The Nazi Officer's Wife (11 page)

Frau Mertens lent us to her neighbors the Grebes, who were a little shorthanded. Now we were just like the other prisoners of war, the Serbs, the Poles, the emaciated Frenchmen—except that we were not
really
like them, because we had no country.

I clung to the belief that I would be able to go home in October. What was there to do on the farm in the winter months? We were seasonal workers, were we not? The prospective return of cold weather terrified me—the rheumy damp, the frozen mornings. How would we survive here?

I thought about my mother, with her dark hair and her perky little gait, the marvelous sweet cakes that fell like the food of the gods from her sugary fingers, her wry ironic commentary on the racist fools who were destroying the earth. I was twenty-seven years old, and I still dreamed of her sweet embrace, her gentle voice.
You must become a mother, Edith, because obviously you have a gift for it
. I thought about home, the warm cobbled streets, the
music. My hands cracked the asparagus canes and tossed the potatoes into their bins, and my mind sang waltzes to itself and danced with my true love.

“Come back, Edith,” said the overseer. “You are in Vienna.”

He was right. I had learned to fill myself up with memories and lock out Osterburg, a fabulous partitioning of the mind that preserved the soul. When the local police arrived and told us we must wear a yellow
Magen David
at all times, I imagined that such a silly thing could never happen in Vienna, which I still put on a pedestal as a model of sophistication. And then Trude received a letter saying that all Jews in Vienna had to wear the six-pointed Jewish star as well.

I couldn’t believe it. Was it possible? Had Vienna descended to the level of an ignorant rural backwater? The idea horrified me. You see how long it takes for us to abandon treasured assumptions.

The police told us we must write to Vienna for the yellow stars, and that when they arrived, we must wear them at all times. But if we had done so, no shopkeeper in town would have waited on us. So we didn’t wear them. Our supervisors on the farm seemed to care not at all. I believe that in their way they had began to want to keep us content enough to go on obediently working for them, even more than they wanted to please the police.

P
EPI WROTE THAT
Jultschi’s husband, Otto Ondrej, had died on the Eastern Front.

Poor Jultschi, the weakest among us, the most beset by tragedy, was alone again. I could not bear to think of her, and yet she did not leave my mind. “My funeral clothes are still in Vienna,” I wrote to Pepi. “Tell her to take them.”

Lest I have any doubt that my youthful certainties had changed forever, Rudolf Gischa wrote to me from the Sudetanland.

“I was surprised to learn that you were still alive,” he said frankly. (Why? Was there a new policy? Were they getting tired of having us work for them? Were the Jews expected to be dead now?) “I feel sorry for anyone who is not a German,” he said. “It is my greatest joy to know that I am privileged to create the great empire of the Reich for the German Volk according to the principles laid down by our Führer. Heil Hitler!”

One of the girls who had been allowed to leave, Liesel Brust, was more courageous than most of us and had always tried to get to know the foreign prisoners. Now she sent me from Vienna a coded letter with a large package of men’s underwear and asked me to leave it by a certain boulder in a certain field on a certain night and then to tell the French prisoners, who were in rags, where they could find it.

I had never done anything like this—an act of political sabotage! To be caught meant banishment to one of the proliferating concentration camps, but to refuse meant such dishonor that I could not even bear the thought of it. I waited for my roommates to fall asleep. Softly, softly I slid open the window and eased myself out. It was a hot night, cloudy and thick with tomorrow’s rain. Under my shirt, the package shifted and crunched. It seemed to me a thunderous sound. I took a deep breath and then raced across the open fields and plunged into the corn. The sharp stalks sliced at me. My heart pounded. I did not once dare to look back, for fear of seeing someone behind me. The boulder bulged in the distance at the end of a bean field. I crouched as low as I could, ran, left the package, and took one look around me. I saw no one, no light in the farmhouse, no patch of clear sky to let a star shine through. I heard distant thunder. My hands were slick with sweat. I lowered my head and sprinted back to the workers’ hut.

Trude was sitting up on her bed, her eyes wide with terror
at my absence. I put one hand over her mouth, the other over mine.

The next day Franz pulled me behind his horse and plow.

“Where is the underwear?”

“I left it.”

“It wasn’t there.”

“I left it exactly where Liesel said.”

“
Merde!
Someone else took it.”

I gasped. Maybe I had been seen! Maybe the authorities had opened and read Liesel’s letter! We would be arrested! I imagined the barracks at Dachau. All that day and the next and the next, I waited for the Gestapo to come.

They never did, though, and we never found out who had taken the underwear.

I was put into a new room. I slept under the window. In the night I awoke and discovered that my face was wet. It wasn’t tears. It was rain. I rolled away from the broken window and went back to sleep. So the bed got wet—so what?

A
S THE TIME
for my return to Vienna approached, I tried to tell the truth of my heart to Pepi. I told him how much I regretted that we had not left when we could, what a terrible mistake it was, how we had no one to blame but ourselves. “We cooked this soup,” I said, “and now we must eat it, you and I. I promise you that I will always be a good comrade, whatever may happen. Count the days which are still between you and me. Another fourteen days. Then I will be with you.”

Mina turned toward me in her bed and raised herself up on one arm. The moon lit her face. “Tell me,” she said. “Tell me how it will be.”

“I will come in at the Western Station,” I said. “I will step off the train and not see him right away. But then he will see me, and he will come to me without calling my name so that all of a sudden he will just be there, suddenly, like magic—that is how he always appears. He will have flowers for me, and his wicked smile. We will go home together through the Belvedere and over the Schwartzenbergerplatz. We will go to his room and make love for three days, and he will feed me oranges.”

She fell back on her mattress, groaning. She had never had a lover.

We packed our suitcases. Nine of our friends, among them Frau Grünwald and Frau Hachek, received tickets for home. They were transformed by delight and anticipation, as they put on their city clothes for the journey. We could not wait to be them.

When we returned from the beet fields, Frau Fleschner assembled those of us who were left in front of the hut. We eagerly awaited her announcement, sure that she would tell us the day, the time, the train.

“You are not going to Vienna,” she said. “You are going to Aschersleben to work in the paper factory there. Consider yourselves lucky. Remember that as long as you are working for the Reich, your families are safe.”

Mina began to cry. I put my arm around her.

“Please tell Mama,” I wrote to Pepi on October 12, 1941. “I can’t write to her. When will we see each other again? Life is so hard now. I don’t know anything about what is happening in Vienna! For today I can’t write anything more. I kiss you. Your desperate Edith.”

S
IX

The Slave Girls of Aschersleben

W
E STOOD IN
the center of the
Arbeitslager
—the work camp—at Aschersleben, wearing our cleanest work clothes, our least muddy shoes, and the yellow star marked “
Jude
” which we had been required to wear for the train ride and which we could now never take off. We were brown as the autumn leaves.

The girls stared at us, astonished, just as we stared at them. Because you see, they were beautiful. They had manicured hands, lovely hairstyles. They wore stockings! The workhouse itself seemed beautiful to us; it was a bright three-story building with a kitchen, a shower room, dayrooms, windows with curtains, and pictures on the walls. I thought: “This place is going to be wonderful compared with Osterburg!”

A big girl named Lily Kramer brought us a cup of acorn coffee.
She had a university degree. Her spectacles sat low on her long nose.

“They let you dress like that in Osterburg?”

“It was a farm.”

“Well, here, you’ve got to look as though you’re going to business,” she said. She leaned forward and spoke very quietly. “They like to make it seem that we are real workers, earning real wages, so that they won’t have to think about who we really are, and in case visitors see us, they will not be disturbed or upset.”

“Are there many visitors?” Mina asked eagerly. She always seized upon the positive, that girl.

“No,” answered Lily. “There are no visitors. Are you by any chance interested in chamber music?” We squinted at her. “How about drama? Schiller?” Was she crazy? “Too bad.”

She sighed and drifted off, like Yelena in
Uncle Vanya
, weary to death of the fools who surrounded her.

We settled in. The girls came and went constantly in their pretty dresses, all marked with the compulsory yellow star. At six in the morning, the curling irons were heating up for the day’s coiffures. Initially I thought the girls were just trying to keep up appearances. But soon I realized it was more than that. They were trying to attract a protector. Not necessarily a lover, for by this time—October 1941—an Aryan could be imprisoned for consorting with a Jew. No, the slave girls of Aschersleben were just trying to find someone who would want to have them around and keep them employed so they and their families would be allowed to remain in the Reich.

In later years, I saw pictures of the paper factory of H. C. Bestehorn in Aschersleben. It had an attractive front entrance, a courtyard, and windows adorned with boxes of flowers. I never saw
that side of Bestehorn. We came every day from our barracks, guarded by our pretty, young, mean-spirited camp commander, Frau Drebenstadt, and went through the back door straight into the factory. I counted eighty-two of us, but there might have been more.

Trude, Mina, and I were assigned to the stamping machines, old green Victorian monsters that punched out cardboard boxes for products like macaroni, tapioca, cereal, and coffee—none of which we got to eat.

I stood at one machine. With my left hand, I pushed four cartons under the blades. The blades came down. I turned the cardboard. The blades came down. I pulled the cardboard out with my right hand and pushed in four more sheets with my left hand. The blades came down. I stood in one place and pushed the cardboard in, turned it, pulled it out, pushed it in, from six-thirty in the morning until eleven forty-five and then from one-fifteen to five forty-five. The blades came down like rockets. Pang! Pang! Pang! The roar of the motors, the beating of the blades, and the swishing of the cardboard were incessant.

Our department head, Herr Felgentreu, a confirmed Nazi, proud of his job, waited for the engineer, Herr Lehmann, to set the machine timer, then synchronized his stopwatch. “You!” he barked. “Start now!” I worked like crazy. Push, turn, push, pull, push turn push pull push turn
Pang! Pang!
as fast as I could, snatching my fingers back from the knives. Ten minutes flew by. Suddenly he shouted “You! Stop!”

I was sweating. My heart was racing. The tips of my fingers burned from pushing and pulling the cardboard. Felgentreu counted how many boxes I had stamped out, then multiplied by six and came up with a quota for the hour. Then he multiplied by eight and came up with my quota for the day: 20,000 boxes.

“But it’s impossible, sir,” I protested. “One cannot work eight hours at the same rate that one works for ten minutes.”

He wasn’t even listening. He was walking away. I started to run after him. Herr Gebhardt, our supervisor, reached out and stopped me. The forewoman who worked under him put her finger over her mouth, signaling me to keep me quiet. I saw that it was the only finger besides her thumb that remained on her right hand.

That first day, I produced 12,500 boxes. This wasn’t backbreaking labor as in the fields, but when the whistle blew I was so tired that I could barely walk.

For the evening meal, we received two pieces of bread and a cup of coffee.

The second day, I was told that if I fell short of my quota again, I would have to stay late to make up what was missing. At the last whistle, I had produced 17,000 boxes. They kept me working. By then I was so weary and so hungry that it took me several more hours to reach my quota. As I was finally leaving the factory floor, an Aryan worker shoved a broom at me and ordered me to sweep up. “No, Edith,” said Herr Gebhardt. “You go and have your dinner.”

The bulk of our food came at lunchtime in a brown ceramic bowl, a kind of improvised mixture of potatoes, cabbage, and celery, “arithmetically equidistant between vegetable and liquid,” said Lily, our resident intellectual. That was a fair description.

In addition to the factory work, I had kitchen duty one week out of every month. I cleaned the tables, peeled potatoes, washed the pots. Standing before the kettle of boiling potatoes, ladling one into every brown ceramic bowl, I thought: “I could slip one into my pocket. It would burn, but who cares?” The Nazi cook was watching me. She knew exactly what I was thinking. What girl
had not succumbed to notions of potato theft in this place? Frightened, I put the potato in another bowl and
dreamed
that it was in my pocket.

At our dinner of bread and coffee, Mina whispered, “Do they mean to starve us, Edith?”

“I guess we’ll have to try and fill up at lunch,” I answered. “Meanwhile, we’ll write home and ask for food.”