Free The Nazi Officer's Wife by Edith H. Beer

from his job at the court. He just stopped showing up for work one day, and his colleagues there assumed that, like all the other Jews, half-Jews, and quarter-Jews, he had been arrested or was doing his best to get out. He couldn’t receive Jewish rations because now, with his mother’s machinations, hewas not registered as a Jew. If he had tried to acquire Aryan rations, he would have been drafted.
    So Pepi was trapped in his mother’s apartment. He lived on what his mother brought him. She swore to the authorities that she was a big smoker, and so she received cigarettes, which she brought home him to him. He went out during the day to sit in a park where he would not be noticed. He occupied himself by writing laws for the new “democratic” Austria that he felt sure would exist after the elimination of the Nazis. Can you imagine? My brilliant Pepi, pretending not to exist, rewriting the Austrian penal code, for fun.
    In 1939, when the Germans attacked Poland, bringing France and Britain into the war, we had a moment of hope that Hitler would soon be beaten, that our decision to stay in Vienna might work out for the best. But soon enough, we understood that the widening war had cut off all escape.
    The old and the sick saw no way to save themselves. The aged widow of the great German-Jewish painter Max Liebermann killed herself just as the Gestapo came to collect her. My mother’s uncle, Ignatz Hoffman, an eminent physician, had married a young woman and spent some very happy years with her. Before the Gestapo came for him, he took poison. “You must run now, my love,” he said. “Run like the wind. You cannot have an old man to burden you.” He died in her arms.
    We heard that a mysterious Nazi woman helped Uncle Ignatz’s wife smuggle out her possessions before she herself escaped.
    All the Jews of Polish origin were being sent back to the land of their forefathers, and so the two gentle sisters kissed us and packed and left. We sent them packages in care of the Jewish community in Warsaw, but of course the packages were returnedbecause it was illegal to send anything to Jews. So we took the advice of a wily neighbor, wrote the address in Polish, and like magic the packages arrived. I too became wily. I never mailed two packages from the same post office.
    We began to lose touch with all our relatives and friends. They were drifting away like stars without gravity, through whatever hole opened in the wall of Nazi conquest.
    My aunt Marianne Robichek wrote that she and her family were heading west toward Italy. Uncle Richard and Aunt Rozsi sent a postcard from China. Hansi, Milo, and Mimi sent messages through other relatives that they had made it to Palestine. My cousin Max Sternbach, a gifted artist who had graduated from the art school that would not accept Hitler, disappeared across the Alps, headed—we hoped—for Switzerland.
    I borrowed Christl’s lilac blouse and had a formal picture taken of myself for Pepi’s birthday. Somehow I had the feeling that we would need pictures of each other, if we were separated. He said we would never be separated, but so many people were. Look at Otto Ondrej, locked down on the Eastern Front. He had never even seen the little son whom Jultschi had named for him.
    Now all my hopes centered on the defeat of Germany. If only France would hold fast … if only Italy would ally itself with England … if only America would enter the war, I thought, then the Nazis would be destroyed.
    In June 1940, while Pepi and I were walking along the Danube Canal, someone on the far bank called out joyfully, “France has fallen!” The whole city erupted with cheering … and I actually vomited in the street. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t walk. Pepi half-carried me home. His mother had some pills to keep herself calm. Now that I was as hysterical as she, Pepi stole a few from her, put them into my mouth, and watched while I swallowed them.

    When Italy declared war on France and