Product Description

Edith Hahn was a young law student in Vienna when Hitler absorbed Austria in 1938. Madly in love with a young man called Pepi who was half-Jewish, she was separated from him and sent to a forced labour camp. So began the extraordinary chain of events that led to her return to Vienna, her life as a 'hidden' Jew with an identity given to her by a German girlfriend, her marriage to a Nazi who knew she was Jewish and protected her, her intervention through her husband on behalf of Pepi, and her life at the end of the war in Eastern Germany where she was appointed a judge over the persecutors of her people. She fled the Communist regime there because of the conflicting emotions she felt for these who had NOT informed on her. She settled and married in London, and now lives in Israel, aged 84.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #216653 in Books
• Published on: 2001-03-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 305 pages

Review
'Hahn Beer tells her story with a remarkable lack of rancour ... her evocation of atmosphere and detail is worthy of John le Carre. The book is most moving as a record of individual courage but it also constitutes valuable evidence on the vexed subject of how far ordinary Germans were aware of the evil in their midst' THE TIMES 'All memoirs of this period are worthwhile, but, in this case, doubly so.' MORNING STAR

About the Author
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Customer Reviews

A STORY OF SURVIVAL DURING THE HOLOCAUST...
This is an interesting work of non-fiction that, at times, reads as if it were a novel. Based upon the recollection of a secular Austrian Jew, a young woman named Edith Hahn, the book tells the reader her intriguing story. During the Holocaust, she went underground and fled to Germany. There, she met and fell in love with a member of the Nazi party whom she had told she was Jewish. He married her and kept her secret. In the waning days of the war, her husband was drafted into the German army and ended up a prisoner of war for a time. Upon his return, he found a crumbling German infra-structure, the Nazis out of favor, and his Jewish wife asserting herself as she really was, a well-educated, independent woman.

She tells a tale of sublimation of self in order to survive the rigors of the policies of Nazi Germany that were imposed upon Austria, her country and a land where anti-Semitism was rife. She tells a tale of sublimation of self in order to survive her marriage to a person whose views were so opposite her own. Though Edith loved her husband, she never felt free to be herself until the war was over. Hers is a story of immobilizing fear and survival. This is an intriguing perspective on the Holocaust from the voice of one who who was in a singular position during the latter half of the war, as she was a surviving Jew in Germany.

Memoirs Of A Courageous "U-Boat" Survivor
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. 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. He continually pressured her to marry him. The ironies of her existence increased as the war progressed.

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.
JANA

A story of survival
This is a captivating story of survival that reached epic proportions that stirred sympathetic emotions in me throughout the read. Edith Hahn, an Austrian Jewish woman survived as she did, outside the concentration camps with a formidable strength and will to survive that amazed me, staring the enemy straight in the eyes under the false identity of a Aryan German.

The horrors of life for Jews during those holocaust years are vividly portrayed, allowing us to see the dark side of man that should not be allowed to haunt humanity. SURVIVAL IN AUSCHWITZ and DISCIPLES OF FORTUNE are other survival novels that bring us closer to what it must have been like for the powerless victims of the holocaust.