The Nazi Officer's Wife (16 page)

“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 the 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.

“F
IND 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.

P
EPI 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.

She gave me the original papers—her baptismal certificate, her vacation ration stamp book. Then she and Elsa went to visit their father at Osnabrück. I was supposed to leave Vienna immediately, but I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t know Germany—I had been only to little towns like Aschersleben and Osterburg. I was so frightened that I could not summon even one simple idea.

I went to the cinema to think.

In the newsreel they showed some pictures of Goebbels opening the “Great German Art Exhibition of 1942” in Munich, at a new, low-slung, ugly building that Hitler thought was beautiful; it was called Das Haus der Deutschen Kunst, “The House of German Art.” Loud military music played as the works of art flickered by. There was a terrifying picture of the war on the Russian front, with German soldiers crawling across the great steppes into the flames and chaos of battle. There was a bust of Hitler by Pagels—that style of sculpture so well liked by the Nazis, in which all soft, human expression is distorted by a mien of ferocity and cruel determination. There was Ernst Krause’s group portrait of the members of the
Leibstandarte
SS Adolf Hitler, holders of the Knights Cross and the Iron Cross. The most detested men in Europe had been made as handsome as movie actors and were set before us in glory as though they were indomitable heroes of a righteous cause. I saw
The Judge
, one of Arno Breker’s ghastly relief sculptures. This one depicted a grim-faced Germanic avenger about to draw his sword.

But also … but also, you see, there were two white marble statues:
Mutter mit Kind
by Josef Thorak, a mother nursing her
baby; and
Die Woge
—“The Wave”—by Fritz Klimsch, a woman lying outstretched, leaning on one arm, one knee bent, her hand on her knee.

I looked at the statue, and something happened to me. How shall I explain this to you? It was a kind of epiphany.
The Wave
washed over me. I heard the statue speak to me.
“Komm, Edith, komm zu mir.”
I heard the voice of
The Wave
calling like my mother’s voice, and in it I heard love, security, kindness, blessing. It was a fantasy, of course; but it happened, I swear to you—it happened to me in my time of greatest fear and confusion, when I was about to un-become myself. This white marble statue spoke to me about peace and freedom and the promise of life. I felt that in the next minute she would leave the screen, her marble skin would warm and become flesh, and she would embrace me and tell me that I would be safe.

“I have decided to go to Munich,” I said to Frau Doktor.

I was never in my life more confident of any decision.

I
BOUGHT THE
Munich newspaper,
Münchner Nachrichten
. In the “Rooms for Rent” section, a women in the little suburban town of Deisenhofen offered a room in exchange for sewing and mending. I thought: This is perfect for me. It is a sign that Munich is the right choice.

Frau Doktor sold my mother’s Persian lamb coat and gave me the money. I left the jewelry with her, not as payment—neither of us would ever have considered such a thing—but for safekeeping. I hugged her close to me, blessing her with all my heart.

I went to my cousin Jultschi’s house and picked up my suitcase with the six dresses Mama had made for me, and the shoes and underwear, the little nightgowns she had left. I kissed my poor
cousin, feeling as sorry for her as she felt for me, and I kissed our darling little boy.

I went to Pepi’s house. Anna was there, happy to see me dressed for departure. She talked about how a niece of hers had just this morning gone to travel in the Reich on vacation with the “Strength through Joy” program, how she had packed her up with cakes and sausages. I was sitting there quietly waiting for Pepi, and she didn’t even offer me a sandwich for the journey.