The Nazi Officer's Wife Read Online Free PDF Page B

bound books by Schiller and Goethe. Strange—but I think that if Pepi felt any connection to things Jewish, it may have been because of those wonderful German books. He knew he would never have received them from his mother’s family. He knew that, intellectually, he was connected to the Jewish side. And Pepi’s whole personality was his intellect—remember that.
    Anna wasn’t a stupid woman, but she was uneducated, full of superstitions and unveiled fears and desires. Hefty, always short of breath, florid, she dressed with unsuitable flash for a woman of her age and size. She wore a big false smile full of big teeth. Set her reddish hair in little pin curls and used beer as a lotion. She spent her days gossiping and read nothing.
    She slept in the same room with her son, even when he wasfully grown. She waited on him as though he were a king, serving him lunch on the good china every day and hushing the neighbors’ children when he took his daily afternoon nap.
    She always knew which child in the district had been born with a deformity, and she always had a theory as to why: a harelip because of the mother’s vanity, a gimpy leg because of the father’s philandering. She told Pepi that his father had suffered from dementia at the end—a sure sign of syphilis, she said. I don’t know to this day whether it was true. Maybe she got the idea from the same wellspring of Austrian poison that caused Hitler to believe that syphilis was a “Jewish disease.”
    Anna bought “new wine,” which she said “had not yet aged” so it “contained no alcohol and could not make you tipsy.” At the end of the day, Pepi and I would find her in the living room of their flat at Number 1 Dampfgasse, drinking the “new wine” and listening to the Nazi radio station with a worried look on her face.
    “For heaven’s sake, Mother!” Pepi protested. “Why do you distress yourself by listening to that irrational propaganda?”
    Anna turned to us with wide, frightened eyes. “We have to pay attention to them,” she said.
    “Oh please …”
    “They are very very dangerous, my dear son!” she insisted. “They hate the Jews. They blame the Jews for everything.”
    “No one listens,” Pepi said.
    “ Everybody listens!” she cried. “In church, in the marketplace, I hear people talking and I know, everybody listens and everybody agrees !”
    She seemed intensely emotional, close to tears. I assumed it was because of the wine.
     

    M Y FATHER GAVE IN . He sent me to the university. I decided to study law.
    In those days, those who hoped to be judges and those who hoped to be lawyers took the same course of study, and specialized only after they had taken their final examinations. We studied Roman law, German law, and church law; civil, criminal, and commercial procedures; the Law of Nations; political science; economic theory; and also certain new subjects, like psychiatry and forensic photography, pertaining to criminal behavior.
    I bought a little box camera and took snapshots of people.
    Pepi’s mother bought him a Leica. He set up a darkroom at home and took soulful pictures of objects: dominos spilled on a table, arranged in a slanting beam of sunlight; books and fruit.
    While Hitler was coming to power in Germany, I was hiking in the mountains with the girls from the socialist youth group. I remember Heddy Deutsch, the daughter of a Jewish member of parliament; and Elfi Westermayer, a medical student. We slept in the hay in farmers’ barns near the lakes at Saint Gilden and Gmunden. We wore blue shirts, hammered studs into the soles of our boots for better traction on the pebbly trails, and went out singing in the brittle mountain air. I remember all the songs. The “International,” “Das Wandern Ist des Müllers Lust,” “La Bandiera Rossa” (“The Red Flag”).
    During the school year, my friends and I gathered at the socialist hall and concentrated on saving the world. In those tumultuous days, other young