Real Edith Hahn example essay topic

Edith Hahn Beer, born in 1914, wrote The Nazi Officer's Wife, a memoir about her life and struggles for survival during the rein of Adolf Hitler. Edith goes chronologically through her life and tells the truths about the constant fear she lived in. Throughout her entire ordeal, perhaps her biggest fear was that her identity would be revealed and lost at the same time. Yet despite the risk it posed to her life, Edith Hahn created a remarkable collective record of survival: She saved every set of real and falsified papers, letters she received from her lost love, Pepi, and photographs she managed to take inside labor camps. Edith Hahn returned to her home of Vienna, Austria, after fourteen months in Nazi labor camps to find her mother had been deported. Her father passed many years earlier and her two sisters fled for Palestine in hopes of escaping Nazi takeover of their homeland.

Edith was left with no one or no place to turn to and as a result, she was forced to change her identity in order to survive. She obtained identity paper from a good Austrian friend, Christ. Edith was now Christina Maria Margaret he Denner, but she would go by Grete Denner. Every aspect of Edith's life would revolve around securing her identity, essentially surviving.

For example, her first move was to Munich, Germany, where she began to work at the Red Cross as a nurse. Edith chose this particular place because she would receive food rations there, where as everyone else received them from the Rations Office, which required a national identity card; Grete did not have one. Even though no one could tell that Grete was actually Edith Hahn, she still feared for the worst. It was a new struggle daily and she longed for the life she once knew. Edith dreamed of good things and participated in deep political discussions. When Edith was twenty-four and an aspiring law student with only one exam left to finish her schooling and her future looked very bright.

Edith fell in love with a young and intelligent Pepi Rosenfeld. However, it would soon dim when Hitler and the Nazis took over Austria. When the Nazis came to power all hope was lost for Edith. Five years of school and the law career she had dreamed of was denied her because she was a Jew and no longer welcome. After her two younger sisters Hansi and Mimi had become Zionist, Edith and her mother had to become registered and made to wear a Jewish cross on their clothes at all times.

Edith was sent to two labor camps where she stayed and worked. Afraid and scared that someone would reveal her true Jewish identity Edith, now known as Grete Denner, guarded her every move carefully, to keep her new identity hidden. Grete posed as the perfect German woman and worked as a nurse at the Red Cross in Munich. When Grete fell in love with a member of the Nazi party, Werner Vetter, she never really became herself but got better at becoming Grete. Grete loved Werner and cherished her time with him, but when he asked her to marry him, she was very unsure.

Edith knew that she had to tell him her secret before she could ever accept his proposal. Edith trusted Werner and wanted him to know the truth about who she was because if she had ever been discovered he would have thought that she betrayed him. She got up the nerve and softly whispered in his ear that she was Jewish. Edith was a U-boat, a lone Jew surrounded in Nazi Germany pretending to be an Aryan and loyal to the Fatherland. He surprisingly said that he would protect her.

Even when they lived together they never spoke of Edith's past and they both pretended to believe that she was Grete Denner and not Edith Hahn. Edith longed for a child because she was afraid that she would soon be to old, but Werner did not want to be the father of a Jewish baby. Edith soon coaxed him into becoming a father. Edith still longed for her family and knew that it was likely that she would never see them again.

She wanted to go to Vienna to see some friendly faces because she was afraid that she was losing herself. Edith loved Werner and loved their life together, as much as possible for the time, but she felt herself slipping away. For example, while working at the Red Cross she remembered women coming in to have children and being put under anesthesia and letting things slip out without any knowledge of it. Edith endured the pain of natural childbirth to protect her self and gave birth to a healthy baby girl named Angela. Edith would struggle for the rest of her life to find herself and her Jewish ties again. She always knew that she was Jewish but she wondered if she would know what being Jewish was.

As a girl Edith was never taught the more traditional ways of the Jewish people and now more than ever she felt less like a real Jew. The Nazis were losing the war and being bombed on a daily basis. Werner, with one blind eye, was drafted to fight and sent to the Russian front. Before Werner left he and Edith would listen to the illegal radio stations on occasion but when Werner left she found herself listening to the radio more and more. Edith learned of the true nature of the concentration camps by listening to the illegal BBC radio station. The radio announcer, Thomas Man, told of the Jews being poisoned and burned in these camps every day.

With this devastating news Edith realized that if she had not become so carefully guarded her Judaism, she would surely be dead. Here she was living a lie and hating it when many of the Jews of that day would have traded places with her instantly. Edith wondered if she deserved to be living this life. The Russians began to take over German towns including Brandenburg, leaving Edith and baby Angela with no place to live.

Edith managed to retrieve her real identity papers and school diploma that she had hidden in the apartment, before it burned to the ground. With the Nazi surrendered Edith soon established the law career she had always dreamed of and soon became a judge. When Werner had finally been released he came home to find an independent woman, not his former obedient wife. Edith had become a woman who could take care of herself but she was still no the Edith Hahn she once was. Before Werner returned, Edith had Angela baptized to please him, or maybe because she had grown accustomed to Christian ways. Werner thought that his wife Grete was gone and that this woman was the real Edith Hahn.

Even with the career that she always wanted, that had been taken away from her, her longing to find herself went onward. Edith longed and feared at the same time that she would see her true self again. Werner asked Edith for a divorce and it came through in 1947. Edith took Angela and fled to England where she met her sister Hansi.

It was not until this particular reunion that she felt she had finally realized that she had always been Edith Hahn. Edith later moved to Israel in 1987. The Nazi Officer's Wife is a wonderful book and well written. Edith Hahn Beer gave amazing background information of her life and her family's life making the chronological format of the autobiography very easy to follow.

Wording was well picked and effective quotes used sporadically which intensified the story told. I think this is truly an amazing story because by the end of the end of the fifth chapter in the book, I could feel the pain and fear that Edith lived in. She did an amazing job of retelling her agony as a lone Jew in the middle of a Nazi infected area..