The Nazi Officer's Wife (2 page)

“Do you know anyone whose boyfriend is fighting on the Eastern front? What do the men write in their letters home?”

“Oh, the men don’t write about the fighting, sir, because they don’t like to worry us, and also they fear that they might give away some important detail and the enemy might capture the mail and read it and their comrades might be endangered.”

“Have you heard that the Russians are cannibals? Have you heard that they eat their young?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And do you believe that?”

I took a chance. “Some people do, sir. But I think that if the Russians ate their babies, there would not be so many Russians as there apparently are.”

He laughed. He had warm, humorous eyes and a gentle manner. He even reminded me a little of my grandfather, whom I had cared for years before when he suffered a stroke … so long ago, in another life. I began to relax with the important industrialist and let down my guard a little.

“What could the Führer do to make his people happy, Nurse? What do you think?”

“My fiancé says that the Führer loves Germany like a wife, and that is why he has no wife himself, and that he would do anything he could to make us happy. So if you could speak to him, sir, perhaps you could tell the Führer that we would be very very happy if he would send us some onions.”

This amused him very much. “You are good medicine for me, Margarethe. You are plainspoken and kindhearted, the true soul of German womanhood. Tell me, is your fiancé fighting at the front?”

“Not yet, sir. He has special skills, so he is working to prepare aircraft for the Luftwaffe.”

“Ah, very good, very good,” he said. “My sons are also fine young men; they are doing very well these days.” He showed me a picture of his tall handsome sons in their uniforms. They had risen high in the Nazi Party and become important men. He was very proud of them.

“It’s easy to be a cardinal,” I said, “when your cousin is the pope.”

He stopped bragging and took a long, hard look at me. “I see you are not such a simple girl,” he said. “I see you are a very clever woman. Where were you educated?”

My stomach tightened. My throat went dry.

“That is something my grandma always said,” I said, turning him over to wash his back. “An old saying in our family.”

“When I return to Berlin, I would like you to come with me as my private nurse. I shall speak to your superiors.”

“Oh, I would love that, sir, but my fiancé and I are planning to be married soon, and so you see, I could not leave Brandenburg—it would not be possible! But thank you, sir! Thank you! I am honored! Most honored!”

My shift ended. I bade him good night and walked, trembling and unsteady, out of his room. I was wet with perspiration. I told the coworker who arrived to replace me that this was because exercising my patient’s heavy limbs was such hard work. But in truth it was because I had almost revealed my disguise. The smallest indication of sophisticated wit—a literary reference or historical knowledge no ordinary Austrian girl could hope to have—was, for me, like a circumcision, a complete giveaway.

As I walked home to the Arado apartment complex on the east end of town where Werner and I lived, I admonished myself for the millionth time to be more careful and hide every sign of intellect, to keep my gaze vacant, my mouth shut.

I
N
O
CTOBER
1943, the other members of the Red Cross nursing contingent gave me a great honor. The municipality of Brandenburg was planning a rally, and each group of workers had to send a representative. For one reason or another, none of the senior nurses could attend; I suspect that they didn’t feel like celebrating because they had heard how badly Germany’s forces were faring in Russia, North Africa, and Italy (although how they would have heard that I cannot imagine, since German radio did not fully report it and everybody knew that to listen to Radio Moscow, the BBC, the Voice of America, or Beromünster of Switzerland was a criminal act akin to treason). I was selected to represent our workers’ group at the rally.

Werner was very proud of me. I can imagine him bragging to his colleagues at Arado, “No wonder they chose my Grete! She’s a true patriot of the Fatherland!” He had a good sense of humor, my Werner, a real flair for life’s little ironies.

I dressed carefully for the big day. I wore my Red Cross nurse’s uniform. My plain brown hair I combed in a simple natural style, no barrettes, curls, or pomade. I wore no makeup and no jewelry except a thin little gold ring with the tiniest diamond chip, a gift from my father on my sixteenth birthday. I was a small girl, not much more than five feet, and I had a lovely figure in those days. However, I kept it covered with baggy white stockings and a shapeless pinafore. It was not a time when a person like me wanted to look especially attractive in public. Nice, yes; neat, yes. But most important, plain. Nothing to draw attention.

The rally turned out to be quite different from those to which we had grown accustomed. There were no stirring drums or strident marches, no beautiful young people in uniforms waving
flags. This rally had a purpose, and that was to overcome the defeatist mood which had begun to fall over Germany since the debacle at Stalingrad the past winter. Heinrich Himmler had been appointed Minister of the Interior in August with this mandate: “Renew German faith in the Victory!” Speaker after speaker exhorted us to work harder and harder to support our valiant fighting men, because if we lost the war, the terrible poverty which most Germans recalled from the days before the Nazi era would return and we would all lose our jobs. If we had grown tired of our evening
Eintopf
, the one-dish meal that Joseph Goebbels had proclaimed the proper self-sacrificing fare for a nation engaged in “total war,” we should remind ourselves that after the Victory, we would feast like kings on real coffee and golden bread made with white flour and whole eggs. We were told that we should do everything in our power to keep up productivity in the workplace, and turn in anybody we suspected of being disloyal, especially people who were listening to enemy radio and the “grossly exaggerated” news of German defeats in North Africa and Italy.

“My God,” I thought. “They are worried.”

The Nazi “masters of the world” were beginning to quake and waver. I felt giddy, a little breathless. An old song began to sing itself inside my heard.

Shhh
, I thought.
It’s too soon to sing. Shhh
.

That night, when Werner and I tuned in to the BBC, I prayed that the news about German military misfortune would mean an early end to the war and, for me, release from the prison of my pretense.

But I did not dare share my hopes, even with Werner. I kept my elation secret, my voice soft, my persona unobtrusive. Invisibility. Silence. These were the habits that I wore when I lived as what survivors of the Holocaust now call a U-boat, a Jewish fu
gitive from the Nazi death machine, hiding right in the heart of the Third Reich.

For a while, in later years, when I was married to Fred Beer and living safely in England, I cast off those wartime habits. But now that Fred is gone and I am old and cannot control the impact of my memories, I put them on again. I sit here as I sit with you today in my favorite café on the square in the city of Netanya by the sea in the land of Israel, and an acquaintance stops to chat and says, “So tell us,
Giveret
Beer, what was it like then, during the war, living with a Nazi Party member inside Germany, pretending to be an Aryan, concealing your true identity, always fearing exposure?” I answer in a little voice that is dazed by its own ignorance, “Oh, but I do not know. I think I do not remember this anymore.” My gaze wanders and loses focus; my voice turns dreamy, halting, soft. It is my voice from those days in Brandenburg, when I was a twenty-nine-year-old Jewish law student on the Gestapo’s “Wanted” list, pretending to be an ignorant twenty-one-year-old nurse’s aide.

You must forgive me when you hear this small voice from then fading and faltering. You must remind me: “Edith! Speak up! Tell the story.”

It has been more than half a century.

I suppose it is time.

T
WO

The Hahns of Vienna

W
HEN I WAS
a schoolgirl in Vienna, it seemed to me the whole world had come to my city to sit in the sunny cafés and enjoy coffee and cake and matchless conversation. I walked from school past the opera house, the beautiful Josefsplatz, and the Michaelerplatz. I played in the Volksgarten and the Burggarten. I saw dignified ladies with rakish hats and silk stockings; gentlemen with walking sticks and golden watch chains; rustic workmen from all the provinces of the bygone Hapsburg empire, plastering and painting our fancy facades with their thick blunt skilled hands. The stores burst with exotic fruits and crystal and silk. Inventions sprang up in my path.

One day, I squirmed into a crowd and found myself looking into a store window where a uniformed parlor maid was demonstrating something called a “Hoover.” She scattered dirt on the
floor, turned on her machine, and like magic whisked the dirt away. I squeaked with delight and raced off to tell my schoolmates.

When I was ten years old, I joined a long line before the offices of a magazine called
Die Bühne
, “The Stage.” Soon I was sitting at a table before a large brown box. A nice lady put earphones on my head. The box came to life. A voice. A song. Radio.

I raced to my father’s restaurant to tell my family. My sister Mimi, only a year younger than I, could not have cared less. The baby—little Johanna, called Hansi—was too young to understand. And Mama and Papa were too busy to listen. But I knew I had heard something special, the force of the future, a god-to-be. Remember that radio was brand-new in 1924. Imagine what a power it represented, and how helpless people were to resist its messages.

I bubbled to Professor Spitzer of the Technical University, my favorite customer among the regulars: “The person who speaks can be very far away, Professor! But his voice flies through the air like a bird! Soon we will be able to hear the voices of people from everywhere!”

Eagerly I read the newspapers and magazines that Papa kept for his customers. What most interested me were the law columns, with cases, arguments, and problems to make your head spin. I raced around our “waltz city,” forever searching for someone to talk to about what I had read and seen.

School was my delight. There were only girls in my class; Papa did not believe in coeducation. Unlike my sisters, I loved to study and never found it difficult.

We were taught that the French were our archenemies, that the Italians were traitors, that Austria had lost the First World War only because of a “stab in the back”—but I must tell you, we were never sure who had done the stabbing. Often, the teachers would ask me what language we spoke at home. This was a not-so-subtle
way of discovering if we spoke Yiddish (which we didn’t) and were therefore Jewish (which we were).

They wanted to know, you see. They were afraid that with our typical Austrian faces, we might be able to pass. They didn’t want to be fooled. Even then, in the 1920s, they wanted to be able to tell who was a Jew.

One day Professor Spitzer asked my father what he intended for my future education. Papa said I would finish grammar school and then be apprenticed as a dressmaker, as my mother had been.

“But you have here a very bright girl, my dear Herr Hahn,” the professor said. “You must send her to high school, perhaps even to university.”

Father laughed. If I had been a boy, he would have beggared himself to educate me. As I was a girl, he had never even considered it. However, since the distinguished professor had raised the question, Papa decided to discuss it with my mother.

M
Y FATHER
, L
EOPOLD
Hahn, had a beautiful black mustache, curly black hair, and a humorous, outgoing personality well suited for a restaurateur. He was the youngest of six brothers, so by the time he was ready for his education, the family’s money had run out. Therefore, he studied to be a waiter. I know it is hard to believe, but in that time and place, a waiter’s training took several years. People liked Papa. They trusted him, told him their stories. He was an inspired listener. That was his gift.

He was much more worldly and sophisticated than he ever expected us to be. He had worked on the Riviera and in the Czechoslovakian spas of Carlsbad and Marienbad, and had experienced some wild nights. He fought with the Austro-Hungarian Army in the First World War. He was wounded, then captured; but he
escaped and returned to us. The wound to his shoulder caused a loss of motion in his arm. He could not shave himself.

The restaurant, at Kohlmarkt in Vienna’s busy center, was my father’s life. It had a long, burnished bar and a dining room in back. His customers came every day for years. Papa knew what they wanted to eat before they ordered. He stocked their favorite newspapers. He provided them with service and comfort, a little world of dependabilities.

We lived in a two-bedroom apartment in what was actually an old converted palace at Number 29 Argentinierstrasse in Vienna’s Fourth District. Our landlord, from the Hapsburg-Lothringen Company, came from royal stock. Since Mama worked side by side with Papa in the restaurant, seven days a week, we girls took our meals there. The household help did the cleaning and took care of us when we were little.

My mother, Klothilde, was pretty, short, buxom, attractive but not coquettish. She kept her long hair completely black. She had a patient, bemused air; forgave people their stupidities; sighed often; knew when to hold her peace.

I lavished all my affection on Hansi, my baby sister, seven years younger than I. To me, she looked like a cherub from one of our baroque cathedrals, with chubby pink cheeks, delicious flesh, and bouncing curls. My sister Mimi I disliked. The feeling was mutual. She had weak eyes, thick glasses, a sour personality—mean-spirited, jealous of everybody. Mama, intimidated by Mimi’s unhappiness, gave her whatever she wanted, assuming that I, the “carefree one,” could fend for myself. Since Mimi could make no friends, and I was popular, like my father, I had to share my friends with her and take her everywhere with me.