The Nazi Officer's Wife (27 page)

I went to sleep on my mattress, holding my well-behaved Angela in my arms, certain that our saviors would soon arrive. One of the old men working in civil defense came down to tell us that a supply train loaded with food had stopped on the tracks. Many people went out to loot it; they shared the food they brought back.

A German soldier awakened us. “The Russians have broken through,” he said. “Time to evacuate the town.”

So I did what everybody else did: I put my baby in her carriage and I ran. There were soldiers all over telling us which way to go, and we ran and ran; everybody was running. The city was burning. We could hear the bridges exploding behind us as the Wehrmacht blew them up to slow the Russian advance. By the time it grew dark, I had reached a little town on the outskirts of the city. I ran into a barn and found a corner to hide in. I wrapped Angela in
my coat, and we both fell asleep. When I woke up, the sky outside was on fire. So was Angela. She was covered with red spots and running a high fever—measles.

I didn’t have anything with which to care for her, no water, nothing. I went from house to house, weeping, begging to be allowed in because my child was so ill. A neighbor from Brandenburg saw my distress and pleaded on my behalf. Everybody said no. Everybody was afraid. Finally, in the last house, the smallest house, a woman and her daughter let me in. They had both had measles. They told me to keep Angela in the shadows and give her water.

The whole city seemed to be fleeing through that little town. On the heels of the civilians came the army that had once seemed invincible, now utterly beaten, desperate not to fall into the hands of the Russians. Some soldiers came to the little house to rest and hide for a bit. One of them had a battery-operated radio. We gathered around it, I and my suffering child, the old woman and her daughter, the haggard soldiers. Admiral Doenitz spoke to us. He told us that Germany could no longer defend itself, the war had been lost, and German citizens should obey the commands of the victors.

Silence. No one wept. No one even sighed.

“So. Is anybody hungry?” I asked.

They gaped at me, astonished.

“Go to the farmers hereabouts and ask them for flour and eggs and milk and jam and bread,” I said. “Bring the food back here, leave your weapons outside, and I will make you something good to eat.”

And that is exactly what happened. All day long, as the men streamed into the little house, I made hundreds of delicate Viennese crepes for the Wehrmacht, and the woman and her daughter
served them. As I stood at the stove, a song from a million years ago came into my head, and I sang:

One day the Temple will be rebuilt,

And the Jews will return to Jerusalem.

So it is written in the Holy Book.

So it is written. Hallelujah.

One of the soldiers whispered in my ear: “Don’t act so happy, madam. Hitler may hear you.”

“Hitler has killed himself, Sergeant. That’s for sure. Hitler and Goebbels did not wait to greet the Russians along with us plain people. That’s why it was the admiral we heard on the radio.”

“You never know,” he said. “Careful.”

In the middle of that tremendous defeat, the sky blazing with bombs and roaring with Russian cannon, he was still afraid to say a word. It was the habit of silence, you see. The habit of silence gets into you; it spreads from this one to the next one. If the Germans wanted to be phobic about an infectious disease, they should have picked silence, not measles.

Before this soldier left, he gave me some glucose tablets. We called them sugar pills. What a treasure they turned out to be!

Now, in this little town, every house hung out a white flag of surrender—a rag, a sheet, a towel. My two kind hostesses were not eager to stay there and say hello to the victorious Red Army, so they left. And I was not so keen to receive them on my own, so I decided to go back to Brandenburg. I took as much food as I could and walked back with Angela in her carriage, heading east on the road as the defeated German soldiers headed west.

I came to a bridge that spanned a very deep ditch. The bridge had been smashed in the middle. The two sagging, cracked sides
of the bridge were connected by a toilet door, the kind of wooden door they have in the countryside, with a heart carved out of it in the center. This little door was barely wide enough to support the wheels of the pram. I looked down through the open heart and saw boulders and debris and death. I imagined the pram slipping off the thin bridge, the baby hurtling downward.

“This is the end,” I thought.

I closed my eyes and raced across the door to the other side. When I opened my eyes, Angela was sitting up, looking at me. Her fever was gone.

The road back into Brandenburg was strewn with German corpses. If they were lucky, somebody had put newspaper over their faces. I tried not to walk on them, but sometimes it was impossible to go around them. There were huge piles of rubble from the bombing. I picked up the pram and climbed over them.

The Russians came down the street on giant horses, towering over the city.

I
MET UP
with my neighbor, Frau Ziegler. Far gone in her pregnancy, she was pushing her other baby, a little boy, in a baby carriage just like me. We decided to stay together and try to make it back to our building.

We passed the bank. The Russians had broken into the vault and taken out all the reichsmarks, and now they threw the money into the street so that it blew like flying leaves in the hot wind from the fires all around. When the Germans ran after the money, the Russians roared with laughter.

Our house on Immelmannstrasse was burning. The Russian soldiers had run inside, taken out mattresses and quilts and pillows, and tossed them into the vacant lot across the street, and now they
were lounging there smoking and laughing, watching the building burn. Much of the facade had fallen away, exposing the cellar where I stored my Viennese suitcase, the one that Mama had left for me with Pepi. I could see the suitcase, shimmering in a haze of heat and smoke.

“I have to get that suitcase!” I screamed, and I ran like a madwoman into the fire. The terrific heat forced me back. Frau Ziegler pleaded with me to forget it; what could be so important that it was worth risking my life for? But I ran back into the blaze once again. The heat overcame me, burning my eyebrows and my hair. “Help me, someone, I have to get that suitcase! Help!”

A Russian soldier who had been watching this scene threw one of our quilts over himself, dashed into the cellar, and brought out my suitcase. I couldn’t stop thanking him. I think I may have kissed his hands. He and his comrades watched curiously as I opened the suitcase, imagining, I suppose, that something incredibly valuable was stored there—jewels, silver, paintings. When they saw that what I had been so hysterical to retrieve was a faded blue volume of Goethe, rather clumsily bound, they thought I had lost my mind.

Now that our home was destroyed, we had to find a place to stay for the night. In the street we met our doctor, the old man who took care of our children. He directed us to a Protestant girls’ school nearby. The teachers there showed us to a tiny room, a sort of dressing room, at the back of the stage in the assembly hall. Two medical stretchers, a broom, a sink. We were exhausted, and so were our children. So we lay down on the stretchers and we went to sleep. We did not think of locking the door.

During the night, I woke up. There was a wailing sound all around me, not like a siren but rather a soft, sustained screaming. It seemed to come from the sky and the earth. Outside the little
room where we cowered, drunken Russian soldiers passed back and forth. They didn’t come in, because we had not locked the door and when they pushed it open they saw nothing but darkness, and they must have thought it was a closet. Frau Ziegler and I lay there holding hands the whole night. We scarcely dared breathe, and we prayed that the children would stay quiet.

In the morning we went back into the streets and searched until we found an abandoned apartment. The doors didn’t close, the windows didn’t close, but nobody bothered anymore about such minor matters. We had nothing to eat except some cold pancakes. In the street, though, there was a hydrant which we could open to get some water. I dissolved the glucose tablets in water and that was how I fed my baby.

The systematic rape of the women in the city went on for a few days and then abruptly stopped. Most women had some relatives they could contact. Frau Ziegler left to go and stay with her mother. But I was alone, so I stayed there in that apartment near the water hydrant.

I went out to find people I knew. One of my friends lived in a building that had not been destroyed. She was sitting on a chair, staring out the window at the blasted city: the smoldering shells of buildings, the Russians sauntering and smoking. Her eyes were ringed with purplish bruises. Her nose was caked with dried blood. Her dress was torn.

“I offered him my husband’s watch,” she said, “but he already had an armful of watches.” She didn’t weep. I think she was finished weeping. “Thank heaven the baby was with my mother.”

“Our old pediatrician is about,” I offered. “Maybe he could help you …”

“No, it’s all right. I have water. I have food.” She looked
around, knowing that her old life was over, missing it already, missing her dead Führer, her dead husband, and the regime that had promised her world conquest. “This was the nicest apartment I ever had,” she said.

E
VENTUALLY THE OLD PEOPLE
who owned the apartment I was staying in came back. They were delighted that I had not stolen anything, and they let me stay on. I do not know what my baby ate at that time, how we ate, what we ate; I do not know that anymore. Every day was an adventure in hunger. We stood on long lines waiting for some authority to give us a little food—some pasta, some dried peas, some black bread. For breakfast we had a watery flour soup mixed with a little salt. Angela ate it with bit of sugar. I was so thin and weak that sometimes I could not even lift her.

Soon not one dog or cat remained alive in the city.

For months and months, there was upheaval: no order, no transportation or electricity, no water in the tap. Everybody was stealing and everybody was starving.

Every lightbulb in every fixture in every corridor in every building was stolen. If somebody offered you a meal, you had to bring your own utensils. The mail came by horse and wagon. Pepi sent me a Christmas card in 1945. I received it in July 1946.

Cigarettes became currency. The Americans joked that you could get any woman in Germany for cigarettes. The Germans brought their china and their laces and antique clocks to certain places at certain hours; and since the Russians were not allowed to socialize with the Germans, they would sell these things to the British and American soldiers in exchange for the ordinary necessities of life.

Immediately after the Russians came, everybody put on a white armband, a sign of surrender. Not I. After all, I felt myself to be one of the victors. The foreign workers found ways to put the colors of their flag on their sleeves, so the Russians would know who they were and give them food for the long trek home. I saw an Austrian wearing red, white, and red—the colors of the Austrian flag—so I did the same, and the Russians gave me some food.

They opened the jails and released all the prisoners, murderers, thieves, and political prisoners all together. One such man noticed my makeshift armband as I stood in a food line and told me, rather merrily, that he too came from Austria and that he had been in jail “for subverting the German army.” He asked for my address. I gave it to him. He disappeared. I forgot him. More than a week later, a truck pulled up to our building and unloaded what was for us a vast quantity of potatoes and vegetables, even fruit.

“It was the Austrian,” I said to my thrilled neighbors. “I don’t even know his name.”

“He was an angel sent by God,” said the old people.

It took almost six months before we had ration cards again, and then we received a quarter of a liter of skim milk per day for a child. We had been living on the money I had rescued from our bank. I carried this cash on me or in the pram under the baby. Now it was all gone. I needed a job. But to find one, I had to have a real identity card. And that posed a grave problem because I was still afraid to tell anybody that I was a Jew.

All through the war, nobody had talked about the Jews. Not one word. It was as though no one even recalled that until recently, Jewish people had been living in this country. But now, the Germans talked constantly about the possibility that the Jews would come back and take revenge. Every time a group of strang
ers entered the town, my neighbors would turn tense and apprehensive. “Is it the Jews?” they would ask, fearing, I suppose, an attack by well-armed, hate-filled people seeking “an eye for an eye.” What a joke! No one could imagine yet how utterly the Jewish people had been destroyed, how starved and diseased and exhausted and powerless the surviving remnant would be.

In such an atmosphere, I was afraid to reveal that I was Jewish. I was afraid that the people who had taken me in—who may well have been living in a Jewish house and wearing a dead Jew’s clothes—might think I would want to take something away from them and would throw me and Angela into the street.

Only in July, two months after the Russian victory, did I slice open the cover of the book that Pepi had made for me and retrieve my real papers.

I went to a lawyer, Dr. Schütze. He applied for a court order to have my name changed from Grete Vetter née Denner to Edith Vetter née Hahn.

Then I went to the radio station and arranged to have my mother’s name announced every day on the program that listed missing people: “Does anyone know the whereabouts of Klothilde Hahn of Vienna, a skilled seamstress, deported to Poland in June 1942? Has anyone seen her or heard anything at all about her? If so, contact her daughter….”

The communists who returned from the camps corroborated the story told by Thomas Mann. One of them told me that he had had the job of going through the clothing of Jewish people after they were stripped and sent to the gas chambers. His job was to find jewelry or money sewn into the lining. I remembered my mother’s brown coat, her fine silk blouses. I imagined this man going through them, slitting the seams.