The Nazi Officer's Wife

by Edith H. Beer

  When we returned from the beet fields, Frau Fleschner assembled those of us who were left in front of the hut. We eagerly awaited her announcement, sure that she would tell us the day, the time, the train.

  “You are not going to Vienna,” she said. “You are going to Aschersleben to work in the paper factory there. Consider yourselves lucky. Remember that as long as you are working for the Reich, your families are safe.”

  Mina began to cry. I put my arm around her.

  “Please tell Mama,” I wrote to Pepi on October 12, 1941. “I can’t write to her. When will we see each other again? Life is so hard now. I don’t know anything about what is happening in Vienna! For today I can’t write anything more. I kiss you. Your desperate Edith.”

  SIX

  The Slave Girls of Aschersleben

  WE STOOD IN the center of the Arbeitslager—the work camp—at Aschersleben, wearing our cleanest work clothes, our least muddy shoes, and the yellow star marked “Jude” which we had been required to wear for the train ride and which we could now never take off. We were brown as the autumn leaves.

  The girls stared at us, astonished, just as we stared at them. Because you see, they were beautiful. They had manicured hands, lovely hairstyles. They wore stockings! The workhouse itself seemed beautiful to us; it was a bright three-story building with a kitchen, a shower room, dayrooms, windows with curtains, and pictures on the walls. I thought: “This place is going to be wonderful compared with Osterburg!”

  A big girl named Lily Kramer brought us a cup of acorn coffee. She had a university degree. Her spectacles sat low on her long nose.

  “They let you dress like that in Osterburg?”

  “It was a farm.”

  “Well, here, you’ve got to look as though you’re going to business,” she said. She leaned forward and spoke very quietly. “They like to make it seem that we are real workers, earning real wages, so that they won’t have to think about who we really are, and in case visitors see us, they will not be disturbed or upset.”

  “Are there many visitors?” Mina asked eagerly. She always seized upon the positive, that girl.

  “No,” answered Lily. “There are no visitors. Are you by any chance interested in chamber music?” We squinted at her. “How about drama? Schiller?” Was she crazy? “Too bad.”

  She sighed and drifted off, like Yelena in Uncle Vanya, weary to death of the fools who surrounded her.

  We settled in. The girls came and went constantly in their pretty dresses, all marked with the compulsory yellow star. At six in the morning, the curling irons were heating up for the day’s coiffures. Initially I thought the girls were just trying to keep up appearances. But soon I realized it was more than that. They were trying to attract a protector. Not necessarily a lover, for by this time—October 1941—an Aryan could be imprisoned for consorting with a Jew. No, the slave girls of Aschersleben were just trying to find someone who would want to have them around and keep them employed so they and their families would be allowed to remain in the Reich.

  In later years, I saw pictures of the paper factory of H. C. Bestehorn in Aschersleben. It had an attractive front entrance, a courtyard, and windows adorned with boxes of flowers. I never saw that side of Bestehorn. We came every day from our barracks, guarded by our pretty, young, mean-spirited camp commander, Frau Drebenstadt, and went through the back door straight into the factory. I counted eighty-two of us, but there might have been more.

  Trude, Mina, and I were assigned to the stamping machines, old green Victorian monsters that punched out cardboard boxes for products like macaroni, tapioca, cereal, and coffee—none of which we got to eat.

  I stood at one machine. With my left hand, I pushed four cartons under the blades. The blades came down. I turned the cardboard. The blades came down. I pulled the cardboard out with my right hand and pushed in four more sheets with my left hand. The blades came down. I stood in one place and pushed the cardboard in, turned it, pulled it out, pushed it in, from six-thirty in the morning until eleven forty-five and then from one-fifteen to five forty-five. The blades came down like rockets. Pang! Pang! Pang! The roar of the motors, the beating of the blades, and the swishing of the cardboard were incessant.

  Our department head, Herr Felgentreu, a confirmed Nazi, proud of his job, waited for the engineer, Herr Lehmann, to set the machine timer, then synchronized his stopwatch. “You!” he barked. “Start now!” I worked like crazy. Push, turn, push, pull, push turn push pull push turn Pang! Pang! as fast as I could, snatching my fingers back from the knives. Ten minutes flew by. Suddenly he shouted “You! Stop!”

  I was sweating. My heart was racing. The tips of my fingers burned from pushing and pulling the cardboard. Felgentreu counted how many boxes I had stamped out, then multiplied by six and came up with a quota for the hour. Then he multiplied by eight and came up with my quota for the day: 20,000 boxes.

  “But it’s impossible, sir,” I protested. “One cannot work eight hours at the same rate that one works for ten minutes.”

  He wasn’t even listening. He was walking away. I started to run after him. Herr Gebhardt, our supervisor, reached out and stopped me. The forewoman who worked under him put her finger over her mouth, signaling me to keep me quiet. I saw that it was the only finger besides her thumb that remained on her right hand.

  That first day, I produced 12,500 boxes. This wasn’t backbreaking labor as in the fields, but when the whistle blew I was so tired that I could barely walk.

  For the evening meal, we received two pieces of bread and a cup of coffee.

  The second day, I was told that if I fell short of my quota again, I would have to stay late to make up what was missing. At the last whistle, I had produced 17,000 boxes. They kept me working. By then I was so weary and so hungry that it took me several more hours to reach my quota. As I was finally leaving the factory floor, an Aryan worker shoved a broom at me and ordered me to sweep up. “No, Edith,” said Herr Gebhardt. “You go and have your dinner.”

  The bulk of our food came at lunchtime in a brown ceramic bowl, a kind of improvised mixture of potatoes, cabbage, and celery, “arithmetically equidistant between vegetable and liquid,” said Lily, our resident intellectual. That was a fair description.

  In addition to the factory work, I had kitchen duty one week out of every month. I cleaned the tables, peeled potatoes, washed the pots. Standing before the kettle of boiling potatoes, ladling one into every brown ceramic bowl, I thought: “I could slip one into my pocket. It would burn, but who cares?” The Nazi cook was watching me. She knew exactly what I was thinking. What girl had not succumbed to notions of potato theft in this place? Frightened, I put the potato in another bowl and dreamed that it was in my pocket.

  At our dinner of bread and coffee, Mina whispered, “Do they mean to starve us, Edith?”

  “I guess we’ll have to try and fill up at lunch,” I answered. “Meanwhile, we’ll write home and ask for food.”

  “The Jews haven’t got enough food for themselves at home,” Trude whispered. “When my sister was married to an Aryan, she and her children received plenty of food. But she had to give food to my parents because their Jewish ration stamps bought them so little.”

  “Where does your sister live?”

  “I don’t even know if she lives. Her husband threw her out. He told the Gestapo she was dead and kept the children.”

  “But how could she bear to let him keep the children?” Mina cried.

  Our normally calm, well-behaved Trude grabbed Mina angrily. “Don’t you understand that she was lucky that he just said she was dead and didn’t hand her over to the Gestapo himself? When will you stop being such an idiot, Mina?”

  At first glance, the rules at Aschersleben seemed just like the rules at Osterburg. But then you saw that there were differences. A ramrod heartlessness had set in.

  “One may go to the toilet only on the floor on which one lives,” said the rules. “Otherwise one must pay a fifty-pfennig fine. One may wash
only on specific days. One may not shower after eight o’clock. The beds must be made according to the prescribed system, corners turned under, then under again, blankets unwrinkled. Nothing may stand on the cupboard. One may not leave the home except for Saturday from 2 to 6 and Sunday from 9 to 11 and 2 to 6, and one may not go out without the yellow star. Jewesses may not go into stores. They may not buy anything.”

  Mina showed me the bread rations that her former boss, Maria Niederall, had sent. “What shall we do with these?” she asked. “Frau Niederall thinks we can buy bread with them.”

  “I’ll send them to Pepi,” I answered, “and he’ll buy bread and send it back to us.”

  But, you may ask me, wouldn’t the bread be stale by then? Stale, hard, and even moldy? The answer is yes, of course. Now try to imagine how little such considerations had come to mean to us. We gratefully ate bread that was fourteen days old. We wrapped it in damp rags to restore some moisture and gnawed on it like mice.

  On Saturday, I got “paid.” Twelve reichsmarks and 72 pfennigs. More than 6 reichsmarks were deducted for room and board. Several more were deducted to recompense Bestehorn for the extra power I had used to make my quota. I ended up with 4 reichsmarks and 19 pfennigs. Since there was nothing to spend it on, I tried to go to the post office to send this tiny bit of money home to Mama. The guard at the door would not let me pass.

  “You need permission from Frau Drebenstadt.”

  “But she’s off today.”

  “You should have gotten permission last week.”

  “But if Mama doesn’t hear from me, she’ll think something terrible has happened!”

  “And if I let you out with that letter, the factory manager will think I have allowed you to steal something.”

  “What could I steal? There’s nothing in the factory but cardboard.”

  “Get back inside,” he said. He was an old man, but he carried a stick and he was much too frightened not to be cruel. “I warn you.”

  One night Trude had an upset stomach. Since all the toilets were occupied, she used a toilet on the next floor. When she came down, Frau Drebenstadt was waiting for her and, without a word, repeatedly slapped her face. Trude was too shocked to cry.

  “Your pay will be docked fifty pfennigs,” Frau Drebenstadt said. “Mail privileges are suspended for a week.”

  That made Trude cry. The mail meant everything to us. When it was cut off—a punishment called Postperre, used for many infractions—we felt completely lost.

  OUR FOREWOMAN HAD been working at Bestehorn all her life. She was an unattractive woman, bent over, with swollen red elbows, but her eyes held a smile for us. She waited until Herr Felgentreu disappeared around the corner of a machine, then:

  “Listen to me, Edith. If you stack the cardboard carefully, you can shove in five pieces instead of four.” She showed us how. “If the blades break, tell me, and I’ll get the engineer to replace them. Don’t let anyone else see you.” She hurried away.

  I tried it. Production increased by twenty percent in a few seconds. A miracle! Immediately the eight of us working on those machines began to push in five sheets of cardboard. After fifteen minutes the forewoman passed by and with her eyes told us that Felgentreu was coming our way. We went back to stacks of four.

  Around four o’clock, when our bosses were having tea, the forewoman bumped me with her bony hip. This was a sign that she would take over for fifteen minutes while I went on a break. Every day she gave one of us a break like that.

  There was no more “reason” for her kindness than for the cruelty of the camp commander who had slapped Trude. It was the individuals who made their own rules in this situation. No one forced them to behave in an unkind manner. The opportunity to act decently toward us was always available to them. Only the tiniest number of them ever used it.

  In November, despite my careful planning and pacing, they gave me a new daily quota: 35,000 boxes. My spirits sank. I was sure I would fail, and that if I failed, Mama would be sent to Poland. However, Mina had a different attitude.

  “In honor of your new quota!” she said brightly, presenting me with a red ribbon. “You are clearly one of ‘Bestehorn’s best’! Mazel tov!”

  Our old friend Liesel Brust wrote that she was working in the Jewish Ration Center in Vienna, that she had seen our families, that everyone was all right. That letter gave me strength. I wore the red ribbon in my hair and attacked the machine with renewed vigor.

  Then they raised the quota to 3,800 boxes per hour. I made it because I always took five pieces of cardboard instead of four and worked like lightning. Naturally, I broke the blade. Felgentreu docked my pay for the extra cost and yelled at me. I hung my head in contrition, a performance at which I now excelled. However, in a few days I was loading in five sheets again. Gebhardt saw me—I know he did. However, he said nothing.

  The skin on my fingertips wore through, rubbed to a bloody mess by the cardboard. I would have been happy to use gloves, but you couldn’t run the machine wearing gloves; they slowed you down and increased the likelihood that your fingers would be chopped off. So I just bled.

  “We must keep working!” I said to my friends. “As long as we keep working, they are all right.”

  In late November, we saw two of the third-floor girls standing at the barracks door wearing their city coats and holding their suitcases. They were going home.

  “Oh, lucky you!” Mina cried. “Are you getting married? Are you getting divorced? We heard that a girl from the Nordhausen Arbeitslager went home because she was pregnant. Are you pregnant?”

  The girls laughed. Pregnancy had become a dark joke by then, because so few of us were still menstruating.

  “Our parents are being sent to school,” one girl explained. “We are going back to be with them.”

  Soon three more people were selected to be sent back to Vienna to accompany their parents to Poland. Bestehorn, however—apparently short of labor—would not let them go, so their mothers and fathers had to journey east without them. On the one hand, it comforted us to know that the company would fight to keep its workers. On the other hand, I lived in terror that such a circumstance would one day separate me from Mama, and that she would somehow be sent without me.

  “You must tell me the minute you hear anything!” I wrote to her. (“I will need a few days to get permission to travel from the Gestapo,” I wrote to Pepi. “So please please tell Mama she must let me know immediately if she’s going to school!”)

  I WENT TO work in the dark and returned in the dark, so I couldn’t tell when the day ended and soon lost track of time. I would put the wrong dates on my letters. I wrote to Mama twice a day, sometimes even more, and sent a cry of questions into the dark.

  Who is at war against whom? I wrote to Pepi during one of the many mail suspensions. I can’t keep it straight. We never see a newspaper. There’s one little radio in the dining area, but we have no time and no strength to listen. We know nothing except rumors. When will this war be over? When will our liberators come? How is it in Vienna? Do you have enough food? Tell Mama to stop sending me food, because I am sure she does not have enough for herself. Can you go out? Are you able to walk in the streets? Can you work at anything? Is your mother able to support you? Burn my letters! Read them and then burn them!

  Between the lines, he could read: Do you remember me? Do you still love me?

  Rumors drove us wild with worry. We heard that the Nazis, in their zeal to “purify” their race, were actually killing the retarded, the insane, and the senile with poison gas. “Oh, this is too much; this must be somebody’s propaganda,” Lily and I said to each other. We heard that people in the concentration camps were literally dying from overwork, that sadistic guards conceived inhuman tortures for those who couldn’t keep up: made them carry heavy stones for no purpose, made them stand all night in the rain, cut their rations in half.

  And we heard awful things about conditions in the Polish ghettos. One girl received a letter from her
boyfriend in the Wehrmacht. “Stay in Aschersleben!” he warned. In the Polish city where he was stationed, he said, the ghettos were crowded; there was no food, no work, no space to breathe. People were falling sick and dying from lack of care. And every day, more transports brought more Jewish people, from all the countries Germany was conquering.

  When the Gestapo heard about this letter, they burst into the barracks, dragged the shrieking girl away, and ransacked her cupboard and tore her mattress off the bed, looking for other letters. From their reaction, we all understood that what the soldier had written must be true. Poland must be worse than Aschersleben.

  “Tell Z not to write to me!” I wrote hysterically to Pepi. “We must not be caught corresponding with the military! It is forbidden!”

  DECEMBER 1941 BROUGHT the grimmest Christmas of my life so far. Yet we were all obsessed with giving gifts. I asked Pepi to buy an umbrella for Mama—“the most elegant and modern,” I insisted—or maybe some earrings or a pretty box for her face powder. I wanted to believe that she was still my beautiful Mama, with earrings and face powder and any need at all for an elegant umbrella. Fantasies; we all had them.

  One girl, whose father had been sent to Buchenwald, asked her boyfriend at home to buy a shaving kit for him, then wrapped it beautifully and attached a card that said, “To my dear father for Christmas, from your loving daughter.” She left it in a cupboard, imagining that when he came out of the concentration camp, she would give it to him.

  One of the unluckiest girls among us had come from Poland to study medicine in Vienna in 1933. Can you imagine worse timing? She had long ago lost touch with her family and received nothing from anybody, so I gave her a loaf of mama’s bread. It was hard as a rock.

  “Wonderful!” she wept. “Just like my mama’s bread. Someday I will ask my mother to bake a loaf of bread for you too, Edith!”