The Nazi Officer's Wife: How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust

Several weeks ago, I read The Last Jews in Berlin, about Jews who managed to hide for the duration of the Holocaust under Hitler's nose. Edith Hahn is not included in Leonard Gross's book (perhaps for reasons of geography, perhaps he did not know her story, or perhaps he was interested in telling the stories of those who were not included to publish their own memoirs), but she certainly could have been.

Edith Hahn had a fairly unremarkable childhood has a Vienna Jew, save for one important difference: she was highly educated, a rarity for women in her circumstances in those days. With a brilliant, inquiring mind, she studied all the way through to a doctorate of law - and then her timing failed her. She was to sit for her final examination just as Austria fell to Hitler and the Jewish laws precluded her from becoming a fully qualified, practicing lawyer.

Edith was remarkable in another way, as well. Unlike so many European Jews, she felt acutely the danger posed by Hitler and his National Socialists. More than once she pleaded with her boyfriend, Pepi, that they should escape while they could, but he could not bring himself to leave his mother, and she could not bring himself to leave him.

Ultimately, the Nazis decided the issue for her: she was ordered to report to forced labor camps in northern Germany, first on an asparagus farm and then at a paper factory, where for 14 months she performed hard labor on starvation rations. Allowed to return to Vienna only upon her mother's deportation to "the east," she pulled off a daring escape and began her transformation into Aryan womanhood, culminating in her marriage to a Nazi officer.

The Nazi Officer's Wife  is a fascinating memoir by a woman who, in the words of her daughter, "experienced the Holocaust both as a victim of the Nazi system in the forced labor camps, and as a dutiful German housewife existing withing the system." Her experiences in the immediate post-war years also provide a glimpse into Soviet East Germany, Stasi and all. (Remarkably - or not, given what she had already been through - Edith manages to escape the ever-tightening Soviet noose and emigrates to England.)