The Nazi Officer's Wife (6 page)

The chancellor fended them off for a while but soon saw that no one would help him and resistance was useless. On March 11, 1938, as Pepi and I were walking through a working-class neighborhood—holding hands, leaning on each other’s bodies, a warm column of love in the cold, darkening night—someone leaned out of a window and said, “Von Schuschnigg has resigned.”

That was complete silence in the street.

Pepi held me. I whispered into his neck: “We have to get out.”

“We’ll wait and see,” he said.

“No, no, we have to get out now,” I said, pressing myself against him.

“Don’t give way to hysteria. It could all be over in a week.”

“I’m afraid …”

“Don’t be. I am here with you. I love you. You are mine. I will always take care of you.”

He kissed me with such passion that I felt my whole body grow warm and light. What did I care if politicians disappeared and nations prepared for war? I had Pepi, my genius, my comfort, the rock who had replaced my father.

The next day was the golden wedding anniversary of my mother’s parents. The whole family was planning to go out to Stockerau to celebrate. We had presents, cakes, wine, and toasts prepared.

But we never made this happy journey, because the German Army chose that same day to march into Austria. Flags were flying.
Martial music played. The Nazi radio station—which had become the
only
station—roared with victory, and thousands of our friends and neighbors and countrymen gathered on the boulevards to greet the Wehrmacht with wild joy and tumultuous cheering.

On April 10, 1938, more than ninety percent of the Austrians voted “yes” to union with Germany.

A socialist friend, whose father had been executed by Nazi assassins, wanted to organize protests against the Anschluss and tried to recruit me for the underground. He told me that I could get a different name, belong to a cell, and deliver messages.

For the first time, I saw the practical wisdom of political activism. “Yes,” I said, pressing his hand as a promise. “Count me in.”

But Pepi said no. He told me it was irresponsible for me even to think of such a thing, because now I had a widowed mother and young sisters who depended on me. What would happen to them if I were arrested?

So I told my friend that he would have to work without me. Like a good little girl, I did what Pepi Rosenfeld said.

F
OUR

The Trap Set by Love

O
NE OF THE
first things the Nazis did was to distribute 100,000 free radio sets to the Austrian Christians. Where did they get these radios? From us, of course. Right after the Anschluss, the Jews were required to turn in their typewriters and their radios, the idea being that if we could not communicate with each other or the outside world, we would be isolated and more easily terrorized and manipulated. It was a good idea. It worked well.

The man the Germans appointed to eliminate the Jews from Vienna was Adolf Eichmann. His policies became a model for making the whole Reich
Judenrein
—“cleansed of Jews.” Essentially he made us pay as much as possible to escape. The rich had to sign over everything they owned; the less rich had to pay such exorbitant amounts for tickets out that families were often forced
to choose which of their children should go and which should stay.

Gangs of thugs in brown shirts owned the streets. They drove around in trucks, flashing their guns and their swastika armbands, hooting at the pretty girls. If they wanted to pick you up or beat you up, they did so with impunity. Anybody who resisted was beaten or killed or taken away to Dachau or Buchenwald or some other concentration camp. (You must understand that at that time, the concentration camps were prisons where opponents of the Nazi regime were detained. Von Schuschnigg was in a concentration camp; so was Bruno Bettelheim for a time. The inmates were made to work at hard labor and lived in dreadful conditions, but they often came back from these places. Not until the 1940s did the words “concentration camp” come to stand for monstrous cruelty and almost certain death. Nobody even imagined there would one day be a death camp like Auschwitz.)

How can I describe to you our confusion and terror when the Nazis took over? We had lived until yesterday in a rational world. Now everyone around us—our schoolmates, neighbors, and teachers; our tradesmen, policemen, and bureaucrats—had all gone mad. They had been harboring a hatred for us which we had grown accustomed to calling “prejudice.” What a gentle word that was! What a euphemism! In fact they hated us with a hatred as old as their religion; they were born hating us, raised hating us; and now with the Anschluss, the veneer of civilization which had protected us from their hatred was stripped away.

On the pavements, protesters had written anti-Nazi slogans. The SS grabbed Jews and forced them at gunpoint to scrub off the graffiti while crowds of Austrians stood around jeering and laughing.

The Nazi radio blamed us for every filthy evil thing in this
world. The Nazis called us subhuman and, in the next breath, superhuman; accused us of plotting to murder them, to rob them blind; declared that
they
had to conquer the world to prevent
us
from conquering the world. The radio said that we must be dispossessed of all we owned; that my father, who had dropped dead while working, had not really worked for our pleasant flat—the leather chairs in the dining room, the earrings in my mother’s ears—that he had somehow stolen them from Christian Austria, which now had every right to take them back.

Did our friends and our neighbors really believe this? Of course they didn’t believe it. They were not stupid. But they had suffered depression, inflation, and joblessness. They wanted to be well-to-do again, and the fastest way to accomplish that was to steal. Cultivating a belief in the greed of the Jews gave them an excuse to steal everything the Jews possessed.

We sat in our flats, paralyzed with fear, waiting for the madness to end. Rational, charming, witty, dancing, generous Vienna must surely rebel against such insanity. We waited and we waited and it didn’t end and it didn’t end and still we waited and we waited.

The restrictions against Jews spread into every corner of our lives. We couldn’t go to movies or concerts. We couldn’t walk on certain streets. The Nazis put up signs on Jewish shop windows warning the population not to buy there. Mimi was fired from her job at the dry cleaners because it had become illegal for Christians to employ Jews. Hansi was no longer allowed to go to school.

Uncle Richard went to the café where he had been going for twenty years. It now had a Jewish side and an Aryan side, and he sat on the Jewish side. Because he had fair hair and didn’t look Jewish, a waiter, who did not know him, said he had to move to
the Aryan side. But on the Aryan side, a waiter who did know him said that he had to go back to the Jewish side. He finally gave up and went home.

Baron Louis de Rothschild, one of the wealthiest Jewish men in Vienna, tried to leave the city. The Nazis stopped him at the airport and put him in prison, and whatever they did to him there convinced him that he ought to sign over everything to the Nazi regime. Then they let him leave. The SS took over the Rothschild Palace on Prinz Eugenstrasse and renamed it the Center for Jewish Emigration.

Everybody talked about leaving.

“Maybe we could go to a kibbutz in Palestine,” I suggested to Pepi.

“You? My adorable little mouse? Doing farmwork?” He laughed and tickled me. “You might get blisters on your pretty fingers.”

I stood in line for days at the British consulate, trying to get clearance to work as a housemaid in England. Every Jewish girl in Vienna seemed to be applying.

An Asian gentleman approached me and my cousin Elli with a bow and a smile. “If you are interested in seeing the glories of the East … the Great Wall … the Imperial Palace … I am authorized to offer you fascinating work in one of several Chinese cities,” he said. “We arrange passports, transportation, and lodging. I have a car nearby. You could be out of Austria by tomorrow.” I am sure there were some who went with him.

My cousin Elli got a job in England. I got clearance for a job—but no job.

One afternoon Hansi did not come home. Mimi and I went out hunting for her. When we returned without her, Mama began to weep. A pretty seventeen-year-old Jewish girl had disappeared
in a city crawling with anti-Semitic thugs. We were sick with terror.

Around midnight Hansi returned. She was pale, shaking, grim, older.

She told us the Nazis had picked her up and taken her to an SS office and put a gun to her head and ordered her to sew buttons on dozens of uniforms. In the room next door, she saw Orthodox Jews, devout men with long beards, forced to do ridiculous gymnastics by their tormentors, who found the show hilariously funny. Hansi had cried out in protest. Some lout had threatened to beat her if she didn’t shut up and sew. At the day’s end, they let her go. She had been wandering the streets ever since.

“We have to get out,” she said.

It was easier to get a ticket out if you were married, so Milo and Mimi decided to tie the knot.

“Let’s get married, Pepi,” I said.

He grinned at me and wiggled his eyebrows. “But you promised your father you would never marry a Christian,” he joked. In truth, he was a Christian now. His mother, Anna, in an effort to protect him from the Nuremberg Laws—which denied Jews citizenship in the Reich—had taken her twenty-six-year-old son to church and had him baptized. Then she had used her connections to have the family name erased from the list of the Jewish community. So when the Jews of Vienna were counted—and they were counted constantly by the precise Colonel Eichmann—Josef Rosenfeld was supposedly no longer on the list.

“It won’t do you any good,” I told him. “The Nuremberg Laws are retroactive. Everything they say applies to people who were Jews before the Laws went into effect, in 1936. So people who became Christians in 1937 don’t count.”

“Do me a favor, darling,” he said. “Don’t tell that to my
mother. She thinks she has saved me from all this foolishness. I’d hate to burst her bubble.”

He kissed me, making my head spin. Somehow my proposal of marriage was forgotten.

I refused to let the political situation keep me from my studies. I had taken both state exams and passed with high grades. One last exam, and I would be a doctor of law, qualified to serve not just as a lawyer but also as a judge. I felt that if I earned my degree, if I was trained, qualified, certified, I would have a much easier time emigrating.

In April 1938, I went to the university to pick up my final exam papers and to receive the date for my doctoral exam. A young clerk there, actually someone I knew, said: “You will not be taking the examination, Edith. You are no longer welcome in our university.” She gave me my papers and the transcript of my grades. “Good-bye.”

For almost five years, I had studied law, constitutions, torts, psychology, economics, political theory, history, philosophy. I had written papers, attended lectures, analyzed legal cases, studied with a judge three times a week to prepare for my doctoral exam. And now they would not let me take it.

My legs buckled. I leaned on her desk for support.

“But … but … this last exam is all I need for my degree!”

She turned her back on me. I could feel her sense of triumph, her genuine satisfaction in destroying my life. It had a smell, I tell you—like sweat, like lust.

G
RANDMOTHER HELPED THE
maid carry some heavy mattresses into the yard for an airing and got a hernia. She had to be operated on, and during this operation she died.

Grandfather couldn’t quite believe it. He always seemed to be turning around, expecting to find her there, always reminding himself with a heavy sigh that she was gone.

Right after Grandmother died, the world held a conference at Evian-les-Bains, a luxurious spa in the French Alps near Lake Geneva, at which the fate of the Austrian Jews was up for discussion. Eichmann sent representatives of our community to plead with other countries to pay the Nazi ransom and take us in. “Don’t you want to save the urbane, well-educated, fun-loving, cultured Jews of Austria?” they asked. “How about paying $400 a head to the Nazi regime? Too much? How about $200?”

They couldn’t get a cent.

No country wanted to pay for our rescue, including the United States. The dictator of the Dominican Republic, Trujillo, took a few Jews, thinking they might help bring some prosperity to his tiny, impoverished country. I have heard that they did.

O
N
N
OVEMBER
9, 1938, I did not go to work at the Denner house, because my sister Hansi had received a ticket to emigrate to Palestine. With a feeling of joy mixed with grief, we were taking her to the railway station. In her knapsack and the one suitcase the Nazis allowed her, she had bread, hard-boiled eggs, cake, evaporated milk, underwear, socks, shoes, sturdy trousers, heavy shirts, only one dress, and only one skirt. Femininity and its pretty paraphernalia had declined in importance. Like fruit and flowers, femininity spoiled quickly and cost too much relative to its small utility in wartime.

Mama and Mimi and I were crying, but Hansi was not. “Come soon,” she said to us. “Get out of this damned country; get out as fast as you can.”

The train came and took her away. She leaned out the window with the other fleeing young people. She waved. She didn’t smile.

Mama had emptied the bank account to pay the Nazis the enormous price they demanded for Hansi’s ticket. There was, Mimi and I knew, virtually nothing left to ransom us. “But you have men who love you,” Mama said, holding us close. “They will save you. Hansi was too young to have a man.”

Walking home from the station, we heard a strange rumble in the darkening streets. On the horizon we saw the orange glow of a fire. A building on the other side of the city was burning. The sidewalks were unnaturally empty. Nazi vehicles roared by, full of excited young men, but there were no pedestrians.