The Nazi Officer's Wife (29 page)

The lawyer who had been assigned to her case withdrew, and I represented her. It was the only time I ever argued in court on behalf of any defendant.

“This is insanity,” I said. “Caused by sadistic cruelty beyond imagination. Who would not be insane after suffering this way? Who would not want to see her children dead rather than to continue a life of torture and agony? If my mother had known what would happen to me in my life, she would have murdered me the moment I was born.”

The woman was acquitted.

W
ANTING
A
NGELA TO
have a playmate during my workday, and feeling that our new security must be shared, I arranged to board a little girl named Gretl. She and her brother lived at the orphanage. She called me “Auntie” and became like an older sister to Angela. Many nights, I made the girls supper, read them a story and tucked them in.

“When will Mommy come back, Auntie?”

“I’m not sure, Gretl.”

“And Papa, when will he come back?” Angela asked.

“They will both come back soon, children.”

“What is Papa like?”

I had told them a hundred times, but they always wanted to hear again. “Well, Papa is big. And strong. And very handsome. He can paint beautiful pictures. And he can eat more than all of us put together!”

They giggled. I kissed them good night. These are the perfect moments that live in my memory—the times when I saw those children fall asleep in peace and comfort, their eyelashes lying down on their faces.

For the first time in ten years, I had begun to feel real. I had a decent home for myself and my child. I had friends who understood me, with whom I could be myself, to whom I could say the truth of my heart. I had a wonderful job, which challenged me and enabled me to heal the world a little. My reality—the true Edith Hahn—was returning. I laughed again, argued again, dreamed of the future.

In my dream, Mama would come back. Of course, I said to myself, she would look older and would probably be exhausted from her long ordeal in the Polish ghetto. But soon, with rest and food and the love and care Angela and I would shower on her, she would be my witty, energetic mother again, and I would keep her with me always. We would never be separated.

In my dream, Werner would return. He would feel comfortable in our new home. He would find work as a painter and we would be a family again, maybe even have another child. I closed my eyes and imagined the little ones sitting down for lunch with big white napkins tucked under their chins.

Hilde Benjamin, a minister in the new government, called a meeting of the women judges every month in Berlin. During one of these trips, I contacted the American Joint Distribution Com
mittee (the “Joint”), a group of American Jews trying to help the remnant of our people in Europe. The Joint began sending me monthly parcels: cigarettes that I could trade to a shoemaker for shoes for Angela, sanitary napkins, socks.

One time in Berlin, I saw an English soldier climbing a telephone pole, setting up phone lines between the Russian and British zones.

“I have a sister in the British Army,” I told him, “and my cousin in Vienna has given me her
Feldposte
number, her military address. But I cannot write to her because I am a civilian. Could you get a letter to her from me?”

He lowered himself down to the street, a polite British boy with freckles and protruding teeth. “Why certainly, madam, it will be my pleasure.”

I sat down on a ruined remnant of a staircase, wrote the letter, and gave it to him.

“Tell her if you see her that I am a judge in Brandenburg. Tell her that I am all right and that I love her … She is my baby sister … Tell her how my heart reaches out for her every day …”

In only a few weeks, my British soldier friend walked right into the courtroom and delivered a letter from Hansi. Thereafter, he became our go-between. She sent me elastic for my underwear and sewing needles and cod liver oil for all that ailed my adored little girl. She said she had been with the British Army in Egypt, assigned to interrogating captured German soldiers.

“You speak good German for a Brit,” one of them said. “Where’d you learn such good German?”

“I am asking the questions now,” answered Hansi.

Sweet victory.

I
N THE AUTUMN
of 1946, one of my colleagues told me about a transit camp in the French zone where Jewish survivors were gathering. Although I still kept Mama’s name on the radio every day, and no news of her had materialized, I thought I might find someone who knew of her in the camp. Besides, it was around Rosh Hashanah, and I longed to be with Jews. So I asked my superiors for a few days off, and the old communists let me go.

It was hell to travel at that time. The trains ran when it pleased Providence. Warnings painted in poison green told of the dread diseases you would catch if you dared use public transportation.

In the stations, serpentlike men offered stockings, coffee, chocolate, and cigarettes at black market prices. To walk in the streets you had to scale or somehow circumnavigate mountains of debris. Pipes rigged for heating protruded from holes in the buildings where windows had once been, emitting the terrifying smell of gas. Most of the time, on that arduous journey to the transit camp, I carried Angela and pushed the pram instead of pushing her in it.

I believe the camp may have been in a school. There were large rooms, full of beds, set up like a shelter after a hurricane or a flood. On one side, they housed the very old people and the little children. But perhaps the old people were not as old as they looked, because you see, they all looked as though they had been dug up from the grave—colorless, emaciated, toothless, shaking, staring. I carried Angela among them. They reached for her, just to touch her, a healthy child. My mother was not there.

I left Angela with one of the attendants and walked to the other side of the transit camp, where the younger people were. Grizzled men with stony eyes came up behind me and stroked my arms.

“Come here to my bed, sweetheart, I haven’t seen a woman like you since the beginning of time.”

“Get away from me! I am looking for my mother!”

“Are you a Jew? Where are you from?”

“I am a Jew. From Vienna. I am looking for Klothilde Hahn!”

They surrounded me. I was terrified. I could not see anybody to help me.

“Leave me alone!” I cried. “I am married. My husband is a prisoner of war. He is in Siberia. My child is here with me. I came only for Rosh Hashanah, to be with some Jews. How can you be Jews? This is not possible! I do not recognize you!”

One of them pulled my hair, yanked my head backward. He was tall, gaunt. He had a shaven head and black eyes set in watery reddish shells.

“So you married a German soldier, huh, bitch? This is why you look so good, so healthy and pink and clean.” He turned to his fellows. “How do you like this, comrades? She sleeps with the goyim. And now she’s too good to sleep with us.”

He spat at me. He had only one or two teeth in his mouth and they were like fangs.

It seemed to me that to get out of that place, I had to run a gauntlet of a thousand grabbing hands. How could these brutalized rapacious men be Jews? It was impossible! Where were the sober, mannerly yeshiva scholars from Poland that I remembered from Badgastein? Where were the refined young men with brilliant minds who went with me to the university? What had the monsters done to my people?

For the first time I experienced the awful, irrational guilt that besets all survivors. For the first time it occurred to me that maybe my life as a U-boat did not weigh heavily on the scales of suffering, that the hideous experiences which had transformed the men in the transit camp might make it impossible for them ever to accept me as one of their own.

I could not stop trembling; I could not stop weeping.

I went back to the other side of the camp, to be with the old people, to help with the children, the orphans of this storm. I held them close to me; I let them play with Angela; I taught them little games to make them smile. With them I had some peace.

But for the journey home, my strength failed me. To drag and push Angela to the station again now seemed an impossible task. I left her with an attendant in the transit camp and said I would come back for her with a car.

At the station one of the black marketeers told me, “There is a train that passes through Brandenburg, but it’s a Russian train. Maybe a woman like you shouldn’t travel that way.”

I felt that I had no choice.

The train came. It was empty. “This is my train,” said the officer in charge. He had straight blond hair and Asian features. “If you want to travel with me, you have to go into a compartment.”

So I did. I was too nervous to sit down. I stood looking out the window. The Russian came and stood next to me and slipped his arm around my waist.

“I am not German,” I said. “I am Jewish.”

He took his arm away.

“There is a Jewish officer on board. He’s the boss of all the trains. Come on. I will take you to him.”

The Jewish officer had dark hair and eyes like my father’s and spoke to me in Yiddish.

“I don’t know Yiddish,” I said.

“Then you are not Jewish.”

“I came from Vienna. We never learned.”

“All the Jews from Vienna are dead. Gone. Murdered. You are a liar.”

“Shema Yisrael,”
I said.
“Adonai eloheynu. Adonai echod.”

I had not said it since my father’s funeral—ten years, time for a world to disappear. I bit my lip and choked on my tears. I leaned on his desk to keep from falling.

Finally he said, “This train comes empty to this cursed country every week, to pick up Russian prisoners and bring them home. Here is the schedule. You may take this train at any time when it suits you, and I will guarantee your safety.”

He held my hand until I regained my composure. But in fact, sometimes I think I have never regained my composure since that visit to the transit camp in the French zone.

What you see is a mask of calm and civility. Inside, always, forever, I am still weeping.

The next day my friend Agnes’s husband, the communist, drove me back to the camp and I collected Angela. The attendants were surprised; I suppose they expected never to see me again. But I did not have that baby in the middle of a war in order to abandon her.

O
NE NIGHT
,
SOMETIME
in late 1946, I was sitting in my apartment, working on a brief, when a man knocked on my door. He thrust into my hand a case containing eyeglasses. Then disappeared. I locked my door, threw the glasses onto the floor, dug and dug into the lining of the case, and finally found a letter—written in almost infinitesimal handwriting—from Werner.

He was all right. I had been writing to him for more than a year, but he had not received any mail from me until my letter of October thirty-first. In fact, the mail that he
had
received came from his sister-in-law Gertrude; it was intended for his brother Robert, who was lying wounded in a military hospital.

For a moment, I just looked at Werner’s letter and enjoyed a flood of relief. Then I read …

“I send you and our Angela best greetings and wishes. I hope that fate will keep you from poverty and give my dearest Grete a strong heart … to endure this time of separation …”

On March 10, 1945, he had been wounded by shrapnel in the right arm. On March 12, he was taken prisoner. After a hellish ride on a military transport, he ended up at a hospital in Poland, where he tried to heal despite near-starvation rations. In May he was brought to a prison camp in Siberia, a miserable, frozen, ugly place, every bit as harsh as I had imagined.

But Werner was a talented man. His virtuosity made him useful, and he found inside work. He did carpentry, repaired locks, wired lamps, decorated the grim Russian offices, painted portraits that the Russians sent home. Just like the French prisoner who made me the beautiful inlaid box, Werner knew that the way to soften a superior’s heart was with a charming gift for his wife.

His letters ached with the fears that came with isolation. How well I recalled them! Was I trying to get him out? Could I pull any strings? Did anyone in Germany remember the prisoners of war? Would they just be a burden to the Fatherland?

He begged me to tell the Russians the circumstances of our marriage, “which clearly depict my anti-Fascist behavior long before the fall of Hitler’s system.”

He asked me to watch over Bärbl.

Now that I was a judge, would I still need a husband to take care of me? Would there be anything for him to do when he got home?

“What an indescribable torment it is,” he said, “to not know whether loving hands are waiting to comfort you after the torture of imprisonment.”

I knew exactly how he felt. I remembered writing to Pepi in Vienna.
Are you there? Do you remember me? Do you still love me?

I imagined the screaming Arctic winds, the white wasteland, the endlessly lit sky and then the months of darkness.

“Please,” I said to the court director, Herr Ulrich, “use your influence. Bring my Werner home.”

I imagined the prison rations, the hard bread. I saw Werner shivering under thin blankets, wearing all his clothes to bed as I had done, his capable hands wrapped in rags of gloves.

“Please,” I said to the lawyer, Schütze, “you know some of the Russians. Tell them what a good man he was, how kind to the Dutchmen and Frenchmen at Arado, how they loved him and sent him gifts.”

I imagined the snow. Deep. Up to his knees. I imagined him working next to SS men, butchers from the death camps. “Get him out,” I begged the Russian commandants. “He’s not like the others. He deserves to come home to his wife and his child. Please.”

The Russians looked at me without expression, denying me nothing, promising me nothing. I did not stop asking. I sent letters to Berlin, petitions to every office I could think of. “Please,” I begged.

Even as I begged for Werner’s release, I feared his homecoming. No matter how deftly I limited my social life to the Victims of Fascism and other anti-Nazi survivors, I knew I was still living among the most virulent anti-Semites the world had ever known, and one of them—albeit the least virulent—was Angela’s father. I had often heard Werner’s views about the “power” of “Jewish blood.” What if he refused to accept our beautiful, lively three-year-old because of this? I felt that I must do something to neutralize the effects of the Nazi propaganda, to make sure my Angela had a loving father. So I arranged for a Lutheran minister to come to my home, and I had Angela baptized as a Christian.