The Nazi Officer's Wife

by Edith H. Beer

  In less than a week, I was back in Vienna. The farmer’s wife packed up bread and ham and cheese and country Stollen for me. I laid the package down on Jultschi’s table. We watched little Otti gnaw at the cake with his tiny new teeth. That at least was a pleasure.

  CHRISTL MET ME in a café. She was prettier and stronger than ever, but a line of tension had stiffened her mouth. She was still hiding Bertschi wherever she could. A number of boys who had courted her and her sister had been lost in the war.

  “Remember Anton Rieder, the one who studied to be a diplomat?”

  “No. Don’t say it. No.”

  “He died in France.”

  I wept for Anton. Maybe we could have saved each other.

  Christl feared for her father, who was working with the Wehrmacht as an engineer on the Russian front. “The radio ridicules the Russians,” she said. “Tells us every day how inferior they are, how Bolshevism has left their people starving and made them stupid. But my mother was a Russian. And she bore the pain of her illness like Athena. And I think we will have more trouble from the Russians than our Führer knows.” She threw her arm around my shoulders. “What will you do?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I will have to go to Poland.”

  “Stick with this Niederall woman,” Christl said. “She’s well connected. As a reward for her early support of the party, she got the shop that belonged to that nice Achter family—they at least were wise enough to get out of here early on. Unlike you, my brilliant friend.”

  She gave me a playful shove. I didn’t laugh. As Jultschi said, there was a time to be funny and now was not the time.

  FRAU NIEDERALL SAT at her highly polished dining table, pouring real coffee from a delicate porcelain pot.

  “The way you ate the other day, I was sure you would love the meals at Käthe’s uncle’s farm. But I hear you could hardly keep down a mouthful.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to appear ungrateful.”

  “You appear to be sick. Under ordinary circumstances, I’d send you right to hospital. Tell me, did you have an Uncle Ignatz Hoffman, a physician in Floritzdorf?”

  “Yes. He killed himself.”

  “I knew him,” she said. “When I was a little girl I lived in that district, and I became very ill and your uncle saved my life. After he died, his wife needed help to take their things out of Austria.”

  “Ah! So you were the one …”

  I leaned toward her, eager to understand who she was, why she had become a Nazi.

  “As a young girl, I went to work for Doktor Niederall. I was not so good at shorthand, but I was excellent at other things. He found me a nice apartment and kept me there. That’s all most men want, you know, Edith—they want a woman waiting, in a comfortable room, with a good meal ready and a warm bed. For years, I was his open secret. But he could not divorce his wife, whom he hated, and who hated him, because the Catholic laws of our God-fearing country forbade divorce.

  “The Nazis said they would change the divorce laws. So I supported them. And they repaid me. I am at last Frau Doktor. Too late to have children, I am sorry to say, but not too late to enjoy the respect that comes with legitimacy.”

  Is it not amazing that such a fine woman would align herself with monsters just to acquire a wedding band?

  CHRISTL GAVE ME food. I slept in the back of her shop. In the night, the watchman came by with his light. I hid behind a wall of boxes, afraid to breathe, thinking: “If they find me, my friend who has hidden me will go to a concentration camp. I have to find someplace else to stay!”

  I ran into Uncle Felix Roemer on the street. He passed me, I walked on a way, and then I turned and followed him into an alley. The Gestapo had come to his flat and demanded to see his papers, but he said he didn’t have his papers because he was trying to emigrate to South Africa and had sent them there. And the investigator had believed him. Not all the SS were as bright as Colonel Eichmann, you see.

  I stayed only one night with Uncle Felix. To stay longer was too dangerous. If the neighbors noticed this old man harboring a young girl, they might take a second look. I lay listening to his harsh old man’s breath as he slept, and I thought: “If we are caught, they will send him to a concentration camp. He will never survive it. I have to find another place to stay.”

  My mother had written me that my cousin Selma, the daughter of my father’s oldest brother Isidore, had been assigned to a transport. When her boyfriend heard about this, he ran away from the Arbeitslager at Steyr and returned to Vienna, so he could go to Poland with her.

  This story inspired me. “Come with me to Poland,” I said to Pepi. “At least we’ll be together there.”

  He did not agree, but he used this idea successfully to threaten his mother. “Edith must have a place to stay!” he insisted. “If you don’t help us, I will go east with her.”

  Alarmed, she gave him the key to another flat in their building that belonged to a vacationing neighbor. I slept there several nights. But I could not wash there or use the toilet or turn on a light—people would have thought burglars had broken in and would call the police. I don’t think I ever even undressed in that place. Anna came in the mornings. She would beckon me to the door, look around to make sure that nobody was around, then push me out, saying: “Go. Go quickly.”

  I was a wreck.

  I wandered like a derelict, in a trance of worry. Where would I sleep tonight? Where was Mama? If I gave up and went to Poland, would I find her? Where would I sleep tonight? Distracted, I wandered into the path of a young man on a bicycle. He swerved so as not to hit me.

  “Watch where you’re going!”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He smiled. I remember him as a wiry little fellow, wearing shorts. “Well, no harm done,” he said. “But now that I’ve spared your life, that surely entitles me to walk with you a bit.” I was terrified of him, but he didn’t know that. He just kept chattering on. “The damn Nazis have ruined Vienna with all their checkpoints and road blocks and such. If you ask me we’d be better off with Von Schuschnigg, wherever he may be, but if you say I said that, I’ll deny it. Come on, let’s stop for a cold drink; what do you say?”

  “Thank you, I have to go, but thank you …”

  “Oh come on, half an hour …”

  “No, really …”

  He looked hurt and maybe a little angry. That frightened me terribly. So I sat with him for a while and he talked and talked. Finally he let me go on my way.

  “Here’s something to remember me by,” he said, and handed me a little Saint Anthony’s medal. My eyes filled with tears. “Oh, my, now don’t go on like that, it’s not a proposal of marriage after all, just a good-luck charm …”

  I kept that medal for the rest of my life.

  TO HAVE A proper wash, I went on “ladies’ day” to Amalienbad, the public baths off Favoritenstrasse in the Tenth District. This was a working-class area where no one was likely to know me. Far from the center of the city, the bathhouse served the many Viennese who had toilets but no bathtubs at home. No guards stood at the doors. There were no signs prohibiting Jews. No one asked any questions or demanded to see any papers.

  I washed in the shallow pool and soaped and rinsed my hair under the spray and sat for a bit in the dense fog of the steam bath, feeling safe enough to dose off.

  Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder. I jumped, started to scream.

  “Shhhh. It’s me. Remember me?”—a tall heavy girl with delicate misted spectacles and a big smile.

  It was Lily Kramer, the cultural leader of the Aschersleben Arbeitslager. I was so happy to see her that I could not stop hugging her. Lily said that her father had made it out to New Zealand, and she herself was hiding with the governess who had helped to raise her, who lived in this neighborhood.

  “How do you stand the tension?” I asked.

  I expected her habitual cynicism. Instead, I got Schiller. “‘Man is a greater thing than you have thought him,’” she said, quoting t
he lines of the Marquis de Posa, the role she had played in Don Carlos. “‘And he will burst the bonds of lengthy slaughter, and will demand his consecrated rights.’ I believe that, Edith. I believe that the world will rise up against this tyrant Hitler and send him to hell.”

  I have no idea to this day whether my friend Lily made it through the war. But I must tell you, at that moment, I saw absolutely no reason to share her optimism.

  “FIND ME A room,” I said to Pepi in the park that night.

  “There is no place,” he protested.

  “The best-connected young man in Vienna, the lawyer-without-portfolio for everyone who needs official correspondence, cannot find a place for his old girlfriend?”

  “Why didn’t you stay in Hainburg? They were ready to board you, but you …”

  “Because I could not stand to listen to all the Nazi talk! When my mama might be starving in some ghetto in Poland! When my friends are all scattered—maybe dead, God forbid! Mina and Trude and Berta and Lucy and Anneliese and Frau Crohn and Käthe and …”

  “Shh, my darling, my little mouse, shh, don’t cry.”

  “Tell your mother to move in with her husband Herr Hofer in Ybbs, and let me stay in your apartment with you!”

  “She’s afraid that if she moves, they will find me!” he said. “You don’t know what it has been like here. They won’t let me work because I am a Jew. But if I go out, they don’t know why I am not working and they think I am a deserter from the army. I tried to work as a chimney sweep because I would be hidden in the chimneys and my face would be obscured by the soot, but still someone recognized me and I had to disappear again. I tried to learn bookbinding, but I have no gift for these artistic things. I am afraid to show myself in the street for fear that someone who knew me will wonder why I am still here and report me. Everyone is afraid, Edith. You don’t understand what it can mean to be involved with a person like you who is wanted by the Gestapo.”

  He looked pale and bald and delicate in the moonlight—like a child, not like a man. I felt so sorry for him. I felt so tired and hopeless. I had come back to Vienna for him, because I was sure in my heart that no matter what he said in his letters, when he saw me, he would want me again, and we would live in hiding in this city for the rest of the war. But it was a vain and stupid hope. The focus of my life had been my love affair with Pepi Rosenfeld, and the Nazis had destroyed that. They had made him afraid of me.

  I WALKED THE streets all through July. I sat in the cinema, just to sit in the dark, to rest. One day I saw a Wochenshau—a newsreel—of Jews being herded into a camp. “These people are murderers,” said the announcer. “Murderers finally meeting with the punishment they deserve.” I ran out of the cinema. The streets were blazing. I walked and walked past the tramway. Someone called to me with a tone of warm surprise: “Fräulein Hahn!”

  “No,” I said. “No!”

  I didn’t even look at whoever had called to me. I ran onto the tram, sat down, and rode somewhere, anywhere.

  I knocked on Jultschi’s door. She took me in, but she was weeping. “I have a child here, Edith,” she said. “I have applied for papers for my child. They will come and check and see who is staying here with us. Please. You’ve got to find another place to stay.”

  I stayed in Christl’s store again. I stayed several nights with Herr Weiss, my mother’s aged friend. I sought out Jultschi’s father, once a man-about-town, a bon vivant, always making deals. Now he was paying someone a fortune for permission to hide in a tiny room. He could not help me.

  I knocked on the door of my old friend Elfi Westermeyer. Her mother answered. She had met me often when Elfi and I were both members of the Socialistische Mittleschülerbund.

  “Hello, Frau We …”

  “Get out.”

  “I thought I might have a few words with Elfi.”

  “Get out.”

  “Just a moment of her …”

  “If you ever try to get in touch with Elfi again, I will call the police.”

  She shut the door. I ran from there.

  At the back of the Jewish ration shop where Liesel Brust gave out her lifesaving food rations, I met Hermi Schwarz, the girl who had ridden home with me from Aschersleben.

  “I can’t live this way anymore,” she wept. “No one wants me. They are all afraid. And I am so afraid to hurt them. Tomorrow I’m going to school. Maybe I’ll find a better life in Poland.”

  I boarded the tram and sat by the window. Despair seized me. I began to weep. I couldn’t stop. All the nice Austrians came over to comfort me. “Poor girl. She must have lost her boyfriend in the war,” they said. They were quite concerned.

  It had been almost six weeks since I had gone underground in Vienna. I had exploited all the goodwill that was available to me, and although there was surely more, I no longer felt comfortable endangering those who were kind to me. I had been unable to find a job that might support me or a room to live in. Like Hermi, I was at the end of my rope. I decided that I would pay one last visit to Frau Doktor, drink one last cup of coffee, thank her for her help, and take my place on a transport to the east.

  “I HAVE COME to say good-bye,” I said.

  Frau Doktor did not answer. She picked up the phone.

  “Hansl,” she said, “I have a girl here. She has lost all her papers. Can you help her?”

  The answer was clearly yes, for she immediately told me to go right away to Number 9 Fleischmangasse in the Fourth District. “When you get there,” she instructed, “tell him the truth.” I went right away, with no more conversation.

  The sign on the door said JOHANN PLATTNER, SIPPEN-FORSCHER—OFFICE OF RACIAL AFFAIRS.

  In those days, many people looked for a Sippenbuch, a record book explaining the lineage of their parents and grandparents on both sides, to prove they had been Aryan for three generations. For this they needed the help of a Sippenforscher, an authority on racial matters. That was where Frau Doktor had sent me.

  I thought: My God, I have been betrayed. But Mina’s voice came to me: “Go to Auntie. You can trust her.”

  Plattner’s sons led me to his office. When I saw him, my heart contracted in my chest. He was wearing a brown Nazi uniform with a swastika on his arm.

  “You are lucky to find me at home,” he said. “Tomorrow I go back to North Africa. Now. Tell me exactly your situation.”

  There was no turning back. I told him. Exactly.

  “Do you have any good Aryan friends?”

  “Yes.”

  “Find a woman friend who looks like you, who has similar coloring, someone who is about the same age. Ask her to go to the ration book office and give notice of her intention to take a holiday. They will give her a certificate entitling her to receive rations during her holiday, wherever she should be. Then she should wait a few days. Then she should go to the police and tell them that while she was on vacation rowing on the old Danube River, her handbag fell into the water, carrying all her papers, including her ration card, to the bottom. Use exactly this explanation. Don’t say there was a fire, or the dog chewed up the papers, because they will demand a remnant. Only the river will keep the secret. The police will then give her a duplicate. Are you committing this to memory, Fräulein?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your friend should then give you the original ration card, as well as her birth certificate and her baptismal certificate. You will assume her name, take her papers, and immediately leave Vienna and go to live somewhere else in the Reich.

  “Under no circumstances—mark me, now, under no circumstances—should you ever apply for a Kleiderkarte, a ration book for clothing. These are held in a national registry, and if you apply for one, the authorities will instantly know that somebody else with the same identity already has one.

  “Buy a season ticket, a Streckenkarte, for the railway—this will have your picture on it and will be an acceptable identification.

  “Use this ticket plus your friend’s personal data, and that should cover you
.”

  “Yes, sir,” I gasped. “Thank you, sir.”

  “One more thing,” he added. “We are short of labor in the Reich, as you probably have guessed, with your background. Very soon, all the women in the country will be asked to register for work. This could get you into trouble, because your friend will be asked to register as well as you. So you ought to go to work for the Red Cross, because that is the only organization which will be exempt from the registration.”

  He turned away. The interview was over. I had never listened so hard to anything in my life. Every word was printed on my mind.

  He did not wish me luck. He did not ask for money. He did not say good-bye. I never saw him again.

  He saved my life.

  PEPI ARRANGED A rendezvous with Christl. He spoke for me, explaining Plattner’s plan. Christl did not hesitate for one second.

  “Of course you may have my papers,” she said. “I’ll apply for the vacation ration card tomorrow.”

  And that was it.

  Do you understand what it would have meant if Christl Denner had been discovered aiding me in this way? She would have been sent to a concentration camp and possibly killed. Remember that. Remember the speed with which she assented, the total absence of doubt or fear.

  Frau Niederall invited me for dinner along with some teachers, members of the Nazi bureaucracy, mostly people involved in the dissemination of ration cards. She deliberately led the conversation to the subject of rationing, so that I would hear their explanation of the system, with all its tortuous ins and outs.

  Christl got herself a little tan by sitting on the terrace, so that she would look as if she had been out sailing. A delicate sprinkling of freckles danced on her nose. On July 30, 1942, she reported to the police that she had gone on vacation and lost her papers in the river. They immediately gave her a duplicate set. And of course the officer invited her out for coffee and she went, and of course he wanted to see her again, but she told him the story about the brave sailor on the high seas, or maybe the one about the brave doctor in the Afrika Korps, or whatever.