The Nazi Officer's Wife (12 page)

“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.

O
UR 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 cru
elty 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!”

D
ECEMBER
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!”

We believed in the future, you see. We all still believed.

My friend Mina planned her gifts as though she were Santa Claus and Pepi Rosenfeld were all the reindeer in the North Pole.

“Now look here, Edith, I’ve saved up eight reichsmarks. So if we send this money to your Pepi, he should be able to buy a small box of herb tea for my mama, and a nice new pen for my papa,
and a box of candies for my brothers and sisters. They love sweets! They still have teeth only because the Nazis won’t let them have sweets, so you see, in its way, this regime has done the Katz family a big favor.”

She actually made me laugh.

“Frau Niederall will surely send us something wonderful for Hanukkah. My papa used to give each of us kids a box of worthless coins on Hanukkah—we thought they were the greatest treasure—and we would play
dreidel
games and make bets and eat
latkes
. Oh, it was so much fun, Edith, such a pleasure to be Jewish. Someday when you and Pepi are married and I am the godmother of your children, I’ll teach them
dreidel
games and we’ll sing all the wonderful Yiddish songs my father knows.”

“I’m afraid to hope for so much happiness, Mina.”

“Don’t be silly. Hope is God’s gift to the world. Look at what wonderful luck I personally have had so far, just because I kept on hoping. Frau Niederall bought the Achter Delivery Company. She kept me and Frau Grünwald when she could have tossed us out. She taught me how to dress nicely, how to dab perfume here and here, how to write business letters and greet customers. I call her Auntie, that’s how much I love her! When you meet her, you must call her Frau Doktor.”

She reached under her bed, her face shining. “Look, I have a Hanukkah present for you,” she said, “to give you hope.” She brought forth a piece of wood into which she had burned a French saying which our friend Franz had used to cheer us, in Osterburg:

La vie est belle, et elle commence demain
.

“Life is beautiful, and it begins tomorrow.”

A few Jewish families were still living in Aschersleben in the late fall of 1941, among them Frau Crohn and her daughter Käthe, a sweet, smart woman about my age. When we girls from the
Arbeitslager
went out on Saturday or Sunday, the Crohns invited us for “coffee.” I cannot tell you how much these visits meant to me. They brought back a feeling of home, civilized life, Jewish community in a world of hatred.

One Sunday, we were returning from the Crohns’ house. I remember a girl named Ditha was there, and a girl named Irma, and another named Clair. We walked on the Breite Strasse, a street forbidden to Jews. Some local boys called out flirtatiously, “Hey, there go the lucky stars!” Somehow they did not understand the humiliation and persecution those hateful patches symbolized. We took their friendliness as a good omen.