The Nazi Officer's Wife (23 page)

Why my new husband didn’t believe that German blood was stronger, that the child would always be an Aryan by virtue of his
father’s participation, I will never understand. When an idea is idiotic to begin with, its applications never make any sense.

THE DOCTOR EXAMINED
me and shook his head. He had found something that I myself had completely forgotten. As a child, I had endured a bout of diphtheria, and it had left me with a heart murmur. The Viennese doctor had told me at that time to take great care with pregnancy. But the tumultuous events of the ensuing years had made such considerations insignificant.

“You’ve taken a big chance here, Grete,” said the German doctor. “You have a weak heart. The murmur is very strong. You should never have become pregnant. But now that you are, I am going to write you a prescription for digitalis and recommend that you quit your job and stay home until the baby is born.”

Wonderful news? Well, not exactly, because now I had a new crisis with my rations. I had been receiving rations suitable for a Red Cross employee eating with the group at the hospital. Now that I was going to be out of work and at home for six months, how would I eat? I needed a new ration book. But I could not receive one without a national registration card, an index card issued for each Reich citizen by the Office of Economics, the Wirtschaftsamt. And how was I going to get one of those without coming to the attention of the Gestapo?

“Please, dear God,” I prayed, “get me through this. I will soon have a child to protect. Help us pass this test.”

For the first time, I decided against looking nondescript, made myself as presentable and attractive as possible, and walked to the central registry. This time I encountered a woman, fat, neat, perfumed. She kept a little potted plant on her spotless desk, I gave
her the Red Cross document, which showed that I had been let off from work and should now receive ration cards at home because I would no longer be eating at the hospital.

She began looking for my index card. There was no sign of it in the main file. She checked four times. I stared at her fingers picking through the little cards on which all the citizens of the Reich were neatly stored.

She glanced at me.

“It’s not here.”

I smiled. “Well, it must be somewhere.”

She searched for a hint of reproach in my face or my voice, but I made sure she found none. I did not want her to feel guilty. I did not want her to feel defensive. I wanted her to feel safe.

She grinned at me suddenly and tapped her forehead with her palm to show me she had just had a wonderful idea; with renewed enthusiasm, she looked in a series of files for the cards of people who had moved from other cities, which were not yet transferred into the main file. Surely my card must be in there. She looked. She looked again. She looked again.

“It’s not here.”

A film of sweat glistened near her ears and on her upper lip. She was terrified. I concentrated every ounce of my emotional strength on concealing the fact that I was terrified too.

“Well, perhaps you can find the card of my husband,” I said.

She looked and immediately found Werner’s card. I could see her mind working. How could a Red Cross nursing assistant, an employee of the Städtische Krankenhaus, the pregnant wife of an Arado supervisor who was also a longtime member of the Nazi Party, not have an index card? Impossible!

“There has to be some mistake …” she murmured.

I said nothing.

“I know what I must do,” she said.

I waited.

“Since your card has obviously been misplaced somehow, I will make up a new card for you right now,” she said, and she did. It went into the file: Christina Maria Margarethe Vetter.

I concentrated every ounce of my emotional strength on not looking happy. But I tell you, if I could have, I would have hugged and kissed that nice fat insecure woman and danced on her spotless desk. Because at last I had a registration card and I could receive my rations in an ordinary, unremarkable way. One of my greatest vulnerabilities, by which the Gestapo could have found me at any moment, had been erased.

I still had the problem of what to wear. Remember that Herr Plattner, the
Sippenforscher
in Vienna, had warned me never to apply for a
Kleiderkarte
, a clothing card. If my shoes needed repairs, Werner fixed them. If I needed a dress, I sewed somebody else’s rags together and made one for myself. Now that I was big with child, Frau Doktor sent me some fabric and I made a pinafore that fit loosely over all my other clothes as they grew tight. Finally I gave up and just wore Werner’s old shirts. But the child—what would I put on the child? After all, I had no soldier in Paris to provide me with silk baby clothes. Christl sent me a knitted bed jacket, so I could rip the wool and make a little sweater.

Then, out of the blue, Werner received a letter from Tante Paula.

“What kind of a brother are you?” she wrote. “Your poor brother Robert is at the front, his wife and three children have been evacuated to East Prussia, their flat is being bombed, the doors don’t work, the windows don’t close, every robber and
squatter and deserter in the city can just march in there and settle down. Take your tools and your clever hands and go over there right this instant and fix everything!”

Well, of course my big strong husband could not withstand such a directive from his diminutive aunt. He told some lie at Arado and raced to Berlin.

His brother’s home was nearly empty. Gertrude had taken almost everything. Only a few items still remained, including a folding crib and
forty
baby jackets and diapers! Werner wrote to Robert to ask if we could use the baby things, and since Robert’s children were too big for them, he was happy to give us permission. Werner battened down the windows, fixed the doors, and locked up the flat. In the end, with all the bombing in Berlin, this particular flat was never touched.

I
N A MATTER
of a little more than a year, I had gone from being the most despised creature in the Third Reich—a hunted Jewish slave girl dodging a transport to Poland—to being one of its most valued citizens, a breeding Aryan housewife. People treated me with concern and respect. If they only knew who I had been! If they only knew whose new life I was breeding!

The insanity of it all made me a little hysterical.

I looked up at the American bombers that passed over every day on their way to nearby Berlin. I saw them as though the sky were a huge movie screen, on which some great fictional epic were being played—planes flying in formation like big ducks across the clouds, black puffs of flak and antiaircraft fire rising up to engulf them. I sent messages of victory skyward to my saviors. When I saw an American airman go down, my heart fell to the ground
with him. I prayed for a glimpse of his parachute; the possibility of his death made my bones ache with mourning.

The appearance of the Allies in the sky, the real possibility of a German defeat, the autumn weather, my new sense of safety, all combined to put dangerous thoughts into my head, thoughts that I had long repressed: the Jewish holidays, my father, my sisters, my Mama, my family in Vienna. Where was everybody? Was anybody out there? Did the others long for me as I longed for them?

Alone in the house, cooking, cleaning, I listened to the BBC and suddenly, to my astonishment, I realized that instead of the usual news, I was hearing a message meant precisely and particularly for me. It was part of a sermon that the British Chief Rabbi Hertz was giving with the approach of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. He spoke in German.

“Our utmost sympathy goes out to the remnant of our brethren in Nazi lands who walk in the valley of the shadow of death,” said the rabbi.

He means me, I thought, me and my baby. But why does he say “remnant”? Are we all that is left? Can it possibly be that everyone else is dead?

“Good men and true the world over remember them in their devotions and ardently yearn for the hour when the land of the destroyer will be paralyzed and all his inhuman designs frustrated.”

They remember us, I thought. Those of us who are hunted, stalked, hiding in the darkness, are in the prayers of our brothers and sisters. We are not forgotten.

“And I know that my Jewish listeners will, in anticipation of the Day of Atonement, fervently join with me in the ancient prayers. Remember us unto life, O King who delights in life, and inscribe us in the Book of Life, for Thine own sake, O living God!”

Werner came home and asked me why I had been crying. I suppose I said it had something to do with the mood changes of pregnancy—anything not to burden him with my true thoughts on the eve of Rosh Hashanah 1943.

W
HEN
I
WAS
about six months pregnant, in the winter of 1944, a great sadness came over me. It disturbed Werner; he liked to see me happy.

“I’m just so homesick,” I wept.

Without a second thought, he said, “Pack.”

He biked over to Arado, and I imagine that he told them that his mother’s house had been bombed and she had been evacuated and now the house had been broken into by a gang of deserters who stole everything and broke all the windows and doors, and so he had to go and fill out a police report, or some such thing, and they believed him—and we went to Vienna.

Everything was the same, but everything was different. The Austrians had begun to suffer now. Their little dictator from Linz had not proved to be the military genius everyone thought he was in 1941. They were losing sons, enduring air raids. They had liked it when they could just loot the lives of a helpless civilian population, but these enemy armies—this Zhukhov, this Eisenhower, this Montgomery—this was not what they had in mind when they voted for Anschluss.

During this second trip Werner and I made to Vienna, I walked slowly on the Ringstrasse, trying to summon memories of my girlhood. The police had the whole place cordoned off because Hitler was coming to stay at the Hotel Imperial and there was to be a gigantic rally.

A policeman approached me. My stomach tightened. My throat
went dry. Frau Westermayer has spotted me, I thought, and fulfilled her threat to call the police.

“Perhaps you would like to walk over there, madam,” he said, “because we are expecting masses of people to come here very shortly and a lady in your condition should not be caught in such a great crush.”

I walked off several blocks and waited for the masses, but they did not come. I suppose the local Nazis felt frightened that the Führer might be displeased with empty streets and take it out on them, so they finally bused in a lot of schoolchildren who were instructed to scream “
Wir wollen unser Führer sehen!
”—“We want to see our Führer!”—so the madman would be “compelled” to appear on the balcony, like royalty.

The next day Pepi and Werner and I met in a café. These two men of mine had developed a certain rapport, not exactly a friendship but more like an alliance. Everyone in my Vienna group had admired Werner’s ability to supply Christl with printed souvenir scarves that her customers bought up eagerly. Now it was Pepi’s turn to ask for help.

He looked awful—older, shabby. “Men are deserting,” he said softly. “The worse things go at the front, the more hostility the regime turns on its own people. So they send out the police, even the SS, to find the deserters. Any young man who is not in uniform can be picked up at any time.”

I had never seen him so grim, so scared.

“What shall I do when they stop me and demand to see my reason for not being in the army? Pull out my blue identification card that disqualifies me from the draft because I am a Jew?”

“You need an excuse,” Werner said thoughtfully.

“Yes.”

“An official excuse …”

“That I can carry in my pocket …”

“Attesting that you are doing some important work required for the war effort.”

“Yes. That’s it. Exactly.”

We sat in silence in the café, all of us thinking. Then Werner said: “Go and get some pieces of letterhead stationery from your stepfather’s insurance company, and a sample of the chief executive’s signature.”

“There must be a stamp as well,” Pepi added nervously. “From the Labor Ministry or the Interior Ministry or …”

“This will not be a problem,” Werner said.

Pepi laughed without mirth. “Not a problem? My dear fellow, everything is a problem.”

“You can trust Werner,” I assured him. “He has golden hands.”

When we returned home, Werner went to work. He bought some ready-made office stamps with date, invoice number, “Received with thanks,” and such already on them. Then he removed some letters from one stamp and cut out new letters from another stamp; fitted the second into the first; and soon had a brand-new stamp that said what he needed it to say. With his tiny knives and chisels, he carved the right design, then with a tweezer inserted the letters and the date. At Arado, he typed a letter on the stationery Pepi had brought from Herr Hofer’s company. It stated that Dr. Josef Rosenfeld was
Unabkömmlich
—busy—needed by the Donau Insurance Company to do vital work on behalf of the Reich. Then he forged the signature of Hofer’s boss. Then he added the incredibly believable, official-looking stamp. Then he leaned back and gave his work a narrow-eyed, critical last look.

“Pretty good, huh?” Werner said.

“Absolutely wonderful.”

In my eyes, it was perfect, a magic document that would keep
Pepi secure for the duration of the war. I don’t know whether he ever used it, but he
had
it, you see. It gave him confidence that he was protected; and that was half the battle for U-boats like us who were hiding among the enemy. If you had confidence, the terror and stress of daily life would not show on your face and give you away.

“I’ll bet I could have made a lot of money doing things like this back in the thirties. Papers people needed, documents …”

“Yes, I suppose you could have.”

“Damn. Just my luck. I’m always too late to cash in.”

“But you are my genius,” I said, kissing him.