The Nazi Officer's Wife (24 page)

He was something special, Werner Vetter. A truly gifted man. I wonder if anybody again ever appreciated his talents as much as I did.

I
T WAS
A
PRIL
. Werner had begun to travel a lot to find supplies for Arado because the war had disrupted normal deliveries. He was tired. We played a little chess, listened to a little news, then went to bed, and he fell asleep instantly.

I felt the first pains of labor. But I didn’t want to wake him right away. I walked back and forth in the bathroom, then went back to bed, then back to the bathroom. About eleven, I woke him up.

“I think I’m having the baby, Werner.”

“Ah. All right. I will read you what happens.” He pulled a book from the bookshelf. “First, the pains are widely spaced apart and very gentle. Then as the baby positions itself …”

“Fine fine, it sounds great in words and sentences, but now let’s go to the hospital.”

We walked through the quiet streets of Brandenburg. I held his arm. It took us almost an hour because I moved so slowly. At the
hospital, the nurses put me into a large room with other women in labor.

The clocks on every wall ticked loudly. They were mad for clocks, the Germans. I could hear the other women groaning. The doctor came in to take a look at me. He said to the nurse: “Wait a little while. Then we’ll give her a sedative.”

I was concentrating on managing the pain, and so I did not say anything right away. But then I began to remember all the patients I had seen who had come out of surgery or had been sedated during childbirth, and who said things that could incriminate them and their loved ones. Suddenly I realized the predicament I was in—I could not take anything for the pain, because if I did, I too might become delirious. I might mention names. “Christl,” “Frau Doktor.” God forbid, I might say “Jew.” I lectured myself like a propagandist.

“All the people you adore will be dead because you were a weakling and could not stand the pain of childbirth. For thousands and thousands of years, women have gone through this ordeal without anesthetic. You must be one of them. You must be like your grandmothers and great-grandmothers and have your baby as an act of nature.”

When the nurse came with her needle, I croaked: “No. No. I am young and strong, and I do not need anything for the pain.”

She did not argue. She packed up her needle and left. As long as I didn’t scream and make a commotion, what did she care?

And after that, for the only time during that terrible war, I really wanted to die.

On Easter Sunday morning, April 9, 1944, my child was finally born. The doctor came in during the last few crucial minutes and tugged her into the world. When I saw that she was a beautiful
girl, that she had a sweet little face and two good eyes and all the right fingers and toes, I was overjoyed.

“My husband wanted a boy,” I said to the doctor. “He may be very unhappy about this.”

“So what shall we do, Frau Vetter? Shall we push her back in and hope that she will be reborn a male? Tell your husband that to have a healthy child at such a time is an even bigger miracle than it usually is. Tell him to thank God and be grateful.” He started to leave and then turned back to me and said: “And remember, it is the man who determines the sex of the baby. So your husband cannot blame you for this lovely girl. It is all his fault.”

They laid her in my arms. I was torn and bleeding, in pain, but I took a deep breath of peace and happiness.

All of a sudden, the sirens screamed—an American air raid. The bombers were in the air above us, and this time it looked as though they were going to bomb not just Berlin and Potsdam, but Brandenburg as well.

Everybody who could walk ran for the shelter. Somebody pushed the gurney on which I lay into a dark, airless place. How lucky that my baby was with me just at that moment, that they had given me a little bottle of water for her, to teach her how to suck. We all listened in the blackness, with the practiced ears of people who had been bombed before, to hear where the bombs were dropping.

I thought: “Stupid girl! What have you done? You have brought a doomed child into the world. If you are not buried by the American bombs, you will be discovered by the Nazis! Your whole family, everything you once knew, could be lost and gone. And when you die, who will sit
shiva
?”

I was so lonely at that moment, so scared. And all I could think of was my mother.

Werner tried to make his way to the hospital, but he was stopped because of the “all points” warning in the streets. It took some time for the all-clear. As it turned out the Americans did not bomb Brandenburg but went to Berlin as usual.

When I saw him wandering through the bunker, calling my name, my heart melted with affection. He looked so sweet. He had not shaved. His face was lined with sleeplessness. His hair, usually perfectly combed, was all messed up.

“Grete!” he called softly. “Grete, where are you?”

I thought that I answered him loudly and strongly. But probably my voice came out in a whisper because he passed me by a couple of times before he saw me.

He leaned over me, smiling, his blue eyes sparkling with pleasure. He picked up the baby, unwrapped the blankets, saw that she was a girl, and turned to stone.

“This was your idea! This whole pregnancy was your idea! And what do I have now? Another daughter! Another daughter!”

Werner was in a fury. It seemed to me that his eyes turned white. The flame of love that I had felt for him moments before went out. A Nazi husband: What could I have expected? Was this not a regime which despised women and prized only their ability to breed? Was this not a country that had made a religion of twisted, primitive virility? He paced back and forth by my gurney, fuming and sputtering with anger. I hated him so much at that moment, I never wanted to see him again. And I said to myself, “This is my child, my child, my child. This child is only mine.”

The next day, I received a letter from Werner apologizing for his bad behavior in the bunker.

You know, we have moments of passion when we are in pain. And then of course the moment ends, and with it the passion and the pain, and we forgive and forget. But I think that every time you hurt somebody you care for, a crack appears in your relationship, a little weakening—and it stays there, dangerous, waiting for the next opportunity to open up and destroy everything. Still, I was not in a position to hold a grudge against Werner. He was the father of my baby, my protector,
her
protector. So when he returned again to the hospital and held my hand to his lips, I allowed my heart to soften.

“You will see,” I said. “She will bring you joy.” He smiled a little and tried to look fondly on the new baby; he really tried. He made a lovely birth announcement and sent it to many friends. But it was like the garland of fruit and flowers in our kitchen, only a decoration to mask more serious matters. The truth was that Werner was deeply disappointed and would be for the rest of his life. He had wanted a son.

As the days went by, he looked more and more disheveled. He was getting thinner. I honestly believe he was completely incapable of feeding himself. He had grown used to having a woman to take care of him, and he couldn’t manage on his own. Maybe he thought that if he appeared like a derelict at the hospital, with his shirt dirty and his face gaunt from hunger, I would be sympathetic, stop bleeding, recover quickly from the birth, and come home. If that’s what he thought, well, he was absolutely right. Every time I looked at him, my heart turned, and I did not stay in the hospital for nine days as I should have. I went home in a week because my husband was so lost without me.

I named our daughter Maria for Frau Doktor, my savior in Vienna. We further named her Angelika, for the great eighteenth-century painter Angelika Kauffman—friend of Goethe, Herder,
Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough—a woman whom Werner admired. Her mythic canvases depicting scenes from the Germanic wars against the Romans were now hanging in the Reich’s Chancellery, for she was Hitler’s favorite too. (In later years, when we moved to England, our daughter gave up the name Angelika and called herself Angela. I will use it to refer to her from now on in my story, because she much prefers it.)

You may ask why I did not name my baby for my mother. It was because it is a Jewish tradition to name children only for dead people, and in April 1944, I believed that my mother was alive.

I felt her presence in everything that I did with the new baby, felt her hovering over the crib, smelled her perfume in the air. I felt her so vividly, so physically, that I was absolutely certain she must be alive and well.

Little Bärbl, Werner’s four-year-old daughter, arrived early on a Tuesday morning shortly after Angela’s birth. The minute she walked into the house, clutching her ochre-haired doll, she raised her little arm and shouted: “Heil Hitler!”

Her mother, Elisabeth, smiled approvingly.

I think that I have rarely in my life met anybody who terrified me as much as Elisabeth Vetter. She was very good-looking, very tall, very strong, and, to me, ice-cold. I suppose she could feel as soft and tender as my magic statue. But she struck me as marble through and through. Werner had stayed late in the morning to greet her and Bärbl. The electric hostility and attraction between him and his ex-wife made the air in the apartment close and hot. I could clearly see that he still wanted her. He kissed his little girl and hastily went off to work.

Left alone with Elisabeth, I adopted my most innocuous personality. I practically whispered. I scurried around offering her
coffee and cake, a chair, a tour of the flat. Bärbl stood in the corner, a tall blond child, naturally shy with me.

Elisabeth gazed down at Angela in her laundry-basket bed. “They certainly don’t look much like sisters,” she said.

She looked at the painted garland around the kitchen. “Well, Werner made efforts for you that he did not make for us—right, Bärbl?”

She looked at the neatly aligned tools and paints. “He thinks he’s an artist. Too bad he has no talent.”

I do not remember whether Elisabeth kissed Bärbl when she left. I waited for her to be outside in the hall. I stood at the window waiting for her to be down in the street. I waited and waited until she had disappeared down the block. Not until she was completely out of sight did I breathe a little easier.

“Where is the picture of Hitler?” Bärbl asked. “We have a picture of Hitler in every room in our flat.”

“We are having it repaired,” I said. “It fell down and broke, and we have to have the pieces fixed. It will take some time, but eventually we will get it back. Would you like a cookie?”

“Yes,” she said.

I gave her
Knödl
, little sugared potato dumplings, each with a single strawberry on the inside. When she was an adult, far away in another country, married to a Scotsman, the mother of British sons, that was what she remembered—the Viennese
Knödl
with the strawberry surprise.

Every day we went for a walk: myself, my baby girl in the pram, and the tall four-year-old. Everything that I did with Angela, Bärbl did with her doll. I gave a bath; she gave a bath. I pumped milk from my breast to put into a bottle. She tried to play at pumping and gave her doll a bottle as well. Whenever we met anybody on
the road and I would say “Good morning,” Bärbl would say “Heil Hitler!”

“Heil Hitler!” to the gardener, to the woman who cleaned the streets, to the man who delivered the rations. People must have thought I was a splendid Nazi mother.

But truthfully, I loved Bärbl. She was a sweet little girl, and after a while she stopped saying “Heil Hitler,” because she was under my roof. I was not strict. I was not working. I had nothing but time for the children.

Bärbl’s six-week vacation with us went so well that Elisabeth must have felt quite threatened. In keeping with the spirit of the times, she denounced Werner and me to the authorities, giving some reason why we were “unfit” to house her daughter. The court sent a delegation of two women social workers to come and visit our home.

As usual with the bureaucracy, I was in a state of panic. I had been living with Werner for quite some time, more than a year, and we had grown relaxed with each other. Was there some sign of my Jewishness that he didn’t even notice anymore but they might see? Was there anything in the house that might say “This woman went to a university, studied law, knew how to dress with style …?”

I asked my upstairs neighbor Karla if I could borrow a picture of the Führer, since mine was being repaired. She found one in a drawer.

The social workers arrived without warning—the usual self-important Nazi women with notepads and hats. I invited them in. My beautiful little angel was sleeping in her laundry basket. I thought: “My God, in that little wicker nest she looks like Moses floating among the bulrushes!” They asked me about the routine of our day, the nature of our meals; they opened the stove to see
if it was dirty; they checked for dust in every corner; they noted every title of every book in the bookcase. Then they left.

In several weeks we received a letter saying that we had passed inspection, we had proved ourselves to have a respectable Aryan household, and that Elisabeth’s petition to acquire sole custody of Bärbl had been turned down. “It can only be good for this child to spend as much time as possible in the home of Herr and Frau Vetter,” they wrote in their report. I always wanted to show those two Nazi women that report. In later years, I would have been thrilled to march into their offices and say, “Look, this is what you wrote to a Jewish woman, you unspeakable hypocrites!”

But fate rarely grants us these satisfactions.

E
LEVEN

The Fall of Brandenburg

I
LIVED IN
hope. I did not think of my sisters except, sometimes, to comfort myself with the idea that they were safe in Palestine. I did not think of Mina or any of my other friends from the labor camp. I tried desperately not to think of Mama. Because, you see, if I thought about them, I would have lost my mind. I would not have been able to bear my disguise another minute. So I did everything in my power to protect myself from the depressing power of Rabbi Hertz’s suggestion that I was only a “remnant” and to delude myself that I was leading a “normal” life.