The Nazi Officer's Wife (3 page)

Papa took care of us all and shielded us from knowledge of the world’s seamy side. He made our decisions, saved for our dowries.
In good times, if he was feeling a bit flush, he would stop at an auction house on his way home from work and buy my mother some jewelry as a surprise—a gold chain, amber earrings. He would lean on one of our leather chairs waiting for her to open the package, cherishing her excitement, anticipating her embrace. He adored my mother. They never fought. I mean it: they
never
fought. In the evening, she did her sewing and he read his paper and we did our homework and we had what the Israelis call
shalom bait
, peace in the home.

I
THINK MY
father knew how to be Jewish, but he did not teach us. He must have thought we would absorb it with our mother’s milk.

We were sent to the
Judengottesdienst
, the children’s service at the synagogue on Saturday afternoons. The maid was supposed to take us. But she was a Catholic, like most Austrians, and she feared the synagogue; and my mother—a working woman, dependent on her help—feared the maid. So we went infrequently and learned almost nothing. However, one song from that time stayed in my head.

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!

In addition to the theme of faith—
Shema Yisrael. Adonai eloheynu. Adonai echod
—this baby song about the Temple was all I knew of Jewish prayer and practice.

Too bad I didn’t know more.

Thank God I knew that much.

Father’s restaurant closed on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. (Like our home, it did not serve pork or shellfish, but otherwise it was not kosher at all.) On these high holidays, we went to synagogue mostly to meet our relatives. Mama and Papa were distantly related; each came from a family named Hahn. Between Mama’s two sisters, and her brother, and Father’s six brothers and three sisters, there were more than thirty Hahn cousins in Vienna. You could always find some Hahn or other at the third café in the Prater. Each branch of the family observed the Jewish religion differently. For example, Aunt Gisela Kirschenbaum—one of Papa’s sisters, who also ran a restaurant—opened her place to the poor for a free seder on Passover. Mama’s brother Richard, an outright nonbeliever, married a stylish furniture heiress from Topolcany, near Bratislava. Her name was Roszi. She had been raised Orthodox, and she couldn’t stand the Hahns’ assimilated ways, so she always went home to Czechoslovakia for the holidays.

Sometimes my parents startled me with an outburst of Jewish consciousness. For example, I once ate a blood sausage sandwich at a friend’s house. “Absolutely delicious!” I reported to Mama. She literally gagged. Her sincere horror astounded me. On another occasion—just for the sake of conversation—I asked my father if I could marry a Christian. With black eyes blazing, he answered: “No, Edith. I could not bear that. It would kill me. The answer is no.”

Papa felt that Jews had to be better than everybody else. He expected our report cards to be better, our social consciousness to be more highly developed. He expected us to have finer manners, cleaner clothes, immaculate moral standards.

I didn’t think about it at the time, but of course now I realize
that my father’s insistence that we Jews must be better was based on our country’s firm belief that we were not as good.

M
Y MOTHER’S PARENTS
owned a gray stucco bungalow in Stockerau, a pretty little town north of Vienna. We went there on weekends and for holidays and birthdays. That was where my closest cousin Jultschi lived.

When Jultschi was nine years old, her mother (Mama’s sister Elvira) dropped her off at Grandmother’s house, went home, and killed herself.

Jultschi’s father stayed on in Vienna. But Jultschi—traumatized by her past, always needful, easily intimidated—remained with our grandparents, who raised her as though she were their own child.

A soft, large, brown-haired, brown-eyed girl with full, deeply sculpted lips, Jultschi had a big heart and—unlike my sister Mimi—a great sense of humor. She played the piano, badly but well enough for our tone-deaf clan, and we made up operas to her good-natured banging. While I, the “intellectual,” was discovering a passion for gothic novels full of mystery and desire, Jultschi was becoming addicted to movies and swing music.

Grandmother Hahn—a short, fat, strong woman and a strict disciplinarian—would assign us housework and then go off to the market, and of course we would not do what she asked but would instead spend the entire afternoon playing. As soon as we caught a glimpse of her coming back down the road, we would dive into the house through the open windows and get to work, so that she would find us dusting and sweeping like proper children. I am sure we never fooled her for one minute.

Grandmother seemed always to be busy adding to the richness
of the world, knitting delicate lace doilies or teaching Jultschi how to bake
Stollen
or tending to her hens and geese, her dog (named Mohrli), and her hundreds of potted plants. She had every sort of cactus. She would notify Mama in advance: “Klothilde! The cactus will bloom on Sunday. Bring the children to see.” And we would stand in the yard at Stockerau, admiring the hardy desert flowers as they struggled to survive in our cold country.

Grandfather Hahn, a shopkeeper, sold sewing machines and bicycles and served as the agent for Puch motorbikes. Grandmother worked alongside him in the store on Sunday, the big shopping day for the local farmers, who would come from church, meet at the pub, have an early drink, and do their marketing for the week. They all knew my grandparents. Stockerau officials would always invite the Hahns to sit with them at carnival time, to watch as each guild gave its program.

On Grandfather’s birthday, our task was to copy a poem out of Mama’s
Wunschbuch
and then recite it in Grandfather’s honor. I remember him sitting like a rotund little king listening to our pretty recitations, his eyes glistening with pride. I remember his hug.

Near my grandparents’ house was a tributary of the Danube, where Jultschi and I loved to go swimming. To reach the water, you had to cross a high wooden bridge. One day, when I was seven, I got up before anyone else, ran down to the bridge, slipped, and went flying down and down and down into the water. I bobbed to the surface, howling and hysterical. A young man leaped in and saved me.

After that, I was terrified of heights. I did not ski in the Alps. I did not climb to the top of towering buildings and hang socialist banners from the dome. I tried to stay close to the ground.

I
N
1928,
WHEN
inflation was so high in Austria that a customer’s lunch would double in price while he ate it, Papa decided to sell the restaurant.

Luckily, he soon found work with the Kokisch family, who had employed him on the Riviera. They had now opened a new hotel in Badgastein, an Alpine resort famous for its medicinal hot springs. Papa managed the hotel’s restaurant.

The Hotel Bristol nestled among green meadows, beneath snowy mountains, where springs of healing waters percolated up into marble spas. Wealthy families would walk along the garden pathways, feeding the fat squirrels, murmuring their conversations in a mannerly hush. Some rich girl whose parents thought she had a little talent was always playing the piano or singing at an afternoon concert in the gazebo. We visited Papa there every summer—a heavenly life.

As the only kosher hotel in that area, the Bristol attracted Jewish guests from everywhere. The Ochs family, who owned the
New York Times
, came there; and so did Sigmund Freud and the writer Sholem Asch. One day a tall blond man, wearing lederhosen and a Tirolean hat with a chamois-hair brush, came in for lunch. Papa thought surely he had come to the wrong place. But then the man took off his hat, put on a
yarmulke
, and stood up to make a
brucha
.

“I guess even the Jews can’t always tell who the Jews are,” Papa remarked with a laugh.

For the first time in Badgastein, we met rabbis from Poland, religious men with beautiful long beards who walked slowly through the halls of the hotel, their hands clasped behind their backs. They filled me with a sense of mystery and peace. I believe that one of them saved my life.

I was sixteen, unwise and self-indulgent. I stayed too long in one of the baths and developed a chill and a fever. My mother put
me to bed, made me tea with honey, and put compresses on my brow and wrists. As night fell, one of the Polish rabbis knocked on our door. He could not reach the
shul
in time for the evening prayers, he said, and asked if he could say them in our house. Of course Mama welcomed him. When he had finished his prayers, she asked if he would say a blessing for her sick daughter.

He came to my bedside, leaned over me, and patted my hand. His face radiated warmth and good nature. He said something in Hebrew, a language I never expected to know. Then he left. And I got well.

In later years, at moments when I thought I was going to die, I remembered that man and comforted myself with the thought that his blessing would protect me.

Of course there were some things about working in this paradise that weren’t so wonderful, but they were part of life then, and to be truthful, we accepted them. For example, kosher slaughtering was not allowed in the province where the hotel was situated. So the
schoichet
had to slaughter the meat in the next province and then transport it to the Bristol. To take another example, our grandparents’ generation usually lived in Vienna’s outlying towns—Floritzdorf, Stockerau. It was not until our parents reached maturity that Jews were permitted to reside in Vienna proper.

So you see, we had all the burdens of being Jewish in an anti-Semitic country, but none of the strengths—the Torah learning, the prayers, the welded community. We spoke no Yiddish or Hebrew. We had no deep faith in God. We were not Polish Chasidim or Lithuanian yeshiva scholars. We were not bold free Americans—remember that. And there were no Israelis then, no soldiers in the desert, no “nation like other nations.” Hold that in your mind as I tell you this story.

What we mostly had was intellect and style. Our city was the sophisticated “Queen of the Danube,” “Red Vienna,” with social welfare and workers’ housing, where geniuses like Freud and Herzl and Mahler whirled in the ferment of their ideas: psychoanalysis, Zionism, socialism, reform, renewal—throwing off lights for the whole world to see by.

In that respect, at least—that “light unto the nations” part—my assimilated Vienna Jews were as Jewish as anybody.

T
HREE

Pepi Rosenfeld’s Good Little Girl

M
Y FATHER’S DECISION
to let me go to high school had a monumental effect on my life, because for the first time I had friends who were boys. It had nothing to do with sex, I assure you. Girls from my social group felt obligated to remain virginal until they were married. No, it was about intellectual development.

You see, in those days, boys were simply better educated than girls. They read more, traveled more,
thought
more. So now, for the first time, I began to have friends with whom I could really talk about the things I cared about—history, literature, society’s many ills and how to cure them completely so that everybody would be happy.

I loved mathematics, French, philosophy. I took class notes in shorthand and knew them completely thereafter; I never had to
study them again. One girlfriend, a terrible math student—Mama dubbed her “Fräulein Einstein”—arrived at my doorstep every morning before school seeking help with her math homework. I tried to explain without making her feel worse than she already did. The reward I received for my delicacy was a bitter complaint: “How come you Jews are always so smart?”

I was a teenage bluestocking, passionate about ideas, dreaming of adventure. I would travel to Russia and live among the peasants and write best-selling novels about my romantic liaisons with commissars. I would be a lawyer, maybe even a judge, and dispense justice to the common man. This notion first occurred to me in September 1928, during the trial of young Philippe Halsmann, sometimes called the Austrian “Dreyfus case.”

Halsmann had gone hiking with his father in the Alps near Innsbruck. He pulled ahead, lost sight of his father, and returned to find him fallen from the trail and dead in a brook below. The son was accused of murdering his father. The prosecution—lacking any motive or proof—based its case on anti-Semitic slander, for Halsmann was Jewish and many Austrians were prepared to believe that the Jews were murderers by inclination. A preacher declared from the pulpit that by insisting on his innocence and not repenting, young Halsmann deserved worse hellfire than Judas. A policeman said that the father’s ghost had appeared to him like King Hamlet to accuse his son.

Philippe was wrongly convicted and sentenced to ten years’ hard labor. He served two years. Then, through the intervention of people like the Nobel Prize-winning author Thomas Mann, his sentence was commuted to time served and he was allowed to leave the country. He ended up in America, where he became a famous photographer.

His trial inspired me. I fantasized about sitting on the bench,
dispensing justice to all. In the court of my dreams, the innocent would never be convicted.

I did not break any rules, never, except that I cut gym all the time. Nobody cared because nobody could imagine a situation in which a girl like me would have to be physically strong. I was a little
zaftig
—that was considered lovely then—and the boys liked me.

I see them before me. Anton Rieder, handsome, tall, impoverished, a strict Catholic. We eyed each other from a distance. Rudolf Gischa, smart, ambitious; he called me his “witch” and made me promise to marry him right after he finished his studies. I said of course I would marry him, but right now we should just keep it our secret. Actually I knew that if I told my father I was going to marry a non-Jew, he would lock me in the house and never let me go to university, a privilege for which I lobbied ceaselessly and which had become much more important to me than any boy.