The Nazi Officer's Wife (7 page)

Mimi and I, our senses sharpened to danger in these past months, broke into a run, dragging our mother along with us. At our house, we found the concierge, Frau Falat, waiting for us, her face drawn and worried. “They’ve been attacking all the Jewish shops,” she said. “One of the synagogues is burning. Don’t go out any more tonight.”

Milo Grenzbauer arrived, out of breath from a long sprint through the streets. “May I trouble you, Frau Hahn?” he asked courteously. “I need to stay at your house. A friend of my brother who is in the SA says that the Nazis are grabbing all the young Jewish men and taking them I don’t know where—Dachau, Buchenwald. He told me and my brother not to be found at our home tonight.”

He sagged into one of the leather chairs. Mimi sat at his feet, trembling, holding on to his knees.

Outside, the streets had begun to roar with the sound of shouting men, screeching brakes, and crashing windows. Around ten o’clock, our cousin Erwin, a medical student, joined us. He was sweating. His face was white. He had come home late from the
laboratory, encountered a mob outside the synagogue, and turned around and headed for our district just as the synogogue began to burn. He had seen Jews being beaten and dragged away.

Pepi arrived right after him. Of the three young men in our house, he was the only calm one—clean, dapper, unruffled.

“Mobs get tired and go home after a while,” he said. “You’ll see. Tomorrow morning, they’ll all have a terrible hangover and we’ll all have a lot of broken windows and they’ll sober up and we’ll fix the windows and life will return to normal.”

We sat gazing at him, astonished. Was he crazy?

“You always keep up such a lovely front, Pepi,” said my mother, greatly amused. “You will make a splendid lawyer.”

“I don’t like to see my sweet little girl upset,” he said. He rubbed the worry from my forehead. “This furrow in her lovely brow must disappear.”

He threw his arm around me and pulled me down next to him on the sofa. At that moment, I adored Pepi Rosenfeld. I felt as though his good nature, his fearlessness, would ultimately lead us all out of this inferno.

And then his mother, Anna, arrived, screaming. “Are you an idiot?” she bellowed at him. “I have bribed half the officials in the city to make you a Christian and get you off the list of the Jewish community! And now, tonight, when the Jews are being carted away and their shops are being torched, what do you do? You come right into their hiding place and sit in their parlor! Get away from these people! These are not your people! You are a Christian, a Catholic, an Austrian! These people are foreigners! Everybody hates them! I will not have you spending another minute in their company!”

She turned to me, her eyes wild. “Let him go, Edith! If you love him, let him go! If you hold on to him, they will drag him
away and put him in prison, my only boy, my son, my treasure …” She began to sob.

My mother, ever sympathetic, offered her a brandy.

“Now, Mother,” Pepi said, “stop making a scene, please. Edith and I will soon be gone from here. We’re planning to go to England, possibly to Palestine.”

“What?! Is that what you are plotting behind my back? To desert me? To leave me, a poor widow, alone on the eve of war?”

“Now stop this ‘poor widow’ nonsense,” Pepi admonished her. “You are no such thing. Herr Hofer is your husband, and he will take care of you.”

Having her secret revealed like that drove Anna wild. “If you abandon me, if you take your little bitch Jewess and run away, I will kill myself!” she screamed. And she ran for the window, and climbed onto the sill as though to throw herself out.

Pepi leaped up, grabbed her, and gathered her big, bulky body into his arms, patting her heaving back. “There, there, Mother …”

“Come home with me,” she wailed. “Get away from these people! Leave that girl—she will be the death of you! Come home with me!”

He looked at me across the broad, shaking expanse of her back, and in his eyes I finally saw what he had been putting up with all these weeks since the Anschluss, why he had never quite agreed to leave. I understood that daily, Anna had been in a state of hysteria, pressuring him, screaming, crying, threatening suicide, that she had entrapped him and held him immobile with an iron chain that she called “love.”

“Go,” I said softly. “Go home with her. Go.”

He did. And the rest of us sat up together for all the rest of Kristallnacht, listening to the sound of our lives shattering.

M
Y SISTER
M
IMI
married Milo Grenzbauer in December 1938. They went to Israel on an illegal transport in February 1939. My mother sold the leather chairs to pay for their tickets. We might have been able to raise the money for a third ticket for me—but to be honest, I couldn’t face the thought of leaving Pepi.

Events crashed into each other with such speed and violence that we felt as if we were caught in an avalanche with no time to recover before the next mountain collapsed. In March 1939, one year after the Anschluss, Hitler—appeased by Chamberlain—took Czechoslovakia. “If the goyim won’t defend each other,” said my mother, “how can we expect them to defend us?” Then my grandfather had a stroke. Uncle Richard hired a nurse to take care of him, and we all tried to visit him in Stockerau as much as possible. But then the Nazis arrested Uncle Richard and Aunt Roszi too.

They spent six weeks in prison. To get out, they gave the Nazis everything they possessed: real estate, bank accounts, bonds, dishes, silver. Then they left immediately, heading east. Russia swallowed them. My mother waited and prayed for word of them, but none came.

One day a young man in uniform knocked on our door. I must tell you, they had a certain way of knocking, these Nazis, as if they resented the door, as if they expected it to disappear beneath their pounding fists. My body could always tell when they were knocking. My skin crawled. My stomach tightened. The Nazi told Mama that Grandfather’s house and shop were being taken over by “good” Austrians, and that he had to go live in a room with relatives.

That was it. No more Stockerau.

Grandfather had been living in that house for forty-five years.
The dishes, the chairs, the pictures, the pillows, the rugs, the telephone, the pots and pans and spoons, the piano, the gorgeous knitted lace doilies, the Puch motorbikes, the sewing machines, the letters we had written him that he had saved in his big wooden desk, the desk itself—all of it, every stick and memory, was stolen; and the thieves sold it to his lifelong neighbors for a very good price.

Mama sent me to take care of him. The stroke, following on Grandmother’s death, had slowed him; but the loss of his home,
his place
, now crippled him beyond repair. I led him to the toilet; I massaged his feet. Whatever I made for him to eat on his special diet, he would thank me and then say, sweetly, almost apologetically, “Your grandmother made it better.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Where is she?”

“She’s gone.”

“Ah, yes, of course, I knew that, I knew that.” He looked at his old hands, worn, callused, scarred from all their work. “When can I go home?” he asked.

He died one morning.

I saw his house again, in later years. I believe it was still being lived in. Donaustrasse Number 12, in Stockerau.

C
OMPARED WITH
G
RANDFATHER’S
eviction, ours was a triviality. Our concierge stood weeping in the doorway, holding an eviction notice from our noble landlord. “What could he do?” she said. “The regime demanded this.”

So Mama and I moved to 13 Untere Donaustrasse, in Leopoldstadt, the Vienna ghetto, to the flat of Milo’s widowed aunt,
Frau Maimon. Two other ladies were already boarding with her—sisters, one a spinster, the other with a husband in Dachau. We lived, five women in a flat intended for one, and we never argued; we never failed to excuse ourselves when we could not help violating each other’s privacy.

Mama and I supported ourselves by sewing. Not couturier tailoring, of course, but mending and recutting old clothes to fit the new times. We did a lot of “taking in,” because our Jewish neighbors in the ghetto were growing thinner.

My cousin Jultschi, however, was growing fatter.

She sat with me in the park, crying her eyes out, her skin blotchy and broken out.

“I know I shouldn’t have gotten pregnant in such terrible times,” she wept. “But Otto had been drafted and we were afraid we would never see each other again and we were so overcome. It just happened, and now I don’t know what I’m going to do. Maybe they’ll leave the child alone. What do you think, Edith? I mean, it has to be of some help to at least have a father who is not a Jew, who is a soldier of the Reich.”

“Maybe it will help,” I said, although I did not really believe that.

“I tried to get a job as a maid in England. I thought they would just think I was fat. But they knew right away that I was pregnant.” Her large melting brown eyes fixed on me. “I have to not be pregnant, Edith, with Otto going off to war and all these laws against the Jews. I have to go see a doctor.”

I got in touch with our old friend Kohn. He had just finished his studies and opened a practice—and now the Nazis had revoked his license. He looked awful.

“Did you hear about Elfi Westermayer?” he said bitterly. “She
didn’t even finish her medical studies and she’s taking patients. Apparently all you need to practice medicine in this country now is a membership card in the Nazi Party.”

He agreed to see Jultschi, but in the end he would not give her an abortion. “I cannot perform this operation safely,” he explained. “I have no surgery, no place at the hospital, no access to drugs. God forbid, you could become infected…. There might be terrible consequences.” He held her hand. “Go home. Have the child. It will be a comfort to you in the days to come.”

So Jultschi went home to her husband. He was packing his gear, getting ready to go off to conquer Poland. He kissed her, promised to return, and left her to wait alone for her baby.

Mama and I descended into poverty with astonishing speed. Denied the ability to make a living, working for customers who paid us in groschen (now re-counted as pfennigs by the Germans), we began to barter our possessions for things we desperately needed.

Mama had a decayed tooth that was killing her. Our Jewish dentist was no longer allowed to practice, but with Pepi’s help, Mama found an Aryan dentist who would pull the tooth. He wanted gold. Mama gave him a gold chain. He wanted more. She gave him another. He wanted more. She gave him her last. Three gold chains for one tooth.

I tried to collect the installments for sewing machines and motorbikes that had been rented through my grandfather’s franchise. But nobody who owed a Jew money felt obligated to pay anymore. Most of them laughed in my face.

Mama’s younger sister, Aunt Marianne, had married a man named Adolf Robichek and settled in Belgrade, where he worked for a Danube shipping company. The Robicheks sent food packages to us with the ships’ captains, and we shared our good fortune
with Frau Maimon and the two sisters. These packages became a lifeline for us.

Did the rest of the Austrians understand what was happening to the Jews? Did they understand that we were being dispossessed, that we were beginning to go hungry? By way of answer, let me tell you a story.

Once, after the Anschluss, I was stopped by a policeman for jaywalking. He ordered me to pay a stiff fine. “But I am Jewish,” I said. That was all he needed to hear to know that I was penniless and could not possibly pay, and he let me go.

So you see, when they tell you that they did not realize how the Jews were being despoiled, you must never believe them. They all knew.

C
HRISTL
D
ENNER’S LOVE
life, always frantic, now became tumultuous because of Nazi politics.

We were talking in the bathroom, because the other rooms, with their palatial windows, were all freezing.

“Let me tell you, Edith, this is such a stupid situation that only the SS could have created it. The Nuremberg Laws on race say that you are not a legitimate Aryan unless all your grandparents on both sides are Aryan, right? So if you have even one Jewish grandparent, you are considered Jewish and deprived of all your privileges as a citizen, right? Well, guess what. Bertschi’s father is a Czechoslovakian Jew.”

“Oh, my God,” I said, appalled.

“So,” she continued, “my father helped Bertschi’s father buy illegal papers ‘proving’ that he too was an Aryan three generations back. A good idea, right?”

“Excellent,” I said.

“The result of this was that Bertschi’s father was immediately drafted.”

“Oh, my God!”

“In the army, they discovered Herr Beran’s true identity and put him in jail. But meanwhile they had drafted Bertschi, who now appeared to be satisfactorily Aryan because of his father’s false papers. But then, in short order, the army discovered that Bertschi’s father was in jail, but not
why
he was in jail, so they slapped Bertschi with a dishonorable discharge and sent him back to Vienna. And, listen to this, Edith, you won’t believe this—”

“What? What?”

“While Bertschi was returning to Vienna, his entire unit was blown up by a bomb set by the French Resistance.”

I felt sad for the unit, thrilled for Bertschi, and delighted to know there actually was a French Resistance.

“Now they have figured out that Bertschi is half Jewish, so the Gestapo is after him.”

“Oh, no …”

“But I have a plan. My father has bought me a formerly Jewish shop. I am to sell souvenirs: coffee cups with maps of Saint Stephen’s imprinted on them, replicas of Nymphenberg statuettes, music boxes that play Wagner. Of course I need a bookkeeper to help me run my shop. So I have hired Bertschi.”

She smiled. Her dog put his head in her lap and gazed up at her adoringly.

“Oh, Christl, that’s so dangerous. They’ll come after you …”

“They already have,” she said. “I must report to Prinz Eugenstrasse tomorrow.”

“You must not go!” I cried. “You’re an Aryan, you can get out, you have papers, you must leave the city, leave the Reich!”