The Nazi Officer's Wife (10 page)

You see, even the inhuman ones were not always inhuman. This was a lesson that I would learn again and again—how completely unpredictable individuals could be when it came to personal morality.

The Frenchman who worked with us, Pierre, was called Franz (short for Franzose or Frenchman) by the Germans because they couldn’t pronounce his name. A winegrower from the Pyrenees, he wore a white patch on his clothes with “KG” (for
Kriegsgefangener
—prisoner of war) stamped on it. He led the horse and the plow out onto the fields and we followed him, usually on our knees, sowing, weeding, with me shouting out French words so he could correct my accent.

“Egless!” I would call.

“
Non, non, église!
”

“Palm de turr,” I would call.

“
Pommes de terre!
” he corrected me.

With my box camera, I took a picture of him, then sent the film back to Vienna for Pepi to develop so Franz could send it on to his wife and children.

Pepi was jealous! Like so many Germans, he believed that the French possessed some erotic advantage over other men and would surely seduce us.

“Time to give up these stupid stereotypes,” I said to my brilliant boyfriend. “Franz is far too exhausted, too emaciated, and too lonely for his family to have any erotic designs on anybody.”

Actually, it was the Germans who tried to seduce us. The over
seer made crude jokes with Frieda, trying to tempt her with his power. Werner, a local boy who hoped to sign up for twelve years in the army, took every opportunity to grope young Eva, the daughter of the vengeful maid. Otto, the SA man from the neighboring farm, battered us with vile suggestions and vulgar jokes.

The farmers had grown proud and haughty. They ate better than anyone else in Germany now. And, like Volkswagen and Siemens, they had slaves. All they had to do was feed the local Nazi power elite, and they could have all the slaves they wanted.

“The city people call us shit farmers,” Otto sneered, “but now they will pay, you watch!” He charged like a bandit for a chicken or a hog, and he loved it when the city people competed to meet his price.

Rumors of growing hardship in Vienna came to us in between the lines of our loved ones’ letters. I knew what Mama did not have because she always sent exactly that thing to me. When she was cold, she sent mittens she had knitted from some yellow yarn she had found. When she was hungry, she sent me tiny cakes.

I had collected a few reichsmarks worth of pay, and I sent the money home to Pepi with instructions for him to buy soap for Mama, some writing paper for me, and even a gift for his mother, whose favor I was still trying to win. At harvesttime, I bought apples and potatoes from the farmers, kilos of beans for pickling, asparagus, and potatoes, and I sent them home to Pepi and Mama and the Roemers and Jultschi, knowing that this bounty would be shared.

The Jews of Polish origin had already been sent back to Poland. Now, in the summer of 1941, we heard talk that the German and Austrian Jews would be sent there as well. These deportations—or
Aktions
, as we called them—filled us with dread. We did not
know what Poland meant then, but we knew it wasn’t good. We thought of it as a kind of uncivilized wilderness, where Germans went to colonize and subjugate the local peasantry. If Mama went to Poland, I thought, she would have to be a maid for German colonists—do their dishes, scrub their floors, iron their clothes. I could not bear to imagine her in such circumstances. My mother, a maid? Impossible!

Frau Fleschner and the overseer assured us that as long as we worked here, our families would not be deported. I had the feeling that they tried to look out for us more and more as time went on. One Sunday, the six of us went out for a walk. While we were away, the police came snooping. The overseer said we had gone far out into the fields to work and shouldn’t be bothered. When we arrived home, he grinned and said, “Say thanks, ladies. I pulled you out of the shit again.”

A
N ENCAMPMENT OF
Polish slave laborers sprawled on the outskirts of the farms. These men moved boulders for the farmers, rebuilt their houses, cleaned the pig shit out of their barns. The Poles would call to us as we went on our way to work with our hoes and spades.

“Don’t pay any attention,” I said to my young comrades.

But a lively dark-haired girl named Liesel Brust, eager to know more about this place where so many Jews were now going, inched a little closer to one of the men and asked: “What is it like, Poland?”

“It’s beautiful,” he answered. He was young. He smiled. His front teeth were gone.

“And Warsaw?”

“Glittering palaces, museums, operas, libraries, universities full
of professors—just the kind of thing that a pretty little Jew girl like you would love. Come inside, sweetheart, and I’ll tell you more about Warsaw.”

I pulled Liesel away from him.

“I met a Chinese man who talked the same way to me in Vienna,” I warned her. “If I had gone with him, I would be in a brothel in Kowloon at this moment. If you go into that Polish camp, you will never return, I promise you that.”

I thought I was talking about a bunch of sex-starved prisoners on the German plains. How could I know then that I might as well have been talking about Poland itself?

The harder I worked, the thinner I became, the closer I came to losing hope and imagining death, the more I was overwhelmed by tenderness for every living thing. I made no distinctions among people anymore; I held no grudges and appreciated everyone. We found mice in the hut. Instead of killing them, we left crumbs for them to eat. An impaired chick was hatched in the egg house. I brought it back to our room and fed it carefully for three days before it died.

I wrote to Pepi that there were two spirits at war in my breast. The first felt that there would be no end to this suffering, that we would all die here in the mud. The second believed that a miracle would happen: the RAF would drop a bomb right on Hitler and Goebbels, the Nazis would disappear, I would be a free woman again, and we would get married and have many babies.

I
MADE A
true friend in Osterburg, Mina Katz. An adorable, lighthearted girl of eighteen, blond and graceful, she was somehow immune to depression and always saw the bright side. She came from a large, impoverished family and brought nothing with her
to the labor camp except an inferiority complex. She could have been a fine scholar if only fate had given her an education.

Mina and her older associate Frau Grünwald had been working for a Jewish-owned delivery company. It had been taken over by a Nazi woman, Maria Niederall, who needed the two Jewish employees to teach her the business. As time went on, this woman grew fond of them and wanted to keep them working for her. However, the Gestapo had other plans. Mina and Frau Grünwald received regular packages from their former employer—sumptuous assortments of food, soap, and clothing that only a well-connected Aryan could have provided.

Like a candle in the fields, Mina carried a glow of good nature about her. She giggled. She sang silly love songs. She invented stories. She brought little gifts to everyone. We all loved her. She and I began to work side by side at every task, cutting the asparagus canes, binding the huge stacks of hay, and pulling the new potatoes out of the damp black ground. We tossed the potatoes into twenty-five-kilo baskets, then hauled them to a waiting wagon, each of us carrying one handle of a basket. We wore wooden shoes. We told each other about our sisters and our schools. We worked without thinking of our work, so quickly that one girl dubbed us the “racehorses” of the bean fields. While wrestling beets from the ground, while mulching tiny bean shoots, I began to teach Mina what I knew—economy, law, politics, literature. She drank it in. This education in the fields nourished both of us and kept us going.

In July we baled hay. The sweat ran down our faces. We burned. I smeared mud on my arms and Mina’s arms. I wrote home asking for any kind of skin cream, but of course, there was none to be had, not because it had disappeared from Vienna but because the Jews were not permitted to buy anything anymore, except what their meager rations allowed. You see these spots on my face? They
appeared in later years. They are little black reminders of the blazing sun in Osterburg.

Sometimes, in the wild riot of my thoughts, I had visions of peace, of a perfect rural community, like those in socialist literature, where love of life would lock out war and hatred.

One day when I was coming out of the bean fields, I saw a group of people taking a rest in the shade of a chestnut tree at the edge of a neighboring farm. There were some old women, Germans with weathered faces and hands like iron. There were some young Jewish girls—“H’s” from Vienna, like me—and some German boys, too young for the Wehrmacht, wearing wide-brimmed hats; and a few Frenchmen. No one looked like anyone’s boss; no one looked like anyone’s slave. They were all just sitting in the shade, drinking from a pitcher of water.

“Come sit down for a moment, Edith,” one of the girls called. I joined them. A young Frenchman laid before us on the grass a battered photo of a little girl.

“
Elle est très belle
,” I said.

Tears cut pathways through the dirt on his face.

So much for my vision.

I
N
A
UGUST THE
rains came, again untimely. The harvest, which had started out so well, was now ruined and there was not enough food. We hoped that after the corn harvest, we would be able to use our few marks of “pay” to buy extra food from Frau Mertens. Realizing that if it was bad with us, it must be awful in Vienna, I received permission to go to the post office with a sack of potatoes.

“You can no longer send potatoes to Vienna,” said the postmistress very loudly, so that her boss in the back room could hear.

“Why not?”

“Not enough potatoes to feed the Germans. The Jews will have to eat the rain.”

I turned away from her. She grabbed my arm and whispered into my ear, “On the outside of the package, say it is clothing. Then it will go through.”

We now could see that our letters were being opened and read. I was terrified of what I had written, of what my mother or Pepi or Christl might write. We heard about denunciations and deportations. Suddenly there was so much to hide. If my mother wrote to me and said, “Remember, darling, I am saving my fur coat for you,” maybe somebody would read that letter and come and steal the fur coat and hurt my mother. If Pepi wrote to me that he stayed in the little park near the old café and read his paper until the evening, maybe the Gestapo would read the letter and go and find him there.

“
Destroy my letters!
” I wrote to him. “
Read them and put them in your heart and then burn them!
I will do the same with yours. And when you write, use abbreviations. Never mention places or people.”

We began to call the Gestapo “PE,” for Prinz Eugentrasse, where they had their headquarters. We said “going to school” to signify reporting for deportation, since people being deported were often assembled at school buildings.

By now I had begun to beg Pepi to marry me, hoping that if he did, we would be able to emigrate like Milo and Mimi, or at least that we might be happy together. “A married woman with a ring on her finger!” I thought. “Able to have children! What unspeakable joy!” I treasured the notion that even if we couldn’t get out, I would be safer married and sharing Pepi’s invisibility. He said he loved me. He spoke of his passion. But in response to my proposals, he said nothing, neither giving me hope nor ending it.

We all thought about converting to Christianity. What would have once seemed unthinkable, a shameful betrayal of our parents and our culture, now seemed like a perfectly reasonable ploy. I thought of the Marranos in Spain, outwardly converted Christians, waiting for the terror of the Inquisition to end so they could follow their true faith again. Perhaps I could pretend to be a Christian too. Surely God would understand. And it might help. Why not try it?

I took myself into the town of Osterburg and stared at the statue of Jesus in front of the local church, trying to will myself to love him. It was wartime. Men were at the front. And yet I saw no candles in the church, no kneeling worshipers praying for the safe return of sons and husbands and fathers. The Nazis had done a wonderful job of discouraging faith in anything but the Führer.

I wrote to Pepi for instructions on how to convert. What papers did I need? What affidavits? What signatures? I read the Parables. I found pictures of the Holy Family. I waxed poetic when I wrote to my lover: “Look how beautiful the mother is! How content and sweet! Look how proud the father is, how delighted with the child, the gift he has been given! How I wish we could have a family as happy and close as this one!”

Somehow what had started out as praise of the Holy Family had evolved into a celebration of the family Pepi and I might have, if only he would marry me … if only he would say he wanted me … if only he would leave his mother—and if only I would get my menstrual periods again.

For you see, I had lost my periods. They had gone, disappeared. “You should be happy,” I said to myself. “Think of the convenience.” But in truth, I was in despair. At night, I lay on my straw bed, trying not to think about the pain in my back, trying to force my stiff fingers to make a fist, and I prayed: “Come back! Come back!” But they did not.

I
SAT ON
an animal trough, writing letters, the laundry flapping around my head. Trude sat down beside me.

“Stop writing, Edith; you are always writing. Listen to me. How long has it been?”

“Since June.”

“Me too. Liesel and Frieda and Lucy too. I wrote home and told my mother and she asked the doctor and the doctor said it comes from overwork. What does your doctor say?”

“Dr. Kohn told my mother I must be pregnant,” I answered.

We laughed until we wept.

From Vienna, Pepi wrote obliquely in his new code that it was silly for me to think of converting now, that the time when such a gesture might have proved useful had long since passed.