The Nazi Officer's Wife (31 page)

I told people who I knew would tell the commandant that I wanted to visit my sister in England for two weeks. Then I went to Berlin and inquired at York House about the best way to get a visa. An Englishman—a complete stranger, with a large mustache and a fat briefcase—told me that I should rent a room in West Berlin and ask there for a passport.

I went to the headquarters of the Jewish community. There I met a man who said he could rent me a room. I told him that I did not actually wish to live there, that I would pay the rent but that really all I needed was the address so I could qualify for an
Ausweis
, a residential identity card. I went to the police station and waited for a long time. Finally an officer came. I told him that I
did not want any food, just a
Personalausweis
so that I could visit my sister in England.

You must understand, at that time there was a blockade of Berlin. It was impossible to secure permission to travel. But this policeman gave it to me. He just gave it to me and wished me a pleasant journey to England.

It took months to assemble the rest of the papers I needed—the passport, the visas, the clearances. Meanwhile, I was working at the court as though I planned to be there forever. Every ten days or so, I would travel to the British zone to collect the papers that had come in and pay my rent to the Jewish couple.

I knew I would eventually have to end our relationship with Gretl, but I didn’t want to do it at the last moment, for fear that it might signal my imminent departure. So one day without any particular warning, I gathered my courage and strength and took her back to the orphanage. I started to tell her some lie about how we’d see her again very soon.

She covered her ears. “No,” she said.

Children always understood everything.

I kissed her. That was a mistake. I should never have done that. She began to cry. And I began to cry.

When I left the orphanage, she was screaming “Auntie! Auntie!” The woman there could hardly hold her. I ran from that place.

This was part of the price I had to pay for leaving Germany: to turn my back on that shrieking child. Baron de Rothschild, signing over his steel mills and his palaces, did not pay a higher price.

D
URING THE LONG
, clandestine arrangements before my departure, I often had to stand in line for hours with Angela. Al
though she was the most mature of little girls, a typical war baby, never demanding or complaining, she would sometimes grow restive and irritable on the long lines. She would whine or make a fuss. And pushing her pram through the ruined streets exhausted me beyond endurance.

One time when I was trying to make my way through the rubble, a Russian soldier fell into step with me and helped me keep the pram upright and Angela inside it.

“Your daughter reminds me of my niece,” he said.

“Oh, then your niece must be adorable.”

“My niece is dead,” he said. “The SS came into our town in Russia and went on a hunt for all the Jews and when they found my sister and my brother-in-law, they just killed them where they stood and threw their little girl out the window.”

It was getting to be the end of the day. The sun was somehow setting again. A man could stand in the street and tell a perfect stranger a story of such incomprehensible evil that it really seemed as if the sun should stop shining altogether. But there was no alteration in Heaven, no sign that the cries of children had been heard.

“You speak excellent German,” I said. “I would never have been able to tell you were Jewish.”

He laughed. “And I knew you were Jewish the minute I saw you.”

An astonishing statement, don’t you agree? For years the Germans had not been able to tell I was Jewish by looking at me. The registrar had stared into my eyes and into my past—and he couldn’t tell. Now here was a complete stranger, a foreigner … and he had known in an instant.

“I have been thinking about trying to get over to the western side of the city, so I can see my relatives who are still alive. But I
have had no luck in getting to the visa office, because I must bring my little girl with me, and it’s impossible to spend all the time necessary to stand in line and wait with this child.”

“Leave her with me,” he said. “Tell me when you want to come back here from Brandenburg, tell me where you wish to meet me, and I will be there and I will keep her with me for as long as you need to get your visa.”

A fantastic offer—and equally fantastic that I accepted it. I returned to Berlin the following week and met the Russian soldier. I left my precious child with him the whole day, and never for a minute thought that he might abuse her or steal her or sell her or hurt her in any way.

Why did I have such trust? Because he was a Jew. And I could not believe that any Jew would want to hurt my baby.

Something always happened, you see. A Yiddish song on Hanukkah, a British rabbi’s prayer on the radio, some kindness on a train or in the street that reminded me, no matter how far I retreated, no matter how deep into self-denial my fear drove me, that the Jews would always be my people and I would always belong to them.

Y
OU WILL ASK
me why it took so long for me to think of leaving Brandenburg, why I had even dreamed of being able to lead a normal life in Germany. I will tell you. It was because I could not imagine a normal life anywhere else.

I couldn’t get a visa for Palestine, even if Mimi wanted me there, which she didn’t. I couldn’t go back to Vienna. To live again in the city that had buried my whole family? Never! In Brandenburg I knew the language and I could get work and support my daughter. Under the communist regime, I had a place, a good job, and
a nice flat and friends who had shared my fate. Do you think after all the terror and hiding and hunger and running, I wanted to start again wandering the strange and evil world alone with a child? Lost again, with no place, no home, no husband, no family,
no place?

When I left Brandenburg and closed that apartment door behind me, I cried bitter tears of mourning for my moment of peace, creativity, and security, so briefly enjoyed.

I left on a Sunday in November 1948. I told no one my intentions so as not to make anyone an accomplice, and left enough money in my bank account to pay the outstanding bills. On the kitchen counter in my flat, I left a loaf of bread so the Russians would think I was coming back.

Angela and I went to the train station and then I lost my courage and went home.

On Monday morning I rang Agnes’s husband and asked him to take us to Potsdam, where one could use the underground, avoiding the train and any potential
razzia
by the Russians.

For two weeks I stayed with the Jewish family at 33 Wielandstrasse in Berlin’s Charlottenburg district, waiting for a British airline strike to be over so I could use the ticket that Hansi and her English husband, Richard, had sent me and fly away. A friend back in Brandenburg told me my apartment had been sealed by the police. I guess they understood that I would not be coming back.

Finally the strike ended. Finally everything ended.

I flew to Northholt Airport with Angela.

When I saw my sister Hansi, when I heard her joyous cry of greeting and felt her tears mingle with my tears, when I held her in my arms—my little soldier sister—I knew that Edith Hahn had finally returned to herself. The ocean of terror was lifted from me. I breathed the air of freedom. My disguise became history.

In my sister’s eyes I saw a reflection of my own grief, which I had fended off for years with hopeful fantasies, and I confronted the agonizing truth. Our mother, Klothilde Hahn, had been murdered after being deported to the Minsk ghetto in the summer of 1942. She had appeared to me in mirrors, smiling with encouragement; sat on my bed and comforted me with happy memories in my most frightening hours; hovered like a light before me as I opened the door to what I thought must be certain death. Was it not Mama who spoke to me through that cold marble statue and directed me to safety? My angel, my beacon, she was gone forever.

And my little daughter and I, because of random good luck and the interventions of a few decent people, had been saved.

F
OURTEEN

Pepi’s Last Package

I
N BRANDENBURG
,
I
had been a respected official of the court, a middle-class woman with an adequate salary and a decent home.

In England, I arrived as a destitute refugee with a sixty-day visa and no permission to work, knowing very little English, carrying no luggage except a briefcase containing a change of underwear. In the years that followed, I worked as a maid, a cook, and a seamstress for the National Health. I never worked in the legal profession again.

I turned my back on the charade of assimilation, sent my daughter to a Jewish school, and raised her as a Jew.

In 1957, I married Fred Beer, another Viennese Jew, whose mother had been murdered in the Holocaust. We told each other our stories once, only once, and did not mention these dreadful
events again for thirty years. We let the past lie and drift, like wreckage on the sea, in the hope that eventually it would sink and be forgotten. In this, I am told, we were not unlike other survivors of terrible catastrophes.

Fred died in 1984, and I moved to Israel in 1987, to live at last among Jewish people in their own country. And though I am surrounded by citizens from cultures very different from mine, I feel a kinship with them all. I am comfortable here. This is my place.

I tried to stay in touch with the people who had been so close to me during my ordeal as a U-boat. When Frau Doktor Maria Niederall was ejected from her stolen shop and fell ill, I saved two weeks’ salary to send her a pretty bed jacket. At least it made her happy. She always loved luxurious feminine things. But it did not make her well. She died too young. So had many of the people who might have mourned for her.

I read a novel by the famous Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. One of the characters in it said, “We must never forget those who have helped us …” and so I wrote to the author and told him about Christl Denner Beran, my beloved friend who is now gone. She was given a medal for her heroism and her extraordinary courage. A tree was planted in her name at Yad v’Shem, the Holocaust memorial here in Israel—the highest honor our country gives to a righteous gentile.

When Angela was growing up in England, I sent her birthday cards from relatives who had become smoke, to make her feel she had a large and loving family. She always received a card from Grandmother Klothilde.

I stayed in touch with Bärbl and her family. And I tried to keep the extraordinary personality of Werner Vetter somewhere remembered in our lives.

“Your father could have painted that wall,” I would say. “Your
father would have been able to make the teacher believe that excuse…. Your father could have fixed the bike….”

I told Angela that Werner and I had loved each other truly and were separated only because he could not get work in England. I did not tell her until she was almost a teenager that we were divorced. In fact, I arranged several visits with him, so she would know this man whom I had tried so hard to love and would always, despite everything, honor.

Why did I surround my daughter with these pleasant, soothing lies? Because I wanted her not to feel alone. Just as Mama had always sent me the things she did not have—the cake when she was hungry, the gloves when she was cold—I tried to give Angela the things that I had lost: a family, a secure place in the world, a normal life.

So I think I could easily have let this story go untold forever.

Except that Pepi Rosenfeld, with a mad courage quite out of character for him, did
not
burn the letters and pictures I had sent him, as I had instructed him to do, but kept them, every single one.

They could have killed us all, those letters.

“What do you think, my dear Edith?” he suggested with his sly smile when we met in later years in Vienna and introduced each other to the people we had married. “Shall I donate these letters to the Austrian National Archives?” I think I must have cried out in horror. “Yes, I thought you might react that way.” He laughed. Decades had passed. And I still fell for that man’s little jokes.

In 1977, shortly before his death, Pepi sent me his last package. It contained all the letters I had written to him from the slave labor camps and from Brandenburg when I was living as a U-boat in the Nazi empire.

And my daughter, Angela, wanting more than anything to know the whole truth at last, read them.

Photographic Insert

(Top Image)
Leopold Hahn, my father.

(Bottom Image)
Klothilde Hahn, my mother.

At the spa in Badgastein.
Left to right
, my cousin Jultschi, a hotel guest, me, another hotel guest, my sister Mimi, my little sister Hansi.