The Nazi Officer's Wife (15 page)

“For fourteen months, I was so lonely, so desperate, and the only thing that kept me going was the thought of you! Why have you not arranged to be alone with me? Do you love someone else?”

“No!” he whispered hoarsely. “No.”

Inflamed by my desire, he pulled me to him. Proper Viennese Aryans glared at us, shocked that we should kiss in public.

“I will find a place,” he said.

I
WENT TO
see Maria Niederall at the Achter Delivery Company on Malvengasse in the Second District. An office assistant named Käthe recognized my name. “It’s Edith, Frau Doktor!” she called. “Mina’s friend!”

From the back of the store, there emerged a tall, dark-eyed woman. She looked me up and down, then flashed a big grin. “Come on in,” she said. “Käthe, bring coffee and sandwiches.”

Frau Doktor wasn’t beautiful, but, oh, did she have style! A sporty dresser, elegant as Dietrich, she had long fingernails, long legs, chestnut hair wrapped in waves and curls against her face. She wore real gold earrings, and on her bosom a special swastika honor badge to show that she had joined the Nazi Party early in the 1930s. She had married a lawyer with a doctorate like the one I had not been able to receive. So she was the wife of the Doktor—thus, Frau Doktor. She watched me eat, noticing my famishment and how my battered hands shook from tension. “Looks to me as if you need a vacation,” she concluded.

“I thought I would have a few days with my boyfriend. But his mother won’t let me in the house.”

“And he obeys her?”

“In all things.”

“Is he a man?”

“He’s a lawyer and a scholar.”

“Ah, well, that explains his docility. Did you sleep with him?”

“Yes.”

“Then he belongs to you, not to his mother. Käthe, bring some of those gooey cakes.”

I ate every crumb, then wet my pinky and mopped up the last essence of the icing from the flowered china plate.

“My girl Käthe here has an uncle in Hainburg with a big farm—lots of food and fresh air. I’ll arrange for you to be his guest for a week so you can get your strength back.”

“But, Frau Doktor, how will I travel? They so often have a
razzia
—a raid—on the train. They’ll find me.”

“You will travel by night. You will have a party membership card with your picture on it just in case anybody checks. But nobody will check, I’m certain. Have some more coffee.”

“I was hoping you would have heard from Mina.”

“Nothing,” Frau Doktor said. Suddenly her eyes glistened with tears. She shook them away. “I could have helped her, you know. She could have stayed in Austria.”

“She wanted to be with her family,” I explained. “If I could have been with my mama, I would have gone as well.”

She took my hands in hers. “You have to soften up these hands,” she said, and rubbed sweet-smelling lotion into the cracked and callused palms. The feel of her strong fingers on my wrists, the smell of the cream—it was such an urbane comfort, so
civilized. “Take this cream with you. Put it on your hands every day, twice a day. You’ll soon feel like a woman again.”

The next evening, to Jultschi’s vast relief, I boarded the train for Hainburg, in a beautiful area near the Czech border, famous for its spectacular birds, misty forests, and luxurious farms. I had in my handbag whatever papers Frau Doktor had given me. But I did not trust them. I sat rigid in my seat. Mentally I rehearsed what I would say if the Gestapo found me.

I got the money for the ticket by accumulating my pay since Osterburg. The Nazi Party card I stole from a complete stranger somewhere on the train from Aschersleben. Then I pasted in my own picture. I have no family or friends left in Vienna. They are all gone. No one helped me. No one helped me. No one
.

In the midst of this anxious reverie, I arrived in a fairy tale by the Grimm brothers, lit by a gentle summer moon. Käthe’s boisterous uncle was waiting for me with a horse and buggy. He was fat and hairy and friendly, and so was his horse. The uncle had been told that I suffered with an intestinal ailment and needed some fresh air and good food to recuperate. As we clip-clopped through the lovely town, he told me all the marvelous things his wife was going to feed me. Pork chops and skewered chickens, dumplings and sauerbraten, pickled cucumbers and potato salad.

“Sounds delicious,” I murmured, feeling sick.

I slept in a large bed under a pile of quilts. On the dresser there was a little shrine—fresh flowers and miniature Nazi flags surrounding a framed portrait of Adolf Hitler. The Führer watched me sleep.

At the breakfast table, looking at the eggs and bread and bacon and smelling the porridge, I became nauseated. I ran outside, gasping. Later on the robust farmer took me and his other guests for a
hayride in the blooming countryside. The other people at the farm—a man, his wife, and their two pale-eyed grandchildren—had come from Linz, on a trip supported by Hitler’s “Strength Through Joy” program, which encouraged citizens to visit sites and shrines throughout the Reich. Our host rolled out a lavish picnic for us.

I nibbled, breathing deeply, thinking: “Get your strength back. Heal your body. Use this chance.”

The farmer had begun to talk about the greatness of the Führer. What a man he was! A lover of little children, a patron of the arts! What a future lay before us all because of his inspired leadership!
Lebensraum
—space to breathe, to move outward. The green fields of Russia, the “empty” plains of Poland. Had we seen the newsreel of Hitler marching triumphantly through Paris? What glorious days for Austria, finally united with her brethren in Germany, finally enjoying the world leadership which the demonic Jews had snatched from her by duplicity and cunning.

He lifted his glass of beer. “To the health of our Führer! Heil Hitler!” And they all cried with one voice, there by the babbling brooks among the breathtaking forests and the warbling birds, sated by their delicious meal, as content as cats in the sunshine: “Heil Hitler!”

I rushed to an embankment of bushes and retched helplessly. I could hear the Nazi farmer whispering behind me: “Poor girl. A friend of my niece Käthe. Sick as a dog. Some kind of stomach trouble.”

In less than a week, I was back in Vienna. The farmer’s wife packed up bread and ham and cheese and country
Stollen
for me. I laid the package down on Jultschi’s table. We watched little Otti gnaw at the cake with his tiny new teeth. That at least was a pleasure.

C
HRISTL MET ME
in a café. She was prettier and stronger than ever, but a line of tension had stiffened her mouth. She was still hiding Bertschi wherever she could. A number of boys who had courted her and her sister had been lost in the war.

“Remember Anton Rieder, the one who studied to be a diplomat?”

“No. Don’t say it. No.”

“He died in France.”

I wept for Anton. Maybe we could have saved each other.

Christl feared for her father, who was working with the Wehrmacht as an engineer on the Russian front. “The radio ridicules the Russians,” she said. “Tells us every day how inferior they are, how Bolshevism has left their people starving and made them stupid. But my mother was a Russian. And she bore the pain of her illness like Athena. And I think we will have more trouble from the Russians than our Führer knows.” She threw her arm around my shoulders. “What will you do?”

“I don’t know. I guess I will have to go to Poland.”

“Stick with this Niederall woman,” Christl said. “She’s well connected. As a reward for her early support of the party, she got the shop that belonged to that nice Achter family—they at least were wise enough to get out of here early on. Unlike you, my brilliant friend.”

She gave me a playful shove. I didn’t laugh. As Jultschi said, there was a time to be funny and now was not the time.

F
RAU
N
IEDERALL SAT
at her highly polished dining table, pouring real coffee from a delicate porcelain pot.

“The way you ate the other day, I was sure you would love the meals at Käthe’s uncle’s farm. But I hear you could hardly keep down a mouthful.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to appear ungrateful.”

“You appear to be sick. Under ordinary circumstances, I’d send you right to hospital. Tell me, did you have an Uncle Ignatz Hoffman, a physician in Floritzdorf?”

“Yes. He killed himself.”

“I knew him,” she said. “When I was a little girl I lived in that district, and I became very ill and your uncle saved my life. After he died, his wife needed help to take their things out of Austria.”

“Ah! So you were the one …”

I leaned toward her, eager to understand who she was, why she had become a Nazi.

“As a young girl, I went to work for Doktor Niederall. I was not so good at shorthand, but I was excellent at other things. He found me a nice apartment and kept me there. That’s all most men want, you know, Edith—they want a woman waiting, in a comfortable room, with a good meal ready and a warm bed. For years, I was his open secret. But he could not divorce his wife, whom he hated, and who hated him, because the Catholic laws of our God-fearing country forbade divorce.

“The Nazis said they would change the divorce laws. So I supported them. And they repaid me. I am at last Frau Doktor. Too late to have children, I am sorry to say, but not too late to enjoy the respect that comes with legitimacy.”

Is it not amazing that such a fine woman would align herself with monsters just to acquire a wedding band?

C
HRISTL GAVE ME
food. I slept in the back of her shop. In the night, the watchman came by with his light. I hid behind a wall of boxes, afraid to breathe, thinking: “If they find me, my friend who has hidden me will go to a concentration camp. I have to find someplace else to stay!”

I ran into Uncle Felix Roemer on the street. He passed me, I walked on a way, and then I turned and followed him into an alley. The Gestapo had come to his flat and demanded to see his papers, but he said he didn’t have his papers because he was trying to emigrate to South Africa and had sent them there. And the investigator had believed him. Not all the SS were as bright as Colonel Eichmann, you see.

I stayed only one night with Uncle Felix. To stay longer was too dangerous. If the neighbors noticed this old man harboring a young girl, they might take a second look. I lay listening to his harsh old man’s breath as he slept, and I thought: “If we are caught, they will send him to a concentration camp. He will never survive it. I have to find another place to stay.”

My mother had written me that my cousin Selma, the daughter of my father’s oldest brother Isidore, had been assigned to a transport. When her boyfriend heard about this, he ran away from the
Arbeitslager
at Steyr and returned to Vienna, so he could go to Poland with her.

This story inspired me. “Come with me to Poland,” I said to Pepi. “At least we’ll be together there.”

He did not agree, but he used this idea successfully to threaten his mother. “Edith must have a place to stay!” he insisted. “If you don’t help us, I will go east with her.”

Alarmed, she gave him the key to another flat in their building that belonged to a vacationing neighbor. I slept there several nights. But I could not wash there or use the toilet or turn on a
light—people would have thought burglars had broken in and would call the police. I don’t think I ever even undressed in that place. Anna came in the mornings. She would beckon me to the door, look around to make sure that nobody was around, then push me out, saying: “Go. Go quickly.”

I was a wreck.

I wandered like a derelict, in a trance of worry. Where would I sleep tonight? Where was Mama? If I gave up and went to Poland, would I find her? Where would I sleep tonight? Distracted, I wandered into the path of a young man on a bicycle. He swerved so as not to hit me.

“Watch where you’re going!”

“I’m sorry.”

He smiled. I remember him as a wiry little fellow, wearing shorts. “Well, no harm done,” he said. “But now that I’ve spared your life, that surely entitles me to walk with you a bit.” I was terrified of him, but he didn’t know that. He just kept chattering on. “The damn Nazis have ruined Vienna with all their checkpoints and road blocks and such. If you ask me we’d be better off with Von Schuschnigg, wherever he may be, but if you say I said that, I’ll deny it. Come on, let’s stop for a cold drink; what do you say?”

“Thank you, I have to go, but thank you …”

“Oh come on, half an hour …”

“No, really …”

He looked hurt and maybe a little angry. That frightened me terribly. So I sat with him for a while and he talked and talked. Finally he let me go on my way.

“Here’s something to remember me by,” he said, and handed me a little Saint Anthony’s medal. My eyes filled with tears. “Oh,
my, now don’t go on like that, it’s not a proposal of marriage after all, just a good-luck charm …”

I kept that medal for the rest of my life.

T
O HAVE A
proper wash, I went on “ladies’ day” to Amalienbad, the public baths off Favoritenstrasse in the Tenth District. This was a working-class area where no one was likely to know me. Far from the center of the city, the bathhouse served the many Viennese who had toilets but no bathtubs at home. No guards stood at the doors. There were no signs prohibiting Jews. No one asked any questions or demanded to see any papers.

I washed in the shallow pool and soaped and rinsed my hair under the spray and sat for a bit in the dense fog of the steam bath, feeling safe enough to dose off.

Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder. I jumped, started to scream.

“Shhhh. It’s me. Remember me?”—a tall heavy girl with delicate misted spectacles and a big smile.

It was Lily Kramer, the cultural leader of the Aschersleben
Arbeitslager
. I was so happy to see her that I could not stop hugging her. Lily said that her father had made it out to New Zealand, and she herself was hiding with the governess who had helped to raise her, who lived in this neighborhood.