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

other’s arms that night.
    “Six weeks,” I said. “That’s all. Six weeks and I will be home. By then America will have entered the war and conquered Germany, and it will all be over.”
    I took a knapsack and one suitcase, as my sister Hansi had done. Mama packed nearly all the food in the house for me.
    Pepi came with his mother to the train station. He looked so sweet, so sad. All his adorable debonair patter had abandoned him. He took my hands and put them in the pockets of his coat with his hands. My mother had great dark circles around her eyes. We were silent, we three. But Anna Hofer would not shut up. She was babbling about rations and fashions, full of joy that I was leaving.
    Suddenly, Mama put her arm around Anna and before she could protest, turned her around, allowing Pepi and me one last moment. The salt tears in his kiss stayed with me. I tasted them in my dreams.
    As the train whistle blew, I whispered to Mama that she shouldn’t be sad, that I would see her in six weeks.

A T FIRST , IT felt like an ordinary journey. I rode in a compartment with several women, and by the time we arrived in Melk, I knew how long they had been in labor with each of their children. A whining frightened girl clung to me. I finally managed to get rid of her. We had a keeper, a bustling German. She looked efficient in her Nazi uniform, but during the long, sleepless night, she wandered through the train in her dressing gown, not really knowing what to do.
    At the Leipzig station, we were herded into a room where we were guarded by two policemen and ordered to remove any lipstick or other makeup. We had to ask permission to use the toilet. We then continued the journey on a local train. By now, our womanly chatter had ceased. After a few hours of being treated like prisoners, we had become prisoners, watchful, silent. I stoodthe whole time, looking out the window at Germany, at the painfully clean villages and tidy little gray houses, all of a uniform design. The countryside, still spotted with winter’s resilient snows, brimmed with mud.
    “That mud is where I am going,” I said to myself.
    At Magdeburg, we had to haul our luggage up the steep steps. A very slow train took us to Stendahl. We stood on the platform, freezing.
    The farmers came—plain, rough people determined to behave in a superior manner, still a bit uncomfortable with all this new power. They looked us over critically, as though we were horses, then divided us into groups. The smallest farmer took two girls. A few others took eight or ten. I went with the largest group—I think there were about eighteen of us—to Plantage Mertens in Osterburg.
    It was a big farm on six hundred morgens of land. (A morgen, about two-thirds of an acre in Germany, was a measurement invented by medieval farmers, who estimated that this was how much land you could plow in a Morgen , a morning.) The farm had five heavyset horses; a large house, which I never entered; some barns; and barracks for us, the workers. Frau Mertens, a woman in her twenties whose husband had gone to war, expected Jews to be what Goebbels’ radio broadcasts had promised—ugly, crude, ratlike miscreants who would surely try to steal everything she possessed. She seemed pleased that we said “Bitte” and “Danke” and appeared meek and exhausted.
    The next day we started working in her fields.
    Never in my life had I done work of this nature. If only I had not cut gym, I might have been stronger, but it was too late for regrets.
    We worked from six until noon, then from one to six in theevening, six days a week, with a part day on Sunday. Our task was to plant beans, then beets, then potatoes, and to cut asparagus. To cut asparagus we would reach into the ground, feel for the tender white stem, cut it with a knife, pull it out, and fill up the hole—thousands of times a day. Soon every joint and muscle throbbed and burned. My bones ached. My head ached. Herr Fleschner—we called him Herr