The Nazi Officer's Wife (20 page)

Thankfully, it was mostly the French and Dutch who worked under Werner’s supervision in the Arado paint department. He made sure that there was enough paint and that the insignia on the aircraft were applied correctly, and he earned quite a good salary. His apartment was by far the nicest in our building.

Each of the workers’ buildings had four stories, with three apartments on each floor. Our flat was on the first floor, facing the street. The big vacant lot across the way, scheduled to become a park, as yet contained nothing but a row of trash bins. We had a bedroom, a big combination kitchen and living room, a smaller room, and a bathroom—with a bath! Actually, it was a gas heating unit with a large kettle on top. You could heat water in the kettle and then empty it into the tub for a bath. We alone, among the tenants, possessed this luxury.

Our stove came already prepared for war. It was electric; but if the electricity were to be cut off, coal bricks could fuel it.

Werner took great care not to tempt the neighbors to gossip. He did not bring me to live in his flat until his divorce was final, in January 1943. Before that time, I stayed with his friend’s wife, Hilde Schlegel, a warmhearted girl with bouncing curls, who lived
a few houses away. Hilde’s husband, Heinz, also a painter, had been sent to the Eastern front. She longed for a child and had recently undergone an operation to help her conceive. Since the Nazis were generous to the wives of soldiers, she had plenty to live on and did not have to work.

“When Heinz went to the army, they gave me enough money to go see him,” Hilde said. “He had been wounded, but only slightly, and he was in a military hospital in Metz. Ach, what a wonderful time that was, Grete—a real honeymoon, my first vacation ever. Because, as you must know, it wasn’t always like this. Let me tell you, we had some hard times back when I was a kid. For twelve years Papa had no steady job. We lived on charity mostly. Then, when our dear Führer came to power, things got much better. Just about all the young people we knew joined the Hitler Youth. When I was fifteen I went to a Nazi Party banquet, and they served rolls with butter. It was the first time I ever tasted butter.” Is that the reason? I wondered. Is that why they averted their eyes, made themselves blind? For the butter? “I feel that everything we have we owe to our dear Führer, may he live forever.”

She clinked her teacup against mine.

Hilde became my closest “friend” in Brandenburg, if you can say that about a woman who has no real idea who you are. She walked me down Wilhelmstrasse toward the town, to show me the stores where I could do my marketing. And she told me all about Werner’s first wife, Elisabeth.

“Huge! Taller than Werner! Gorgeous. But temperamental! Ach, what shouting, what fighting! Ask Frau Ziegler in the flat across the hall from Werner if I’m not telling the truth. They had terrible battles. He hit her! And she hit him back! No wonder he finally went and found himself a proper sweet little girl like you.”

Elisabeth had taken most of the furniture when she moved out, but we were left with quite enough to get along. Werner lugged all his tools and paints and brushes into the “little room,” transforming it into his workshop. We kept a single bed in there, in case anyone came to visit. Against the interior wall, he put together a work table; and then, on little hooks, he hung all of his tools, neatly organized by size and function. To make me feel welcome, he decided to decorate the colorless apartment by painting all around the living room a mural on the wooden section of the wall.

Every night, he would come home from work, change his clothes, and eat the evening meal, which I prepared; then, he would go to work on that mural. He used a technique called
Schleiflack
. I seem to remember that it required several steps of sanding, varnishing, painting, and finishing—a messy, dusty, slow job. He stole paint from the Arado warehouse, bright colors which usually sparkled on the wings of the planes bombing England. Night after night, Werner scraped and sanded, sketched an outline, put down a base coat, let it dry, sanded again, painted again. I sat in a chair near the doorway and watched him, remembering the craftsmen I had seen in Vienna, climbing like acrobats on their scaffolding, painting the facades of the boutiques and the hotels. I was so impressed with him, so filled with admiration, that I needed no other entertainment than to watch him at work. His face was smudged and shining with sweat and the intensity of his pleasure in the project. The gold hair on his strong forearms bristled with plaster dust.

Soon a frieze of fruit and flowers appeared, encircling the kitchen, a network of twining vines, curling leaves, apples, carrots, radishes, onions, and cherries—a garland representing all the bounties of peacetime inside which we two would live, as in a charmed circle.

When he had finished his mural, Werner crouched in the middle of the floor and swiveled slowly on his paint-spattered shoes. His bright blue eyes glittered with critical intensity as he looked for places where finishing touches were needed.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“I think it is beautiful,” I said. “And you are a great artist.”

I sank down on the floor beside him and held him tight. I did not mind that some paint ended up on my clothes.

In January, after the divorce came through, I moved into that flat, and when Werner closed the door behind us, I became a privileged middle-class German woman. I had a home, a safe place, a protector. I remembered the blessing of the rabbi who had sat by my bed and patted my hand and prayed in Hebrew for me in Badgastein. I felt very lucky.

W
E ENJOYED A
very quiet, peaceful relationship, Werner and I. But you must understand that I was not a normal companion, like Elisabeth or Frau Doktor, full of demands and opinions. I was concerned only that everything should be as Werner liked it. I never deliberately reminded him that I was Jewish. I only wanted him to forget that, to put that fact away in the back of his mind, as I had put away Edith Hahn, and just let it gather dust there, barely remembered. I put all my energy and imagination into learning how to do the one thing I had lied about being able to do—cook. Frau Doktor sent me packages of lentils and a book of recipes: “Cook with love,” it said, and you can be sure that I did.

Every morning I would get up at five, make us breakfast, and make Werner’s lunch, and he would go to work on his bike. I ate a potato in the morning so he would have enough bread for his
lunchtime sandwich. I could see clearly that before my arrival he hadn’t been eating enough, that he could not really feed himself adequately. Early on he had awful headaches in the evening, hunger headaches; I had made their acquaintance myself, so I knew how he suffered, and I tried very hard to feed him well. Just in case I was held up at night at the Städtische Krankenhaus, the hospital where the Red Cross had placed me, I taught him to make
Kartoffel-puffer
, pancakes made of fried potatoes and anything else one could find. Werner Vetter gained two kilos after I moved in.

Tante Paula Simon-Colani, a tiny, powerful woman whom I immediately adored, came often to visit from Berlin, to give herself some relief from the constant bombing there. She told me that Werner’s family had an inherited obsession with cleanliness.

“Dust, my dear,” said Tante Paula. “Dust as though your life depended upon it.”

Good advice, as it turned out. One day, Werner came home before I did and, just to satisfy the family passion, reached up and ran his forefinger along the top edge of the door to see if there was any dust up there. He was tall enough to do that. To clean off the top edge of the door, I had had to climb on a chair. But I had done it, thank God, because Tante Paula had warned me. So there was no dust.

“I am extremely pleased with the way you are keeping the house,” he said that evening. “Even the upper edges of the doors are dusted. This is good, very good.”

“Ah, well, but I have an advantage—Tante Paula warned me that you would be checking,” I laughed, sitting on his lap, wiggling my fingers through the buttons on his shirt and tickling his belly. I think he might have been just a little embarrassed. He never bothered me about cleaning again.

Werner had a problem with authority, which was a very serious problem indeed when you consider that he was living in the most authoritarian society in the world at that time.

I believe he handled his problem by lying. He was an inspired liar. My lies were small, believable. His were huge, colorful. If he didn’t want to get up for work one morning, he would say his brother’s house in Berlin had been blown up by the RAF, the children were in the street homeless, and he simply had to go and help them. And Arado would believe him.

He loved lying to his superiors at Arado. His lies made him feel free—in fact, superior to his superiors—because he knew something they didn’t know, and he was taking the day off while they were working.

Years later, I became friendly with one of his other wives. She said Werner told her that my father had committed suicide by jumping from a window with a typewriter tied around his neck. Why would Werner tell such a story? Perhaps just to entertain her, perhaps just to entertain himself, to make life a bit more thrilling. I sometimes think that was what sparked his interest in me too: the thrill of a lie. After all, an obedient, docile, willing, loving, cooking, cleaning, mending Jewish mistress was not something every German had around the house in the winter of 1942-43.

Werner and I never talked about the Jews or what might be happening to my mother in the east. To speak of it could only have been dangerous for me, because either he might have felt guilty, as a German; or he might have felt frightened, as someone who was running a risk by harboring a fugitive.

He knew that I was a well-educated woman, but that certainly was not something I reminded him about. He didn’t like people who had any claim to superiority over him. So I carefully limited my opinions to practical matters. For example, when Werner was
divorcing Elisabeth, I told him that in the custody battle for little Bärbl, he should ask for six weeks’ visitation.

“If she comes to us for just a short time, you won’t be able to have any influence on her,” I said. “But if she comes for six weeks, then it will be a real vacation with Father and she will get to know you and love you.”

Werner requested this from the court. When his divorce was granted—in January 1943—and he received six weeks’ visitation rights, he was so happy that he waltzed me around the apartment, singing (very quietly), “Isn’t it just dandy to have a lawyer in the house?”

Every month, he sent out money to buy the car that had been invented especially for the Nazis, to be the dream vehicle of the common man—the Volkswagen. I had no faith in it. I figured it was just something else that the government was doing to get money from the people.

“You will never get that car,” I said, as I pressed his shirts.

“I’ve already paid for several months.”

“I promise you, dearest, you will never get it.”

He looked at me thoughtfully for a moment. Some instinct must have told him that what I said was true, because he soon stopped paying and thereby became one of the few Germans not to be robbed in this unique manner.

Sexually, Werner was a powerful man. He insisted that we prepare for bed together. He never stayed up after me. I never stayed up after him. Another woman whom stress and tension had rendered sleepless the night before, who had worked all day as a nurse’s aide in a municipal hospital, who had cleaned the house and made the dinner, might have said, “No, not tonight. I’m tired.” But not I. I knew I was living with a tiger. I wanted the tiger to be sated and happy, with a full belly, ironed shirts, no arguments.

Does that seem like an impossibility? Can a woman be satisfying in bed when she is pretending to be somebody else, when everything she loved has disappeared and she is living in perpetual terror of discovery and death? The answer is, quite truthfully, yes. Sex is one of the few things you can do in life that makes you forget all the things you cannot do.

And besides—you must understand this—I cared for Werner, more and more each day.

His first wife, Elisabeth, haunted me. She didn’t even live in Brandenburg anymore; she had moved with Bärbl to Bitterfeld northwest of Halle in central Germany—but sometimes I felt that she was sitting at our table, sleeping on our pillow.

“She came by when you were at work,” Frau Ziegler told me. “She was asking about you. Who is this Viennese girl, what’s her story? I told her, Elisabeth, Grete is a very nice person; you ought to be happy that Bärbl is going to have such a nice stepmother.”

I could see from the malicious twinkle in her eye how much Elisabeth’s old neighbor had enjoyed increasing her discomfort about me. If she had only had any idea how much she was increasing my discomfort about Elisabeth!

Elisabeth asked another neighbor if there was any chance that Werner still loved her and might want her again. What was I going to do about this? I wanted to stay with Werner, but I dreaded the idea of marriage—the background checks, the papers, and the questions. On the other hand, I lived in fear that if I didn’t marry Werner soon, his former wife might take him away.

If it seems that I was haunted by Elisabeth, then you should have seen Werner. There we were in the kitchen one night, the picture of domestic peace. I was darning the holes in Werner’s socks. He was reading a novel he had borrowed from the Arado
library. Suddenly his book fell to the floor. He stood up straight. He began to speak.

“You are responsible for all of our problems with money,” he said angrily. “You have no sense about how to spend or how to save. You buy clothes, you wear them once, and then you throw them away. It’s because you are lazy, too lazy to do the laundry, to iron, to behave like a real woman should.”

I didn’t know what to think. Was he speaking to me? I was the only person in the room, but the person he was speaking to was nothing like the person I was.

“Werner, what’s the matter?” I asked in my small voice. He did not even hear me. He began to stride up and down the kitchen, rubbing his chest as though trying not to have a heart attack, dragging his fingers through his neat hair.