Literary Sampler: Essays, Book Reviews, and More...
Monthly Column by Charity Gingerich

Edith Hahn Beer’s autobiography The Nazi Officer’s Wife: How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust,¹ is a truly riveting yet heart-breaking story of the survival of a well-educated young woman born in Vienna. From 1942 until the end of the war Beer lived dangerously as a U-boat, "a fugitive from the Gestapo living under a false identity beneath the surface of society in Nazi Germany"¹. She was forced to forget who she truly was, becoming “Grete Denner” in order to survive the present madness. That Beer was a Jew from Vienna who survived the war is no small miracle, since they received one of the first waves of the Holocaust’s onslaught. Toward the end of the war when Beer tells a Jewish Russian officer that she is a Jew from Vienna, he responds, "all the Jews from Vienna are dead. Gone. Murdered. You are a liar" (279).

In reading this story, one is reminded of the fact that even though there were those such as Beer whose bodies were ultimately spared from gassings and other forms of mass murder, many died on the inside, in their spirits, in the essence of who they were as individuals. Because they lost so much and felt guilty at having survived while others did not, the pieces of these lives were often never put back together; they became the walking wounded/dead.

The scope of the book deals with Beer’s childhood in Vienna during the 1920s and chronologically moves through her years first as a schoolgirl, then as a young woman attending the University of Vienna, intent on earning her degree as a lawyer. She vividly describes the days prior to the Anschluss, as well as those during and after this terrible event. After Hitler officially invaded Austria, Beer went through four distinct and painful phases of the war, first as a slave-laborer at an asparagus plantation in Osterburg, northern Germany, then as a worker in the Arbeitslager of Aschersleben, a paper factory. She then officially became a Jewish U-boat, obtaining false identification papers through the help of a dear friend. Finally she went from simply being a Jew in hiding, living in the town of Deisenhofen outside of Munich, working as a Red Cross girl, to being the mistress and eventually the wife of Werner Vetter, a proud member of the Nazi party.

A most troubling issue of the Holocaust is dealt with in this book in a forceful way and that is the uncomfortable question of how such insanity, such terrible, uncivilized acts could have taken place in such a civilized "developed" part of the world. Beer, an intelligent, open-minded young women is at first overwhelmed by unbelief at what she and her family are hearing and seeing through Hitler’s propaganda against the Jews of Vienna. She exclaims, "rational, charming, witty, dancing, generous Vienna must surely rebel against such insanity" [!] (57). After all, how could a city so full of intelligence, culture and history be so blind? How could it change so quickly, as in the blink of an eye, from a city of light to one of such darkness? In hindsight Beer is able to answer the question of how the people of Vienna could turn against the Jews so quickly:

They had been harboring a hatred for us which we had grown accustomed to calling 'prejudice' […] In fact, they hated us with a hatred as old as their religion; they were born hating us, raised hating us; and now with the Anschluss, the veneer of civilization which had protected us from their hatred was stripped away (57).

It is an uncomfortable truth that education, culture and even religion alone are not enough to stave off the barbarity that mankind is capable of perpetrating upon one another. This is a lesson that Beer and her family learned through bitter experience and it serves as a lesson to the rest of us. The best that can be done with such experience is to pass it on to a world that for the most part prides itself as being above such ideologies and behaviors bred in intolerance and hatred.

In the end, what makes this book so successful is that it is such a deeply personal story; the author does not spare intimate details of her life, and there is an incredible honesty to be found in these pages. In many ways this is not just a tale of survival but a love story -– an incredibly sad one. Thus the reader is brought very close to a personalized tragedy of the Holocaust. We are no longer looking at mass numbers, a sea of faces on a museum wall whose lives are unknown to us, but rather at one woman’s life and story, so bravely told.

¹Beer, Edith Hahn. The Nazi Officer’s Wife. New York: Perennial, 2000er

Copyright © 2007 by Charity Gingerich.

About the Author: Charity graduated from Kent State University with a BA in English, as well as minors in writing and history in 2006. This fall (2008) she will be entering the MFA in Creative Writing program at West Virginia University where she will be specializing in poetry. Charity always welcomes any questions/suggestions about this column. Click Here to send her an email.