his new code that it was silly for me to think of converting now, that the time when such a gesture might have proved useful had long since passed.
Frau Mertens lent us to her neighbors the Grebes, who were a little shorthanded. Now we were just like the other prisoners of war, the Serbs, the Poles, the emaciated Frenchmen—except that we were not really like them, because we had no country.
I clung to the belief that I would be able to go home in October. What was there to do on the farm in the winter months? We were seasonal workers, were we not? The prospective return of cold weather terrified me—the rheumy damp, the frozen mornings. How would we survive here?
I thought about my mother, with her dark hair and her perky little gait, the marvelous sweet cakes that fell like the food of the gods from her sugary fingers, her wry ironic commentary on the racist fools who were destroying the earth. I was twenty-seven years old, and I still dreamed of her sweet embrace, her gentle voice. You must become a mother, Edith, because obviously you have a gift for it . I thought about home, the warm cobbled streets, themusic. My hands cracked the asparagus canes and tossed the potatoes into their bins, and my mind sang waltzes to itself and danced with my true love.
“Come back, Edith,” said the overseer. “You are in Vienna.”
He was right. I had learned to fill myself up with memories and lock out Osterburg, a fabulous partitioning of the mind that preserved the soul. When the local police arrived and told us we must wear a yellow Magen David at all times, I imagined that such a silly thing could never happen in Vienna, which I still put on a pedestal as a model of sophistication. And then Trude received a letter saying that all Jews in Vienna had to wear the six-pointed Jewish star as well.
I couldn’t believe it. Was it possible? Had Vienna descended to the level of an ignorant rural backwater? The idea horrified me. You see how long it takes for us to abandon treasured assumptions.
The police told us we must write to Vienna for the yellow stars, and that when they arrived, we must wear them at all times. But if we had done so, no shopkeeper in town would have waited on us. So we didn’t wear them. Our supervisors on the farm seemed to care not at all. I believe that in their way they had began to want to keep us content enough to go on obediently working for them, even more than they wanted to please the police.
P EPI WROTE THAT Jultschi’s husband, Otto Ondrej, had died on the Eastern Front.
Poor Jultschi, the weakest among us, the most beset by tragedy, was alone again. I could not bear to think of her, and yet she did not leave my mind. “My funeral clothes are still in Vienna,” I wrote to Pepi. “Tell her to take them.”
Lest I have any doubt that my youthful certainties had changed forever, Rudolf Gischa wrote to me from the Sudetanland.
“I was surprised to learn that you were still alive,” he said frankly. (Why? Was there a new policy? Were they getting tired of having us work for them? Were the Jews expected to be dead now?) “I feel sorry for anyone who is not a German,” he said. “It is my greatest joy to know that I am privileged to create the great empire of the Reich for the German Volk according to the principles laid down by our Führer. Heil Hitler!”
One of the girls who had been allowed to leave, Liesel Brust, was more courageous than most of us and had always tried to get to know the foreign prisoners. Now she sent me from Vienna a coded letter with a large package of men’s underwear and asked me to leave it by a certain boulder in a certain field on a certain night and then to tell the French prisoners, who were in rags, where they could find it.
I had never done anything like this—an act of political sabotage! To be caught meant banishment to one of the proliferating concentration camps, but to refuse meant such dishonor that I could not even bear the thought of it.
Frau Mertens lent us to her neighbors the Grebes, who were a little shorthanded. Now we were just like the other prisoners of war, the Serbs, the Poles, the emaciated Frenchmen—except that we were not really like them, because we had no country.
I clung to the belief that I would be able to go home in October. What was there to do on the farm in the winter months? We were seasonal workers, were we not? The prospective return of cold weather terrified me—the rheumy damp, the frozen mornings. How would we survive here?
I thought about my mother, with her dark hair and her perky little gait, the marvelous sweet cakes that fell like the food of the gods from her sugary fingers, her wry ironic commentary on the racist fools who were destroying the earth. I was twenty-seven years old, and I still dreamed of her sweet embrace, her gentle voice. You must become a mother, Edith, because obviously you have a gift for it . I thought about home, the warm cobbled streets, themusic. My hands cracked the asparagus canes and tossed the potatoes into their bins, and my mind sang waltzes to itself and danced with my true love.
“Come back, Edith,” said the overseer. “You are in Vienna.”
He was right. I had learned to fill myself up with memories and lock out Osterburg, a fabulous partitioning of the mind that preserved the soul. When the local police arrived and told us we must wear a yellow Magen David at all times, I imagined that such a silly thing could never happen in Vienna, which I still put on a pedestal as a model of sophistication. And then Trude received a letter saying that all Jews in Vienna had to wear the six-pointed Jewish star as well.
I couldn’t believe it. Was it possible? Had Vienna descended to the level of an ignorant rural backwater? The idea horrified me. You see how long it takes for us to abandon treasured assumptions.
The police told us we must write to Vienna for the yellow stars, and that when they arrived, we must wear them at all times. But if we had done so, no shopkeeper in town would have waited on us. So we didn’t wear them. Our supervisors on the farm seemed to care not at all. I believe that in their way they had began to want to keep us content enough to go on obediently working for them, even more than they wanted to please the police.
P EPI WROTE THAT Jultschi’s husband, Otto Ondrej, had died on the Eastern Front.
Poor Jultschi, the weakest among us, the most beset by tragedy, was alone again. I could not bear to think of her, and yet she did not leave my mind. “My funeral clothes are still in Vienna,” I wrote to Pepi. “Tell her to take them.”
Lest I have any doubt that my youthful certainties had changed forever, Rudolf Gischa wrote to me from the Sudetanland.
“I was surprised to learn that you were still alive,” he said frankly. (Why? Was there a new policy? Were they getting tired of having us work for them? Were the Jews expected to be dead now?) “I feel sorry for anyone who is not a German,” he said. “It is my greatest joy to know that I am privileged to create the great empire of the Reich for the German Volk according to the principles laid down by our Führer. Heil Hitler!”
One of the girls who had been allowed to leave, Liesel Brust, was more courageous than most of us and had always tried to get to know the foreign prisoners. Now she sent me from Vienna a coded letter with a large package of men’s underwear and asked me to leave it by a certain boulder in a certain field on a certain night and then to tell the French prisoners, who were in rags, where they could find it.
I had never done anything like this—an act of political sabotage! To be caught meant banishment to one of the proliferating concentration camps, but to refuse meant such dishonor that I could not even bear the thought of it.
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