The Nazi Officer's Wife

Looking back over my posts, I see a large proportion of books about World War II.  I guess I do read a lot of books about that era.  I think perhaps it is because I was born just as the war was beginning in Europe, and the war colored my early life.  My father was a chaplain in the Army Air Corps, and our family moved with him from base to base.  The first churches I remember are Army base chapels.  I remember them with great fondness and warmth.  Some of my first baby sitters were my dad's chapel assistants, lovely WACS.  I remember when Franklin Roosevelt died, and when the war ended.  Even though I was very young, those memories remain strong and were formational influences in my life.  I remember ration books and coupons for clothing and food.....those memories stay.

Recently I was talking with a good friend who had just finished a book about World War II,  and recommended the book to me.  The full title is The Nazi Officer's Wife: How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust by Edith Hahn Beer.

Edith is a young Jewish woman who grew up in Vienna as part of a warm, loving, middle class family.  Her ancestors had lived in Vienna for years.  Her father owned and ran a restaurant, and their lives were secure and safe, until Hitler started coming to power.and war came to Europe.

This book is an autobiography, written by Edith at the request of her daughter, Angela, so she could understand what her mother had survived.  Edith Hahn had saved her papers....everyone had stacks of  papers to prove who they were, to allow them food rations, to allow them to move around....to allow them to breathe!  Her papers are now in the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.

I have read other books about this time and about concentration camps, including the classic Night  by Elie Wiesel, and I've heard him speak. I've visited Dachau, the concentration camp just outside Munich.  However, this book reached me in a personal place, and I think it is because, at last, I've read a woman's story from that time.  So often, we read the men's stories.  This time I could put myself in her place and experience what a woman had to endure.

What she had to endure is almost unthinkable.  She lived as a "U-Boat" in Munich for several years during the war.  A U-Boat is what Jews who lived in the society as "Aryans" called themselves.  She did this.  She married a German man who became an Army officer toward the end of the war.  She told him she was a Jew, and for some reason he married her anyway, and did NOT turn her in.  She lived in fear all the time.

 Her mother had been taken away to Poland, and her sisters had escaped to various places while she was at a work camp early in the war.  She was the only family member still left in Germany, and did not know about her family until the war ended.  Then, she learned that her mother, after being taken to Poland in 1942, had been killed shortly after being deported.  She had told herself the entire war that her mother was alive, and after finishing the book, I think this belief is what kept her going.  That belief, and the beautiful daughter she had in 1944.  The daughter who would later ask her to tell her story to the world. 

She and Werner Vetter (the Nazi) were married about a total of four years.  He was sent to Siberia when captured by the Russians, at the end of the war, and when he came back to Munich, their life together disintegrated and they divorced.  He remarried his first wife, and Edith and her daughter soon were able to get out of Germany to England.  Edith has lived in Israel since 1987.

This book portrays the inhumanity and unbelievable cruelty of people towards other people, and  I learned much about the Nazi treatment of people, especially of women.  Women were good only as breeders, not as thinking, capable people.  She had to subvert and bury her entire background and personality in order to survive. 

In this book I also learned about the resilience of people in horrid circumstances, and how people will fight to survive in spite of horror.

This is a personal book about one life, but one life which was part of a large pattern of attempted extermination.  The human spirit shines brightly, but my heart weeps for the horror.