The Nazi Officer's Wife: How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust
Edith Hahn Beer, 1999
HarperCollins
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780688177768
Summary
Edith Hahn was an outspoken young woman in Vienna when the Gestapo forced her into a ghetto and then into a labor camp. When she returned home months later, she knew she would become a hunted woman and went underground. With the help of a Christian friend, she emerged in Munich as Grete Denner. There she met Werner Vetter, a Nazi Party member who fell in love with her. Despite Edith's protests and even her eventual confession that she was Jewish, he married her and kept her identity a secret.
In wrenching detail, Edith recalls a life of constant, almost paralyzing fear. She tells of German officials who casually questioned the lineage of her parents; of how, when giving birth to her daughter, she refused all painkillers, afraid that in an altered state of mind she might reveal something of her past; and of how, after her husband was captured by the Soviet army, she was bombed out of her house and had to hide while drunken Russian soldiers raped women on the street.
Yet despite the risk it posed to her life, Edith created a remarkable record of survival. She saved every document and set of papers issued to her, as well as photographs she managed to take inside labor camps. Now part of the permanent collection at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., these hundreds of documents, several of which are included in this volume, form the fabric of a gripping new chapter in the history of the Holocaust—complex, troubling, and ultimately triumphant. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 24, 1914
• Where—Vienna, Austria
• Education—University of Vienna (studies interrupted)
• Death—March 17, 2009
• Where—London, England, UK
Edith Hahn Beer was an Austrian Jewish woman who survived the Holocaust by hiding her Jewish identity and marrying a Nazi officer.Her memoir in 2000: The Nazi Officer's Wife: How a Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust.
Early life
Hahn was one of three daughters born to Klothilde and Leopold Hahn. Her parents owned and ran a restaurant (in June 1936, Leopold Hahn died while working at a famous Hotel as the restaurant manager in the Alps).
Although it was uncommon for a girl of that time to attend high school, her professor persuaded her father to give in and he sent her to high school. She continued her studies at university and was studying law at the time of the Anschluss, when she was forced to leave the university because she was Jewish.
World War II
In 1939, Hahn and her mother were sent to the ghetto in Vienna. They were separated in April 1941, when Hahn was sent to an asparagus plantation in Osterburg, Germany and then to the Bestehorn box factory in Aschersleben. Her mother had been deported to Poland two weeks before Hahn was able to return to Vienna in 1942. With duplicate copies of the identity papers of a Christian friend, Christa Beran, aka Christl Denner Beran, she went to Munich.
In Munich, she met Werner Vetter, a Nazi party member who sought her hand in marriage, and she volunteered as a German Red Cross nurse. The couple lived together in Brandenburg an der Havel and married to legitimize the impending birth of their daughter, Angelika, born in 1944. Vetter became a prisoner-of-war and was sent to a Siberian labour camp in March 1945.
Later life
Following the war, she used her long-hidden Jewish identity card to reclaim her true identity. The Allies' need for jurists called her law education into use and she was appointed as a judge in Brandenburg. Hahn pleaded with the Soviet occupation authorities to free Vetter and he was released in 1947, but their marriage ended shortly afterward. Vetter died in 2002.
Pressed by the authorities to work as an informer, she fled with her daughter to London, where her sisters settled after they had sought refuge in Palestine at the onset of the war. Hahn worked as a housemaid and a corset designer. She married Fred Beer, a Jewish jewellery merchant, in 1957 and they remained married until his death in 1984. After his death, she moved to Netanya, Israel.
In December 1997, a collection of Hahn's personal papers was sold at auction for $169,250. The collection, known as the Edith Hahn Archive, was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. (From Wikiepdia. Retrieved 1/17/2014.)
Book Reviews
Born to a middle-class, nonobservant Jewish family, Beer was a popular teenager and successful law student when the Nazis moved into Austria. In a well-written narrative that reads like a novel, she relates the escalating fear and humiliating indignities she and others endured, as well as the anti-Semitism of friends and neighbors..... Her story is important both as a personal testament and as an inspiring example of perseverance in the face of terrible adversity.
Publishers Weekly
A well-written, tense, and intimate Holocaust memoir by an author with a remarkable war experience. Young Beer (nee Hahn) was a promising Viennese Jewish law student until the German Anschluss annexing Austria.... Beer took on an Austrian friend's documents... [even] marrying one Nazi.... She admitted her Jewishness to him but lived outwardly as a normal Hausfrau..... This engaging book goes deep...in explaining how the survival instinct allows one to sleep with the enemy. (Author tour)
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The author describes Viennese Jews: "We had all the burdens of being Jewish in an anti-Semitic country, but none of the strengths—the Torah learning, the prayers, the welded community. We spoke no Yiddish or Hebrew. We had no deep faith in God. We were not Polish Chasidim or Lithuanian yeshiva scholars. We were not bold free Americans…" (page 26). Does this effect your empathy for Edith and her family? Why or why not?
2. It's always surprising to see moments of beauty in wartime accounts. Did you see any of these moments in this book? If so, what?
3. "That was the only reason I stayed in Austria, you see. I was in love, and I couldn't imagine life without my Pepi," says the author (page 75). And yet, Pepi refuses to marry her. Do you think it is because he wants to stay and protect his Aryan mother or because he doesn't want to marry a Jew?
4. "Frau Fleschner and the overseer assured us that as long as we worked here, our families would not be deported. I had the feeling that they tried to look out for us more and more as time went on" (page 93). How did you feel about the owners of the labor camp in Osterburg? Do you think they were slave owners or do you see them as the worker's saviors?
5. "We all thought about converting to Christianity. What would have once seemed unthinkable, a shameful betrayal of our parents and our culture, now seemed like a perfectly reasonable ploy" (page 98). Do you think that if you had been a Jew at that time you would have converted in order to save your life?
6. The men in this book—Pepi and Werner—come across as weak and cowardly compared to the strength of the women, both Jewish and Christian—Edith, her mother, Frau Docktor Maria Niderall, Christl Denner Beran, even Werner's ex-wife Elisabeth. Would you describe this as a feminist book as well as a Holocaust memoir?
7. There are many degrees of heroism in this story—from the Bestehorn forewoman's advice on how to make Edith's impossible work quota to Christl's gift of her identity. Discuss other acts of kindness in the book and whether or not you regard them as heroic deeds.
8. Edith's husband Werner is a complex man. While he knowingly marries a Jew, he does not want to have a Jewish child. Although Edith is able to use her connections to get him out of prison, he does not like his wife's new job or status. What do you think of Werner? Do you forgive him his flaws as the author seems to?
9. As Edith lives her life as Grete, an ordinary Hausfrau, she is in constant fear that her Jewish identity will be discovered. Is there a particular incident in the book where you share her fear?
10. "For the first time it occurred to me that maybe my life as a U-boat did not weigh heavily on the scales of suffering, that the hideous experiences which had transformed the men in the transit camp might make it impossible for them ever to accept me as one of their own" (page 278). Discuss other groups or people throughout history who might also suffer from survivor guilt.
(Questions issued by the publisher.)