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Summary: I couldn't put it down!
Review: A captivating story of not only survival but thriving in the heart of hell. I experienced sorrow and joy and triumph all through the eyes and soul of Edith Hahn. A wonderful story that makes the reader grateful for her own life of uneventful existence.
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Summary: How boring can you get
Review: A shallow book, I did'nt find the story a bit inetresting especially the way the author wrote it, oversentimental and boring.
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Summary: Excellent piece of history
Review: As those that survived HaShoah become older and realize the need to share with the younger generations the trials they went through, the story of what really transpired becomes clearer. This was an excellent example of an individual with courage and imagination. And the book is well-written for the average reader rather than the historian. I read it in less than two days.
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Summary: CHOICES OF COURAGE!
Review: Choices of courage are the choices the woman in this book made. This woman did exactly whatever she had to do to remain alive.It was obvious FROM her choices that she was going to be one of the many people who survived as a witness to the atrocities of how, not just one person but entire groups of people can become, be it out of fear or loyalty to some crazed individual telling them what to do.The woman in this book is a true witness to the Holocaust and whatever her choices were are the very choices that kept her and her daughter alive. Not another soul on this earth should even dare to think they have the right to judge any choice this woman made in surviving the Holocaust. Perhaps not everyone has the ability to understand the difference between real life and a fantasy or the actuality of how it was during 'hitlers' reign of terror on any personal level. That is understandable because anyone who was not there physically would NEVER be able to fathom the horrors of that time. Anyone who has a conscience, any compassion or love for mankind within their own soul, would not be able to understand the magnitude of the hatred and the brutality of those days. BUT this book describes it well enough for the mature reader to grasp. This read was filled with choices of courage.
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Summary: Memoirs Of A Courageous "U-Boat" Survivor
Review: Edith Hahn Beer is a Jewess, now living in Netanya Israel. In 1938, pro-Nazi Vienna, she was an intelligent, inquisitive law student, with an adventurous spirit. After Anschluss, the German's pressed the Austrian Jews for all their money and valuables in return for exit visas. Some families had to decide, because of a lack of funds, which of their children could leave for safer havens, and which were doomed to stay in Austria with their parents, and almost certain deportation. Edith's two sisters left the country, but she remained with her childhood friend and lover, Pepi, with the hope they would soon marry. She was sent to a labor camp in the north of Germany to do backbreaking farm work, 12 hours a day, six days a week. The motto of some of the Jewish laborers was, "Life is beautiful, and it begins tomorrow." Her mother was deported to the East while Edith was in Germany, helpless to assist or join her beloved parent. When she finally returned to Vienna, her home and family were gone. Her remaining friends, Jew and Gentile, with few exceptions, were afraid to assist her. Her beloved Pepi, whose Jewish father had married a non-Jew, was a weak man, dominated by his mother. And the mother wanted nothing to do with Edith. A prewar friend, who also happened to be a doctor, and a Nazi Party bureaucrat, assisted Edith, and another gentile friend obtained copies of her own identity papers for her. Edith writes, "Our faces will be imprinted on the hearts of those who are kind to us, like a blessing." So, she moved to Munich, in 1942, submerging her identity in the wartime Reich. Edith Hahn disappeared from the face of the earth and Grete Denner emerged to replace everything Edith had ever been. Grete was not only a new identity, she was a totally different woman; mild, meek, unassuming and uneducated - hard to pick out of a crowd. Thus began life as a "U-boat," submerged beneath the surface of society in Nazi Germany. She writes, "Now I am like Dante. I walk through hell, but I am not burning." Living in mortal fear, she found work as a nurses aide, and a room with a kind family. She met a handsome Aryan, Werner Vetter, who wooed her persistently. When he pressured her to marry, she finally blurted out her secret. Werner accepted her Jewishness, to the extent that he still wanted to marry and protect her. He wanted to sleep with her and have her take care of him. But her husband never rid himself of Nazi prejudices about "Jewish blood," and resisted having a child with Edith/Grete. She, in turn, became the passive, perfect wife Werner desired, abandoning any remaining sense of self. The ironies of her existence increased as the war progressed, and Germany's doom became obvious to almost all. Then Werner, blind in one eye, was drafted and became an officer in the Wehrmacht. Edith/Grete became pregnant - the Ideal Aryan Wife, with a baby on the way and a husband at the front. This is a powerful account of a person existing in a schizophrenic life, with constant fear of discovery, and almost no sense of identity. The isolation was devastating. One can only imagine Edith's survivor guilt, which most Holocaust survivors suffer from. Here she was living the "normal" life of a German Hausfrau, while millions of others, like her own mother, went to the camps and crematorium. She discusses this guilt frankly in the book. She was and is an extraordinarily brave woman. We are fortunate that, at great risk to her life, she kept a record of her survival and has chosen to share her inspiring story. This intimate narrative is simply and intelligently written. Her tale is so gripping that it is almost impossible to put down. At times it does seem that truth is stranger than fiction. I highly recommend this autobiographical account of a woman's life in hell. It is a story like no other.
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Summary: Edith and Her Two Men
Review: Edith Hahn Beer was a bright Jewish girl in Vienna in the '30s. Her whole life was a story very simular to Scarlett O' Hara's. Every boy loved her, and she had her pick of anyone. She chose a man named Pepi (deadringer to Ashley Wilkes)and they adore each other, except Pepi loves his mother (who is like Ashley's sisters)almost more. When Edith is trapped into going into farms and paper factories, there seems to be no hope. When she finally gets out, she changes her idenity as one of her friends and meets and marries a Nazi soldier, Werner Vetter (a bad ringer for Rhett)even though she told him she was Jewish. He is drafted in 1944 and when he comes back in 1947 he hates the new Edith/Scarlett that has a job as a judge. Good book!
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Summary: What One Does to Survive
Review: Edith Hahn Beer's book on what one did to survive the Holocaust was riviting. It was well written and effectively explained how one survived the unthinkable. Intead of sitting in judgement of how Jews survived Nazi atrocities, I found myself being in awe of the spirit of survival of this strong-willed, valiant woman. I think this is a "must read" for anyone curious about how anyone survived the darkest time of the 20th century.
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Summary: Very Unusuall story
Review: Edith Hahn was a Jew born in Vienna who wanted to be a lawyer. After the German Unification, she was forced out of the house that she lived in a moved to a ghetto. Shortly after that, she had to report to a farm in Osterberg, Germany and stayed there for about a year until she was transferred to a factory and made boxes. During her time at the factory, Edith got word that her mother was being transferred to Poland. Edith wanted to go too, but could not.
Edith got back to Vienna a month after her mother left and became a Nazi fugitive. After several months of this, Edith decided that she could not take living like that, but after the guidance of a friend, and the help of another moved to Munich not as Edith Hahn, but as Christina Maria Margarethe Denner, or Grete (The real Christina Denner called herself Chrisle)
After several months of living in Munich Edith met Werner Vetter, who painted air plans for the Luftwaffe. After getting divorced from his first wife, Edith moved in with him. She however did not want to get married because she was afraid that the official doing the wedding would know that she was a Jew. When Edith became pregnant in 1944, they got married though.
After the birth of Maria Angelika (called Angela) Werner was drafted into the German army and quickly became a Nazi Officer. The Russians captured him shortly afterwards.
After the war was over Edith became a lawyer and very soon a Judge and used her pull with the Communist government to get Werner released.
After his release, Werner did not like the fact that Edith had no time for him, and he left her to go back to his first wife and daughter. After Werner left, her Edith decided that she did not like living in Communist controlled Germany and moved to England to live with her sister and brother in law. In England, Edith married Fred Beer, and in the late 1980's after Fred's death, she moved to Israel.
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Summary: A rollercoaster ride through the Third Reich - as a female!
Review: Edith Hahn's story is surprisingly well written for an amateur; she is not self-censoring as far as one can make out. She tells the truth about her family, their life in Vienna where her parents run a restaurant, her happy childhood memories and focus on boys; her irritation with one sister who was self-pitying and unhappy. She is smart as a whip, gets into the law faculty of Vienna's university and almost graduates as one of the top law students - except that the Anschluss arrives before she takes her final exams. Her boyfriend, a "Mischling" (halfJew) is witty and wonderful and a perfect companion, but in the end, he betrays her and favors his gentile mother who lives in fear of the Jews and their coming near her son, after the Jewish father dies. She stays, in fact, well past the point of safe passage out of the Third Reich principally because of him. She winds up on an asparagus farm with other Jewish women doing dreadful and miserable farm work. Next, she's transfered to a cardboard-box factory. She gets out of there by feigning a return to Vienna to join her mother in a mandatory transport to Poland, but on the train she rips off the yellow star and returns to Vienna as an undercover Gentile. She gets false papers from a family friend/doctor, then uses them to get to Munich, where she lives with a family and helps them run a home-based tailoring business. That's how she meets her first husband, a German working in an airplane factory as a painter. She does love him to some extent, but mainly she sees marriage to this rather off-balance traditional man as a way to stay safe during the war. As a hausfrau, she's got the perfect disguise, and they have a child. He is drafted and sent to Russia, winds up in a POW camp in Siberia. She winds up alone with the child in Brandenburg after the war, and the Russians are there. She tries to pull strings to get him out early. He suddenly appears in their doorway, by which time she is now working as a judge in dealing with family law cases. Her salary is good, she is secure, and her husband balks at his sudden relegation to unemployment and a wife who doesn't darn his socks and who expects that he might pick up the fish for dinner. He explodes, hits her violently in front of the child, and disappears, ultimately rejoining his first wife. Our heroine gets out of East Germany and takes off for England. Whew! There, I think I gave away the plot more or less.But commentary: she is honest, tells her own opinion and reveals the little slips and errors that somehow save her. She is very well-educated for a woman of her time, speaking and writing English and French. She abhors the thought of her mother working as a maid, cleaning up for Germans. If you read a lot of the Holocaust literature written by women, most had had Gentile maids and could not imagine doing such work, nor did they know how to do it. If they were lucky enough during the war to be assigned to such a job, instead of a labor camp, they felt so enraged and humiliated, as well as inept and helpless in the work, that it becomes a major focus in the writing. I find it an interesting detail that male biographies and diaries do not mention. It was also because of Germany's pro-natalist policy that she does so well as a mother and housewife. One of the great shocks for her is a chance acquaintance in a park when a gentleman joins her in a walk, spontaneously. The time is after the war. He is a Jew, he reveals, and they are both "u-boots" who managed to swim under the surface during the war. He tells her that he could recognize immediately that she was Jewish. She is astounded in retrospect that the Germans she lived amongst couldn't recognize her typical Jewish features. She doesn't speculate as to an answer, but I can guess that many Germans were trained to hate Jews through propaganda yet in their everyday lives had little real contact with them, and never really studied their features. In a city with many Jews, such as Vienna, there was much higher recognition, of course. I remember that in my years living in Germany, no one recognized me as an Irishman, in spite of reddish hair, freckles, blue eyes and all other typical features of a "mick". In the USA or Canada, England or Australia, they know. In Germany, they thought I was an American whose parents were German but who had neglected to teach me the language properly.This is a story "mit Happy=end" as they say. She moved to Israel after the death of her second husband and lives contentedly there with her daughter, Angela, daughter of a Nazi officer. I would recommend this book to all who appreciate honesty and a female educated perspective.
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Summary: another evil person
Review: explains away her actions
"I had to do it"
just like gestapo camp guards burning babies
she abandonded a girl back to an orphanage, now that she didnt need a playmate for her own daughter anymore.
these people make me sick
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