ hut.

  Trude was sitting up on her bed, her eyes wide with terror at my absence. I put one hand over her mouth, the other over mine.

  The next day Franz pulled me behind his horse and plow.

  “Where is the underwear?”

  “I
left it.”

  “It wasn’t there.”

  “I left it exactly where Liesel said.”

  “Merde! Someone else took it.”

  I gasped. Maybe I had been seen! Maybe the authorities had opened and read Liesel’s letter! We would be arrested! I imagined the barracks at Dachau. All that day and the next and the next, I waited for the Gestapo to come.

  They never did, though, and we never found out who had taken the underwear.

  I was put into a new room. I slept under the window. In the night I awoke and discovered that my face was wet. It wasn’t tears. It was rain. I rolled away from the broken window and went back to sleep. So the bed got wet—so what?

  AS THE TIME for my return to Vienna approached, I tried to tell the truth of my heart to Pepi. I told him how much I regretted that we had not left when we could, what a terrible mistake it was, how we had no one to blame but ourselves. “We cooked this soup,” I said, “and now we must eat it, you and I. I promise you that I will always be a good comrade, whatever may happen. Count the days which are still between you and me. Another fourteen days. Then I will be with you.”

  Mina turned toward me in her bed and raised herself up on one arm. The moon lit her face. “Tell me,” she said. “Tell me how it will be.”

  “I will come in at the Western Station,” I said. “I will step off the train and not see him right away. But then he will see me, and he will come to me without calling my name so that all of a sudden he will just be there, suddenly, like magic—that is how he always appears. He will have flowers for me, and his wicked smile. We will go home together through the Belvedere and over the Schwartzenbergerplatz. We will go to his room and make love for three days, and he will feed me oranges.”

  She fell back on her mattress, groaning. She had never had a lover.

  We packed our suitcases. Nine of our friends, among them Frau Grünwald and Frau Hachek, received tickets for home. They were transformed by delight and anticipation, as they put on their city clothes for the journey. We could not wait to be them.