The Nazi Officer's Wife Read Online Free PDF

Rosenfeld appeared suddenly, out of nowhere. He had a way of doing that, coming upon you like a cat or a sprite, on silent feet, with his subtle smile. Without a word, he seized my heavy books and fell into step with me.
    “Have you ever been to the National Library before?” he asked.
    “No.”
    “Well, I go there very often now that I’m enrolled in the law program at the university, and I can tell you, it’s extremely gigantic. As you are unfamiliar with the layout of the place, you may not know which entrance to use. Why, you could become lost even before you get inside! Better let me lead you.”
    So I did. We walked and walked, past the palaces, through the parks, scattering the pigeons, not even hearing the tolling clocks of the city.
    “My paper has to be very long and complex,” I said. “I shall cite all the great thinkers—Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud.”
    “What about Adolf Hitler?”
    “Oh, him. He’s not a thinker. He’s just a ranter and raver.”
    “There may come a time,” said Pepi, “when people cannot tell the difference.”

    “Impossible,” I solemnly predicted. “I have read Hitler’s book Mein Kampf and also some works by his colleague Herr Alfred Rosenberg because I am a fair-minded, objective person and I believe one should always hear out all sides before making a decision, and so I can tell you from firsthand knowledge that these men are idiots. Their ideas about how the Jews have poisoned their so-called superior Aryan race and caused all of Germany’s troubles are utter nonsense. No intelligent person could possibly believe them. Hitler is laughable. He will soon disappear.”
    “Just like all your old boyfriends,” Pepi said with his sly smile.
    We stopped for cake and coffee, as people of our type habitually did in the midafternoon. He told me about his studies, his professors, his great future as a doctor of jurisprudence. The sun sparkled on the spires of the churches. In the park at the Belvedere, he interrupted my chatter with a little kiss. I completely lost my train of thought. He set down my books and took me in his arms and kissed me properly. We never did get to the National Library. I never did pick up my sister Mimi (who complained about my lack of consideration for years afterward). But by the end of that afternoon, what Pepi Rosenfeld had said came true: all my old boyfriends had just disappeared. Poof. Like that. Gone.
    Pepi could always get my attention. I’d be in class, in a bookstore, in a café, and suddenly I would feel a tingling on my scalp or at the nape of my neck. I’d turn around and there he would be, staring at me. He never talked nonsense. He always had a point to make. I felt that my long search for someone to share my passion for ideas and books and art had finally ended. Soon I was madly in love with him and could think of no one else. When my old amour Rudolf Gischa wrote to me from his university in the Sudetanland, Czechoslovakia, declaring that he had decided to jointhe Nazi Party, that Adolf Hitler was obviously right about everything, including the Jews, and that I should please return to him his promise of love and marriage, I did so with pleasure.
     
    B Y THE TIME I met Pepi, his father had died—in Steinhof, the famous insane asylum that the Kaiser built. Pepi’s uncles, important men in the city of Eisenstadt, provided a monthly pension for Pepi’s mother, Anna. She had converted to Judaism in order to marry but had really always remained a candle-lighting, mass-going Catholic. After Herr Rosenfeld’s death, Anna pretended to continue to be Jewish so his family would continue to support her. She also kept it a secret when, in 1934, she married Herr Hofer, an insurance man from Ybbs—so that the money would keep coming in.
    Pepi had a sort of bar mitzvah; really it was just a party which his mother gave in order to elicit some presents. She was disappointed because, instead of cash, his uncles gave him a set of beautifully