The Nazi Officer's Wife

by Edith H. Beer

  The whole city seemed to be fleeing through that little town. On the heels of the civilians came the army that had once seemed invincible, now utterly beaten, desperate not to fall into the hands of the Russians. Some soldiers came to the little house to rest and hide for a bit. One of them had a battery-operated radio. We gathered around it, I and my suffering child, the old woman and her daughter, the haggard soldiers. Admiral Doenitz spoke to us. He told us that Germany could no longer defend itself, the war had been lost, and German citizens should obey the commands of the victors.

  Silence. No one wept. No one even sighed.

  “So. Is anybody hungry?” I asked.

  They gaped at me, astonished.

  “Go to the farmers hereabouts and ask them for flour and eggs and milk and jam and bread,” I said. “Bring the food back here, leave your weapons outside, and I will make you something good to eat.”

  And that is exactly what happened. All day long, as the men streamed into the little house, I made hundreds of delicate Viennese crepes for the Wehrmacht, and the woman and her daughter served them. As I stood at the stove, a song from a million years ago came into my head, and I sang:

  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.

  One of the soldiers whispered in my ear: “Don’t act so happy, madam. Hitler may hear you.”

  “Hitler has killed himself, Sergeant. That’s for sure. Hitler and Goebbels did not wait to greet the Russians along with us plain people. That’s why it was the admiral we heard on the radio.”

  “You never know,” he said. “Careful.”

  In the middle of that tremendous defeat, the sky blazing with bombs and roaring with Russian cannon, he was still afraid to say a word. It was the habit of silence, you see. The habit of silence gets into you; it spreads from this one to the next one. If the Germans wanted to be phobic about an infectious disease, they should have picked silence, not measles.

  Before this soldier left, he gave me some glucose tablets. We called them sugar pills. What a treasure they turned out to be!

  Now, in this little town, every house hung out a white flag of surrender—a rag, a sheet, a towel. My two kind hostesses were not eager to stay there and say hello to the victorious Red Army, so they left. And I was not so keen to receive them on my own, so I decided to go back to Brandenburg. I took as much food as I could and walked back with Angela in her carriage, heading east on the road as the defeated German soldiers headed west.

  I came to a bridge that spanned a very deep ditch. The bridge had been smashed in the middle. The two sagging, cracked sides of the bridge were connected by a toilet door, the kind of wooden door they have in the countryside, with a heart carved out of it in the center. This little door was barely wide enough to support the wheels of the pram. I looked down through the open heart and saw boulders and debris and death. I imagined the pram slipping off the thin bridge, the baby hurtling downward.

  “This is the end,” I thought.

  I closed my eyes and raced across the door to the other side. When I opened my eyes, Angela was sitting up, looking at me. Her fever was gone.

  The road back into Brandenburg was strewn with German corpses. If they were lucky, somebody had put newspaper over their faces. I tried not to walk on them, but sometimes it was impossible to go around them. There were huge piles of rubble from the bombing. I picked up the pram and climbed over them.

  The Russians came down the street on giant horses, towering over the city.

  I MET UP with my neighbor, Frau Ziegler. Far gone in her pregnancy, she was pushing her other baby, a little boy, in a baby carriage just like me. We decided to stay together and try to make it back to our building.

  We passed the bank. The Russians had broken into the vault and taken out all the reichsmarks, and now they threw the money into the street so that it blew like flying leaves in the hot wind from the fires all around. When the Germans ran after the money, the Russians roared with laughter.

  Our house on Immelmannstrasse was burning. The Russian soldiers had run inside, taken out mattresses and quilts and pillows, and tossed them into the vacant lot across the street, and now they were lounging there smoking and laughing, watching the building burn. Much of the facade had fallen away, exposing the cellar where I stored my Viennese suitcase, the one that Mama had left for me with Pepi. I could see the suitcase, shimmering in a haze of heat and smoke.

  “I have to get that suitcase!” I screamed, and I ran like a madwoman into the fire. The terrific heat forced me back. Frau Ziegler pleaded with me to forget it; what could be so important that it was worth risking my life for? But I ran back into the blaze once again. The heat overcame me, burning my eyebrows and my hair. “Help me, someone, I have to get that suitcase! Help!”

  A Russian soldier who had been watching this scene threw one of our quilts over himself, dashed into the cellar, and brought out my suitcase. I couldn’t stop thanking him. I think I may have kissed his hands. He and his comrades watched curiously as I opened the suitcase, imagining, I suppose, that something incredibly valuable was stored there—jewels, silver, paintings. When they saw that what I had been so hysterical to retrieve was a faded blue volume of Goethe, rather clumsily bound, they thought I had lost my mind.

  Now that our home was destroyed, we had to find a place to stay for the night. In the street we met our doctor, the old man who took care of our children. He directed us to a Protestant girls’ school nearby. The teachers there showed us to a tiny room, a sort of dressing room, at the back of the stage in the assembly hall. Two medical stretchers, a broom, a sink. We were exhausted, and so were our children. So we lay down on the stretchers and we went to sleep. We did not think of locking the door.

  During the night, I woke up. There was a wailing sound all around me, not like a siren but rather a soft, sustained screaming. It seemed to come from the sky and the earth. Outside the little room where we cowered, drunken Russian soldiers passed back and forth. They didn’t come in, because we had not locked the door and when they pushed it open they saw nothing but darkness, and they must have thought it was a closet. Frau Ziegler and I lay there holding hands the whole night. We scarcely dared breathe, and we prayed that the children would stay quiet.

  In the morning we went back into the streets and searched until we found an abandoned apartment. The doors didn’t close, the windows didn’t close, but nobody bothered anymore about such minor matters. We had nothing to eat except some cold pancakes. In the street, though, there was a hydrant which we could open to get some water. I dissolved the glucose tablets in water and that was how I fed my baby.

  The systematic rape of the women in the city went on for a few days and then abruptly stopped. Most women had some relatives they could contact. Frau Ziegler left to go and stay with her mother. But I was alone, so I stayed there in that apartment near the water hydrant.

  I went out to find people I knew. One of my friends lived in a building that had not been destroyed. She was sitting on a chair, staring out the window at the blasted city: the smoldering shells of buildings, the Russians sauntering and smoking. Her eyes were ringed with purplish bruises. Her nose was caked with dried blood. Her dress was torn.

  “I offered him my husband’s watch,” she said, “but he already had an armful of watches.” She didn’t weep. I think she was finished weeping. “Thank heaven the baby was with my mother.”

  “Our old pediatrician is about,” I offered. “Maybe he could help you …”

  “No, it’s all right. I have water. I have food.” She looked around, knowing that her old life was over, missing it already, missing her dead Führer, her dead husband, and the regime that had promised her world conquest. “This was the nicest apartment I ever had,” she said.

  EVENTUALLY THE OLD PEOPLE who owned the apartment I was staying in came back. They were delighted that I had not stole
n anything, and they let me stay on. I do not know what my baby ate at that time, how we ate, what we ate; I do not know that anymore. Every day was an adventure in hunger. We stood on long lines waiting for some authority to give us a little food—some pasta, some dried peas, some black bread. For breakfast we had a watery flour soup mixed with a little salt. Angela ate it with bit of sugar. I was so thin and weak that sometimes I could not even lift her.

  Soon not one dog or cat remained alive in the city.

  For months and months, there was upheaval: no order, no transportation or electricity, no water in the tap. Everybody was stealing and everybody was starving.

  Every lightbulb in every fixture in every corridor in every building was stolen. If somebody offered you a meal, you had to bring your own utensils. The mail came by horse and wagon. Pepi sent me a Christmas card in 1945. I received it in July 1946.

  Cigarettes became currency. The Americans joked that you could get any woman in Germany for cigarettes. The Germans brought their china and their laces and antique clocks to certain places at certain hours; and since the Russians were not allowed to socialize with the Germans, they would sell these things to the British and American soldiers in exchange for the ordinary necessities of life.

  Immediately after the Russians came, everybody put on a white armband, a sign of surrender. Not I. After all, I felt myself to be one of the victors. The foreign workers found ways to put the colors of their flag on their sleeves, so the Russians would know who they were and give them food for the long trek home. I saw an Austrian wearing red, white, and red—the colors of the Austrian flag—so I did the same, and the Russians gave me some food.

  They opened the jails and released all the prisoners, murderers, thieves, and political prisoners all together. One such man noticed my makeshift armband as I stood in a food line and told me, rather merrily, that he too came from Austria and that he had been in jail “for subverting the German army.” He asked for my address. I gave it to him. He disappeared. I forgot him. More than a week later, a truck pulled up to our building and unloaded what was for us a vast quantity of potatoes and vegetables, even fruit.

  “It was the Austrian,” I said to my thrilled neighbors. “I don’t even know his name.”

  “He was an angel sent by God,” said the old people.

  It took almost six months before we had ration cards again, and then we received a quarter of a liter of skim milk per day for a child. We had been living on the money I had rescued from our bank. I carried this cash on me or in the pram under the baby. Now it was all gone. I needed a job. But to find one, I had to have a real identity card. And that posed a grave problem because I was still afraid to tell anybody that I was a Jew.

  All through the war, nobody had talked about the Jews. Not one word. It was as though no one even recalled that until recently, Jewish people had been living in this country. But now, the Germans talked constantly about the possibility that the Jews would come back and take revenge. Every time a group of strangers entered the town, my neighbors would turn tense and apprehensive. “Is it the Jews?” they would ask, fearing, I suppose, an attack by well-armed, hate-filled people seeking “an eye for an eye.” What a joke! No one could imagine yet how utterly the Jewish people had been destroyed, how starved and diseased and exhausted and powerless the surviving remnant would be.

  In such an atmosphere, I was afraid to reveal that I was Jewish. I was afraid that the people who had taken me in—who may well have been living in a Jewish house and wearing a dead Jew’s clothes—might think I would want to take something away from them and would throw me and Angela into the street.

  Only in July, two months after the Russian victory, did I slice open the cover of the book that Pepi had made for me and retrieve my real papers.

  I went to a lawyer, Dr. Schütze. He applied for a court order to have my name changed from Grete Vetter née Denner to Edith Vetter née Hahn.

  Then I went to the radio station and arranged to have my mother’s name announced every day on the program that listed missing people: “Does anyone know the whereabouts of Klothilde Hahn of Vienna, a skilled seamstress, deported to Poland in June 1942? Has anyone seen her or heard anything at all about her? If so, contact her daughter….”

  The communists who returned from the camps corroborated the story told by Thomas Mann. One of them told me that he had had the job of going through the clothing of Jewish people after they were stripped and sent to the gas chambers. His job was to find jewelry or money sewn into the lining. I remembered my mother’s brown coat, her fine silk blouses. I imagined this man going through them, slitting the seams.

  No, I thought. No. Impossible.

  You see I could not accept that Mama had met such a hideous fate. I just couldn’t. This was not complete folly on my part. Every day people who had been given up for dead walked out of the dust and rubble into the arms of their loved ones. So I kept Mama’s name on the radio. I expected her to return.

  I WENT TO the Central Registry and to my horror found myself looking at the same man who had officiated at our wedding ceremony.

  “Ah, Frau Vetter! I remember you.”

  “And I remember you too.”

  “It still says here that we have no background papers for your mother’s mother. Perhaps now that our Russian friends have come, they can supply them.”

  “I think not. Those were false papers.”

  “What?”

  “Here, these are my real identity papers. And this is a court order commanding you to register me as the person I really am.”

  He stared at my Jewish identity papers, shocked.

  “You lied to me!” he exclaimed.

  “Yes, I certainly did.”

  “You falsified your racial records!”

  “Right.”

  “This is a high crime against the state, what you did!”

  I leaned toward him. Close. Close. I wanted him to feel my breath.

  “Well, I don’t think you will find any attorney in Brandenburg to indict me for it now,” I said.

  I was now the real me, for the first time in years. How did that feel, you will ask? I will tell you. It felt like nothing. Because, you see, I could not immediately find the old Edith. She was still a U-boat, deep in hiding. Just like the rest of the Jews, she did not bounce back quickly. It took time, a long time.

  Forever.

  I took my new identity and went to see the mayor of the town, a communist who had spent many years in a concentration camp.

  “From which camp did you come?” he asked.

  I said, “I managed without a camp.”

  He looked at my school records, which Pepi had preserved. He saw immediately that I had the qualifications of a junior barrister—a Referendrar. So he sent me to the Brandenburg courthouse, where I got a job right away and suddenly, incredibly, a new life.

  TWELVE

  Surfacing

  THE HIGH-RANKING NAZIS had long ago taken off with their loot. What we had left in Brandenburg were a lot of little Nazis who tried to lie about their background. However, the courthouse with all its files had not been bombed, so the Russians possessed fairly accurate records of who was and who was not a friend of the Nazi regime. You could see correspondence from individuals you knew, who closed with “Heil Hitler!” The really enthusiastic ones would add “Gott Strafe England!”—“May God destroy England!” Few, then, could lie and get away with it. Since the Russians, unlike the Americans and the British, would not knowingly employ Nazis, those of us who could prove that we were not Nazis and who had some actual legal training were rare and suddenly valuable in the new labor crisis.

  On September 1, 1945, I went to work on the second floor of the district court. The director of the court—Herr Ulrich—gave me old cases to study, so that I could bring myself up to the present on the legal system. A distinguished jurist, fired because he wouldn’t join the Nazi Party, he now loved to ask people, “Tell me, sir, were you a member of the party?” And then he w
ould sit back and watch them squirm and sweat and lie.

  My first job was as a Rechtspfleger, an attorney who helps those needing guidance in court. After some time I was appointed as Vorsitzende im Schöffengericht, a judge on a panel of three which also included two lay assessors. (To find a jury of twelve non-Nazis would have been impossible.) The court administration, dominated by the Russians, wanted me to work in a special court dealing with political matters. I refused and finally became a judge in the family court.

  My greatest ambition, stimulated by the Halsmann case, fired by my relationship with Pepi, long ago totally abandoned, now became a reality. I was a judge.

  I was given an office. I wore a robe. Before I entered the court, the foreman shouted out, “Das Gericht!” People stood up and remained standing until I was seated.

  It was the most wonderful time in my life, the one and only time when I was able to work to the maximum of my intellectual ability—a pleasure beyond description—and the one and only time I had even the slightest power to alleviate any of the suffering in this world.

  RIGHT AFTER I secured my first court job, I became ill. I had skin eruptions due to nutritional deficiencies. My feet were permanently twisted from wearing ill-fitting shoes. I was exhausted. I wound up in the hospital. My landlady kept Angela.

  When I recovered, I applied to the housing office for a new place to live. It took two months, but finally I was assigned a very nice flat on Kanalstrasse, in the best district. It had belonged to a Nazi lawyer who had fled. It had a balcony.

  A man who had taken over a Nazi furniture factory, which the Nazis had stolen from the Jews, arranged for me to acquire furniture at good terms. I remember one beautiful desk, very ornate, with brass decorations and feet like the claws of a lion. It looked as if it had come from a palace—a real SS desk.