The Nazi Officer's Wife (28 page)

No, I thought. No. Impossible.

You see I could not accept that Mama had met such a hideous fate. I just couldn’t. This was not complete folly on my part. Every day people who had been given up for dead walked out of the dust and rubble into the arms of their loved ones. So I kept Mama’s name on the radio. I expected her to return.

I
WENT TO
the Central Registry and to my horror found myself looking at the same man who had officiated at our wedding ceremony.

“Ah, Frau Vetter! I remember you.”

“And I remember you too.”

“It still says here that we have no background papers for your mother’s mother. Perhaps now that our Russian friends have come, they can supply them.”

“I think not. Those were false papers.”

“What?”

“Here, these are my real identity papers. And this is a court order commanding you to register me as the person I really am.”

He stared at my Jewish identity papers, shocked.

“You lied to me!” he exclaimed.

“Yes, I certainly did.”

“You falsified your racial records!”

“Right.”

“This is a high crime against the state, what you did!”

I leaned toward him. Close. Close. I wanted him to feel my breath.

“Well, I don’t think you will find any attorney in Brandenburg to indict me for it now,” I said.

I was now the real me, for the first time in years. How did that feel, you will ask? I will tell you. It felt like nothing. Because, you see, I could not immediately find the old Edith. She was still a U-boat, deep in hiding. Just like the rest of the Jews, she did not bounce back quickly. It took time, a long time.

Forever.

I took my new identity and went to see the mayor of the town, a communist who had spent many years in a concentration camp.

“From which camp did you come?” he asked.

I said, “I managed without a camp.”

He looked at my school records, which Pepi had preserved. He saw immediately that I had the qualifications of a junior barrister—a
Referendrar
. So he sent me to the Brandenburg courthouse, where I got a job right away and suddenly, incredibly, a new life.

T
WELVE

Surfacing

T
HE HIGH
-
RANKING NAZIS
had long ago taken off with their loot. What we had left in Brandenburg were a lot of little Nazis who tried to lie about their background. However, the courthouse with all its files had not been bombed, so the Russians possessed fairly accurate records of who was and who was not a friend of the Nazi regime. You could see correspondence from individuals you knew, who closed with “Heil Hitler!” The really enthusiastic ones would add
“Gott Strafe England!”
—“May God destroy England!” Few, then, could lie and get away with it. Since the Russians, unlike the Americans and the British, would not knowingly employ Nazis, those of us who could prove that we were not Nazis and who had some actual legal training were rare and suddenly valuable in the new labor crisis.

On September 1, 1945, I went to work on the second floor of
the district court. The director of the court—Herr Ulrich—gave me old cases to study, so that I could bring myself up to the present on the legal system. A distinguished jurist, fired because he wouldn’t join the Nazi Party, he now loved to ask people, “Tell me, sir, were
you
a member of the party?” And then he would sit back and watch them squirm and sweat and lie.

My first job was as a
Rechtspfleger
, an attorney who helps those needing guidance in court. After some time I was appointed as
Vorsitzende im Schöffengericht
, a judge on a panel of three which also included two lay assessors. (To find a jury of twelve non-Nazis would have been impossible.) The court administration, dominated by the Russians, wanted me to work in a special court dealing with political matters. I refused and finally became a judge in the family court.

My greatest ambition, stimulated by the Halsmann case, fired by my relationship with Pepi, long ago totally abandoned, now became a reality. I was a judge.

I was given an office. I wore a robe. Before I entered the court, the foreman shouted out,
“Das Gericht!”
People stood up and remained standing until I was seated.

It was the most wonderful time in my life, the one and only time when I was able to work to the maximum of my intellectual ability—a pleasure beyond description—and the one and only time I had even the slightest power to alleviate any of the suffering in this world.

R
IGHT AFTER
I secured my first court job, I became ill. I had skin eruptions due to nutritional deficiencies. My feet were permanently twisted from wearing ill-fitting shoes. I was exhausted. I wound up in the hospital. My landlady kept Angela.

When I recovered, I applied to the housing office for a new place to live. It took two months, but finally I was assigned a very nice flat on Kanalstrasse, in the best district. It had belonged to a Nazi lawyer who had fled. It had a balcony.

A man who had taken over a Nazi furniture factory, which the Nazis had stolen from the Jews, arranged for me to acquire furniture at good terms. I remember one beautiful desk, very ornate, with brass decorations and feet like the claws of a lion. It looked as if it had come from a palace—a real SS desk.

To add to my good fortune, the boss of the electric service, a communist who had returned from the camps, lived in my building and arranged to put us on the Russian grid. So, unlike most Germans in Brandenburg, we had light.

You will ask how we ate in those days, what we ate. I will tell you that it was like the English song: one got by with a little help from one’s friends.

I joined an organization, Victims of Fascism, full of people just like me, who had somehow survived. These were not just communists but other Jews who had existed as U-boats with falsified papers, or by hiding in the countryside, or escaping from the death marches or the camps. It meant everything to me to discover that I had not been the only one. We looked into each other’s faces and without a word we understood each other’s stories. The thing I had sought and found less and less in my successive trips to Vienna—surcease from lying and hiding and fear,
someone who would understand
—I now found among the Victims of Fascism.

My new friends gave me a bottle of wine. I traded it to a Russian soldier for a bottle of cooking oil, a deal that delighted both parties.

On a bread line, I befriended a woman of my age, named Agnes. When I was in the hospital, trying to recover on meager rations, she brought me something extra to eat every day. Her brother had
been in the SS. Her husband—perhaps his name was Heinrich—was a communist who had spent ten years in the Orianenburg concentration camp. Toward the end of the war, he had escaped and found shelter with fellow communists who were distributing flyers to encourage foreign workers to commit acts of sabotage. Now he had become an official of the Brandenburg municipality, so highly placed in the Communist Party that he had a car.

Then there was Klessen the fisherman. During the war, he let the communists use his fishing boat as a floating headquarters where they printed anti-Nazi leaflets. Klessen had lost his youngest son at Stalingrad. One day a Nazi officer who chartered his boat was talking about the loss of lives at the front in such an uncaring manner that Klessen became enraged and shot him. Of course, he had to flee. He hid in the woods. The war ended. He came home.

The Russians trusted him. He and his wife became friends of mine. They gave me fish, vegetables, and potatoes—so much, in fact, that I had some left over to send to Tante Paula and my sister-in-law Gertrude in Berlin. Once Klessen came to my office with a bag of eels that he had caught in a secret trap. I put them into my desk drawer. I was conducting an interview with someone, and suddenly the desk began to shudder and shake, because even though they were dead, the eels were still jumping.

From the moment I joined the court, I made petitions to the Russian administration, called the Kommandatura, to get Werner out of Siberia.

“My husband is a German officer,” I said. “But he was captured only at the end of the war and saw almost no active duty. He is disabled, half-blind. He doesn’t deserve to be in a prison camp. He’s a good man who hid me and helped me. Please … let him out.”

Now, when you asked these Russians for something, they did
not say yes or no; they said nothing, and you did not know what the outcome would be until it happened. So I kept asking and they kept saying nothing and I kept asking.

As the mail began to arrive again and as an occasional telephone began to work, I heard news of my friends and family. My little sister Hansi had arrived in Vienna with the British Army and knocked on Jultschi’s door. The happiness of their reunion spilled over into my pulverized little German city like a joyous flood. I heard that my cousin Elli was safe in London; that Mimi and Milo were safe in Palestine; that my cousin Max Sternbach, the artist, had survived by pretending to be a French prisoner; that Wolfgang and Ilse Roemer had been saved by the Quakers; that my cousins Vera and Alex Robichek had survived their Italian exile; that Uncle Richard and Aunt Roszi were safe in Sacramento.

Could I imagine that almost all the rest were murdered? My friends from Vienna, the girls from the
Arbeitslager
, dozens of relatives, all gone … could I even imagine that?

My work as a judge centered on children. Destitute German children were everywhere in those days, begging in train stations, sleeping on piles of rags on the pavement. Of course, they turned to lives of crime. They sold precious food on the black market. They sold their sisters and themselves. They stole whatever they could find to steal. These youngsters were brought before me at the family court. Remembering Osterburg, the best of my prisons, I never sent them to languish among hardened criminals, but I sentenced them instead to outside work—clearing the rubble, paving the streets.

The Russians searched the country for the children of Germans and slave laborers; took them from their mothers, natural or adoptive; and transported them to the Soviet Union. This was retaliation for the heartless kidnapping of thousands of Russian children
by the Nazi forces, for slave labor or “Aryanized” lives in Germany.

However, a matter of policy for nations can be a matter of personal tragedy for individuals. This is what happened to Karla, my former upstairs neighbor, who came to see me at the court.

“Is it true you are a Jew, Grete?” she asked.

“Yes. My name is not Grete. It’s Edith.”

“So maybe I can tell you what my trouble is and you will understand. You know, my husband and I had no kids, but we could never get a baby because we were not members of the Nazi Party and the adoption agencies, which had so many babies, would never give one to us.”

“Ah, so that was why …”

“We found a child, the daughter of a French prisoner and a farm girl from East Prussia. We paid her family everything we could gather. And you know how much I love my little Elsie; she’s my whole life. But the Russians are taking away all these children now, Grete … I mean, Edith … and that was why we ran away so quickly before dawn like that …” (She lowered her eyes.) “Also to make room for my brother …”

“Yes, I understand.”

“I have broken so many laws, signed all kinds of false papers, to protect her identity and make people think she is my baby out of my body. But now all these children are being taken. And I am so afraid—not to go to jail; I would gladly go to jail—but to lose my child. Grete … I mean Edith … I will do anything not to lose my child. Can you help me?”

“Yes,” I said.

And I did. Finally it was my turn to save someone’s life.

One custody battle emerged over and over again. A German officer is in a prison camp. He has been divorced and his second
wife is taking care of his children. The mother of the children says the father was a Nazi and not able to educate the children “in a democratic way,” and seeks sole custody.

I thought of my Werner in the Russian snows. I thought of Elisabeth trying to use this Russian occupation as an excuse to take little Bärbl away from him, and I never acquiesced in such an application. Never.

A very old judge, brought back from retirement, told me that during the war he had tried the case of a man who was half a Jew himself and married to an Aryan. When the Nazis forced this man to clean the streets, he shouted out horrible curses against Goebbels, the propaganda minister. The police were ready to drag him off to a concentration camp. But the old judge had only fined him for libel and told him, please, in the future, for the sake of his family, to keep his mouth shut.

In 1946, the daughter of this same Goebbels-curser came into my office and asked for help to emigrate to Palestine. A near-impossible request. There were almost a hundred thousand leftover Jews in Europe, wild to escape the continent where six million of their people had been incinerated. Britain would not let
them
into Palestine, much less a German Christian.

The girl went everywhere I could think to send her—to the American Joint Distribution Committee, to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, to the British Consulate—and finally she got out to Israel. She married there. Her parents joined her and made their lives in this country.

M
ANY PEOPLE COMMITTED
suicide at the end of the war, not just Goebbels and Hitler but my teacher from Vienna and her husband the Nazi judge and my Latin teacher from the south Tirol.
So when they brought me a woman who had tried to kill herself, I assumed she was a Nazi with a fear of the Gulag. She was babbling madly that I, only I, must be her lawyer.

The minute she walked into my office, I understood.

She was a woman whom I had met on the maternity service at the Städtische Krankenhaus—the one whose husband had raped and beaten her, the one who was afraid to go home. She was at the end of her rope—she had thrown her three children into the river and then jumped in after them. A Russian soldier had pulled her out. She was about to go on trial for murder.