The Nazi Officer's Wife

by Edith H. Beer

  “The number is on your desk,” he said with a smile.

  “Ah. Yes. In my office.”

  “No. Not that desk. The antique desk with the brass fittings and feet like the claws of a lion, the desk you have in your apartment.”

  In my mind’s ear, I heard the fiend Goebbels laughing.

  A young girl whom I knew missed the last train home and came back unexpectedly to stay the night with me. When she knocked on the door, a cold sweat popped up on my skin. By the time I opened that door, I was weak with fear. Every terrible memory—the preparation for arrest, for interrogation, for death—had come back.

  “You are a messenger from heaven,” I said to the girl, welcoming her in. She did not understand what I meant. I meant that I knew beyond any doubt, from my reaction to her knock on my door, that I could never again live as part of a system of denunciation and intimidation and tyranny, where you always feared the unexpected guest. I knew I had to get out.

  I told people who I knew would tell the commandant that I wanted to visit my sister in England for two weeks. Then I went to Berlin and inquired at York House about the best way to get a visa. An Englishman—a complete stranger, with a large mustache and a fat briefcase—told me that I should rent a room in West Berlin and ask there for a passport.

  I went to the headquarters of the Jewish community. There I met a man who said he could rent me a room. I told him that I did not actually wish to live there, that I would pay the rent but that really all I needed was the address so I could qualify for an Ausweis, a residential identity card. I went to the police station and waited for a long time. Finally an officer came. I told him that I did not want any food, just a Personalausweis so that I could visit my sister in England.

  You must understand, at that time there was a blockade of Berlin. It was impossible to secure permission to travel. But this policeman gave it to me. He just gave it to me and wished me a pleasant journey to England.

  It took months to assemble the rest of the papers I needed—the passport, the visas, the clearances. Meanwhile, I was working at the court as though I planned to be there forever. Every ten days or so, I would travel to the British zone to collect the papers that had come in and pay my rent to the Jewish couple.

  I knew I would eventually have to end our relationship with Gretl, but I didn’t want to do it at the last moment, for fear that it might signal my imminent departure. So one day without any particular warning, I gathered my courage and strength and took her back to the orphanage. I started to tell her some lie about how we’d see her again very soon.

  She covered her ears. “No,” she said.

  Children always understood everything.

  I kissed her. That was a mistake. I should never have done that. She began to cry. And I began to cry.

  When I left the orphanage, she was screaming “Auntie! Auntie!” The woman there could hardly hold her. I ran from that place.

  This was part of the price I had to pay for leaving Germany: to turn my back on that shrieking child. Baron de Rothschild, signing over his steel mills and his palaces, did not pay a higher price.

  DURING THE LONG, clandestine arrangements before my departure, I often had to stand in line for hours with Angela. Although she was the most mature of little girls, a typical war baby, never demanding or complaining, she would sometimes grow restive and irritable on the long lines. She would whine or make a fuss. And pushing her pram through the ruined streets exhausted me beyond endurance.

  One time when I was trying to make my way through the rubble, a Russian soldier fell into step with me and helped me keep the pram upright and Angela inside it.

  “Your daughter reminds me of my niece,” he said.

  “Oh, then your niece must be adorable.”

  “My niece is dead,” he said. “The SS came into our town in Russia and went on a hunt for all the Jews and when they found my sister and my brother-in-law, they just killed them where they stood and threw their little girl out the window.”

  It was getting to be the end of the day. The sun was somehow setting again. A man could stand in the street and tell a perfect stranger a story of such incomprehensible evil that it really seemed as if the sun should stop shining altogether. But there was no alteration in Heaven, no sign that the cries of children had been heard.

  “You speak excellent German,” I said. “I would never have been able to tell you were Jewish.”

  He laughed. “And I knew you were Jewish the minute I saw you.”

  An astonishing statement, don’t you agree? For years the Germans had not been able to tell I was Jewish by looking at me. The registrar had stared into my eyes and into my past—and he couldn’t tell. Now here was a complete stranger, a foreigner … and he had known in an instant.

  “I have been thinking about trying to get over to the western side of the city, so I can see my relatives who are still alive. But I have had no luck in getting to the visa office, because I must bring my little girl with me, and it’s impossible to spend all the time necessary to stand in line and wait with this child.”

  “Leave her with me,” he said. “Tell me when you want to come back here from Brandenburg, tell me where you wish to meet me, and I will be there and I will keep her with me for as long as you need to get your visa.”

  A fantastic offer—and equally fantastic that I accepted it. I returned to Berlin the following week and met the Russian soldier. I left my precious child with him the whole day, and never for a minute thought that he might abuse her or steal her or sell her or hurt her in any way.

  Why did I have such trust? Because he was a Jew. And I could not believe that any Jew would want to hurt my baby.

  Something always happened, you see. A Yiddish song on Hanukkah, a British rabbi’s prayer on the radio, some kindness on a train or in the street that reminded me, no matter how far I retreated, no matter how deep into self-denial my fear drove me, that the Jews would always be my people and I would always belong to them.

  YOU WILL ASK me why it took so long for me to think of leaving Brandenburg, why I had even dreamed of being able to lead a normal life in Germany. I will tell you. It was because I could not imagine a normal life anywhere else.

  I couldn’t get a visa for Palestine, even if Mimi wanted me there, which she didn’t. I couldn’t go back to Vienna. To live again in the city that had buried my whole family? Never! In Brandenburg I knew the language and I could get work and support my daughter. Under the communist regime, I had a place, a good job, and a nice flat and friends who had shared my fate. Do you think after all the terror and hiding and hunger and running, I wanted to start again wandering the strange and evil world alone with a child? Lost again, with no place, no home, no husband, no family, no place?

  When I left Brandenburg and closed that apartment door behind me, I cried bitter tears of mourning for my moment of peace, creativity, and security, so briefly enjoyed.

  I left on a Sunday in November 1948. I told no one my intentions so as not to make anyone an accomplice, and left enough money in my bank account to pay the outstanding bills. On the kitchen counter in my flat, I left a loaf of bread so the Russians would think I was coming back.

  Angela and I went to the train station and then I lost my courage and went home.

  On Monday morning I rang Agnes’s husband and asked him to take us to Potsdam, where one could use the underground, avoiding the train and any potential razzia by the Russians.

  For two weeks I stayed with the Jewish family at 33 Wielandstrasse in Berlin’s Charlottenburg district, waiting for a British airline strike to be over so I could use the ticket that Hansi and her English husband, Richard, had sent me and fly away. A friend back in Brandenburg told me my apartment had been sealed by the police. I guess they understood that I would not be coming back.

  Finally the strike ended. Finally everything ended.

  I flew to Northholt Airport with Angela.

  When I saw my sister Hansi, when I heard her joyous cry of greetin
g and felt her tears mingle with my tears, when I held her in my arms—my little soldier sister—I knew that Edith Hahn had finally returned to herself. The ocean of terror was lifted from me. I breathed the air of freedom. My disguise became history.

  In my sister’s eyes I saw a reflection of my own grief, which I had fended off for years with hopeful fantasies, and I confronted the agonizing truth. Our mother, Klothilde Hahn, had been murdered after being deported to the Minsk ghetto in the summer of 1942. She had appeared to me in mirrors, smiling with encouragement; sat on my bed and comforted me with happy memories in my most frightening hours; hovered like a light before me as I opened the door to what I thought must be certain death. Was it not Mama who spoke to me through that cold marble statue and directed me to safety? My angel, my beacon, she was gone forever.

  And my little daughter and I, because of random good luck and the interventions of a few decent people, had been saved.

  FOURTEEN

  Pepi’s Last Package

  IN BRANDENBURG, I had been a respected official of the court, a middle-class woman with an adequate salary and a decent home.

  In England, I arrived as a destitute refugee with a sixty-day visa and no permission to work, knowing very little English, carrying no luggage except a briefcase containing a change of underwear. In the years that followed, I worked as a maid, a cook, and a seamstress for the National Health. I never worked in the legal profession again.

  I turned my back on the charade of assimilation, sent my daughter to a Jewish school, and raised her as a Jew.

  In 1957, I married Fred Beer, another Viennese Jew, whose mother had been murdered in the Holocaust. We told each other our stories once, only once, and did not mention these dreadful events again for thirty years. We let the past lie and drift, like wreckage on the sea, in the hope that eventually it would sink and be forgotten. In this, I am told, we were not unlike other survivors of terrible catastrophes.

  Fred died in 1984, and I moved to Israel in 1987, to live at last among Jewish people in their own country. And though I am surrounded by citizens from cultures very different from mine, I feel a kinship with them all. I am comfortable here. This is my place.

  I tried to stay in touch with the people who had been so close to me during my ordeal as a U-boat. When Frau Doktor Maria Niederall was ejected from her stolen shop and fell ill, I saved two weeks’ salary to send her a pretty bed jacket. At least it made her happy. She always loved luxurious feminine things. But it did not make her well. She died too young. So had many of the people who might have mourned for her.

  I read a novel by the famous Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. One of the characters in it said, “We must never forget those who have helped us …” and so I wrote to the author and told him about Christl Denner Beran, my beloved friend who is now gone. She was given a medal for her heroism and her extraordinary courage. A tree was planted in her name at Yad v’Shem, the Holocaust memorial here in Israel—the highest honor our country gives to a righteous gentile.

  When Angela was growing up in England, I sent her birthday cards from relatives who had become smoke, to make her feel she had a large and loving family. She always received a card from Grandmother Klothilde.

  I stayed in touch with Bärbl and her family. And I tried to keep the extraordinary personality of Werner Vetter somewhere remembered in our lives.

  “Your father could have painted that wall,” I would say. “Your father would have been able to make the teacher believe that excuse…. Your father could have fixed the bike….”

  I told Angela that Werner and I had loved each other truly and were separated only because he could not get work in England. I did not tell her until she was almost a teenager that we were divorced. In fact, I arranged several visits with him, so she would know this man whom I had tried so hard to love and would always, despite everything, honor.

  Why did I surround my daughter with these pleasant, soothing lies? Because I wanted her not to feel alone. Just as Mama had always sent me the things she did not have—the cake when she was hungry, the gloves when she was cold—I tried to give Angela the things that I had lost: a family, a secure place in the world, a normal life.

  So I think I could easily have let this story go untold forever.

  Except that Pepi Rosenfeld, with a mad courage quite out of character for him, did not burn the letters and pictures I had sent him, as I had instructed him to do, but kept them, every single one.

  They could have killed us all, those letters.

  “What do you think, my dear Edith?” he suggested with his sly smile when we met in later years in Vienna and introduced each other to the people we had married. “Shall I donate these letters to the Austrian National Archives?” I think I must have cried out in horror. “Yes, I thought you might react that way.” He laughed. Decades had passed. And I still fell for that man’s little jokes.

  In 1977, shortly before his death, Pepi sent me his last package. It contained all the letters I had written to him from the slave labor camps and from Brandenburg when I was living as a U-boat in the Nazi empire.

  And my daughter, Angela, wanting more than anything to know the whole truth at last, read them.

  Photographic Insert

  (Top Image) Leopold Hahn, my father.

  (Bottom Image) Klothilde Hahn, my mother.

  At the spa in Badgastein. Left to right, my cousin Jultschi, a hotel guest, me, another hotel guest, my sister Mimi, my little sister Hansi.

  (Top Image) Pepi tying his shoe on a visit to Stockerau in 1939.

  (Bottom Image) This picture, taken on the same visit, is the only one I have of Pepi and me together. He came to visit me when I was caring for my grandfather, who had suffered a stroke.

  My student identification at the University of Vienna, 1933.

  (Top Image) This picture was taken when I was nineteen years old.

  (Bottom Image) Pepi in 1937, at age twenty-four.

  (Top Image) After the Germans took over Austria—the Anschluss of 1938—all Jews were given new identification cards. Men were given the middle name Israel. Women were given the middle name Sara.

  (Middle Image) A reissued passport. It felt strange—it was my old picture with my new middle name, Sara.

  (Bottom Image) The eviction notice that banished Mama and me from our home. After this, we lived in the Vienna ghetto.

  (Top Image) The asparagus plantation at Osterburg. These were some of my co-workers, bending over the furrowed fields.

  (Middle Image) Our overseer’s little daughter, Ulrike Fleschner, then about four years old, holding a Nazi flag.

  (Bottom Image) Herr Fleschner, the overseer, is on the left, wearing a white shirt. Next to him are Frau Telscher, one of my roommates at Osterburg, and Pierre, a French prisoner of war whom the Germans called Franz. The baskets are for asparagus.

  These are letters Pepi and I exchanged to practice English when I was in the slave labor camp. He corrected me but I never corrected him. I was by choice the pupil and he the teacher.

  The Nazis required that all ID pictures show the left ear. I used this one, which Pepi took in 1939, because it was the least recognizable photograph of me. The Gestapo had a copy in its files.

  (Top Image) The last notes Mama wrote to Pepi before she was deported. “They won’t let me stay behind,” she wrote. “I have to go…. Please tell Edith…. God will stand by her and me.”

  (Bottom Image) In this letter, I wrote to Pepi that my friend Mina Katz and I had enjoyed the sweets he’d sent me and that my quota had been raised to 35,000 boxes per day.

  The last letter I received from Mina before she was deported. She wrote in code. “Prinz-Eugenstrasse” refers to the headquarters of the Gestapo in Vienna. “Tante” (“Aunt”) refers to Frau Doktor Maria Niederall, who helped me so much.

  My Jewish ration card. I was supposed to use it when I returned to Vienna from Aschersleben, but I never did.

  (Top Image) I borrowed my friend Christl Denner’s lilac
blouse for this picture, which I gave as a gift to Pepi in 1940 just before I was taken to the Arbeitslager, the labor camp. When Pepi died in 1977, it was still sitting on his desk at home.

  (Bottom Image) Christl Denner Beran, my dear friend, who died in 1992. She gave me her identity papers and saved my life. Christl is wearing a dress my mother made for her.

  Maria Niederall gave me this picture of herself. I kept it with me in Brandenburg.

  Christl made this application for new papers to replace those she told the police she had accidentally dropped into the Danube.

  The marriage certificate of Werner Vetter and “Margarethe Denner.” You can see the “proof” that we were both “German-blooded” (“deutschblütig”), as well as additional notes about the birth of our daughter and the revision, in July 1945, when my real name was noted.

  (Top Image) Werner Vetter before the war …

  (Bottom Image) … and after he was drafted into the Wehrmacht in September 1944.

  Werner designed and hand-painted this birth announcement after our daughter, Angela (“Angelika”), was born in April 1944. This one was sent to Pepi with a note on the back: “A star has fallen from the heavens….”

  In the summer of 1944, Werner took this picture of me pushing Angela’s pram and walking with Bärbl, Werner’s four-year-old daughter from his first marriage.

  Werner smuggled out this letter to me from a Siberian prison camp. It was packed into the lining of an eyeglasses case and delivered by a man who tossed it through my door and left instantly.