The Nazi Officer's Wife by Edith H. Beer Read Free Book Online Page B

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 thisworld. 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 tothe 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