The Nazi officer's wife How one Jewish woman survived the Holocaust

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. Using all their resources, her family bribed officials for exit visas for her two sisters, but Edith and her mother remained, due to lack of money and Edith's desire to be near her half-Jewish boyfriend, Pepi. Eventually, Edith was deported to work in a labor camp in Germany. Anxious about her mother, she obtained permission to return to Vienna, only to learn that her mother was gone. In despair, Edith tore off her yellow star and went underground. Pepi, himself a fugitive, distanced himself from her. A Christian friend gave Edith her own identity papers, and Edith fled to Munich, where she met andÄdespite her confession to him that she was JewishÄmarried Werner Vetter, a Nazi party member. Submerging her Jewish identity at home and at work, Edith lived in constant fear, even refusing anesthetic in labor to avoid inadvertently revealing the truth about her past. She successfully maintained the facade of a loyal German hausfrau until the war ended. Her story is important both as a personal testament and as an inspiring example of perseverance in the face of terrible adversity. Photos not seen by PW. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Beer grows up an assimilated Jew in pre-Nazi Vienna; she even attends law school and plans to be a judge. She falls in love with another secular Jew and plans a happy life; then she is expelled, first from school, then from all normal activities. To survive, she adopts the identity of a Christian friend, becoming a "U boat" (a Jew hiding among Nazis). The author then falls in love with a Nazi; they marry, and she becomes Grete, the perfect Third Reich hausfrau and mother, even though her husband knows that she is Jewish. After the war, the real Edith emerges and works as a judge. She rescues her husband from a labor camp, but he doesn't want her anymore, because she is no longer a subservient wife and their child is a Jew. Eventually Beer and her daughter move to England. This is a factual retelling, not an introspective autobiography. Does Beer have any survivor's or collaborator's guilt? For this recording, the talented Barbara Rosenblat uses a clear, slightly accented English enunciation that just matches Beer's Viennese background. Partially because this book has also been made into a movie, it is likely to be a more popular choice than other, perhaps more thoughtful, Holocaust narratives. Recommended for moderate to large Judaica libraries and large academic or public libraries.-I. Pour-El, Des Moines Area Community Coll., Boone, IA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A well-written, tense, and intimate Holocaust memoir by an author with a remarkable war experience. Young Beer (n‚e Hahn) was a promising Viennese Jewish law student until the German Anschluss annexing Austria made her circle stop its laughing (``Hitler is a joke. He will soon disappear''). She was a Christmas-tree Jew with a Gentile boyfriend (dreaming of a socialist paradise), but Zionist siblings (who escape to Palestine), and the deadly follow-ups to the Nuremberg Laws send Beer into an underground existence as a ``U-boat'' in Aryan Germany. Beer took on an Austrian friend's documents and identity, got employed with the Munich Red Cross, and dated soldiers for the meals and cover'marrying one Nazi, Werner Vetter, with a good job and expertise in art. She admitted her Jewishness to him but lived outwardly as a normal Hausfrau. Beer talked her husband into pregnancy, even though under Nazi rule their baby would be considered Jewish. The baby was a girl, making Werner furious'``a Nazi who made a religion of twisted, primitive virility,'' Hahn comments. The losing Reich drafted the one-eyed Werner, made him an officer, and shipped him to Russia. The Nazi officer's wife discovered the Holocaust from forbidden BBC broadcasts and so learned the fate of family and friends. After the Russians conquered and burned her neighborhood, Beer retrieved her old identity papers and diploma, and this illegal fugitive was eventually transformed into a feared judge. Some embittered Jewish survivors cursed her for the way she survived the war, but Beer was still fearful enough to baptize her daughter. A returned Werner rejected the independent Edith who had replaced his servile Grete, so Beer divorced him in 1947, left the oppressive Russians, and emigrated to England, then, in 1987, to Israel. This engaging book goes deeper than psychologizing on the (Patty) Hearst Syndrome in explaining how the survival instinct allows one to sleep with the enemy. (Author tour)