The Nazi Officer's Wife

October 4, 1999
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 and--despite her confession to him that she was Jewish--married 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.

August 4, 2003
In the 1930s, Edith Hahn was studying law at university, in love with her boyfriend and living with her close-knit, nonobservant Jewish family in Vienna. Her idyllic life ended abruptly when the Nazis took over, and she was sent to a labor camp in Germany. After obtaining permission to return to Vienna—and discovering that her mother was no longer there—Edith went underground and lived in terror as a fugitive until a Christian friend let her use her papers to create a fake identity. Incredibly, a Nazi Party member fell in love with her and married her, even after she told him her true identity, and she spent the rest of the war pretending to be an ordinary German hausfrau.
Audie Award–winner Rosenblat gives a compelling performance in the first-person role of Edith. She narrates the story in a light Austrian accent, which lends a ring of authenticity to her reading. At times, Rosenblat seems to become
Edith: sighing with regret over a lost love, chuckling over a girlhood prank, her voice filled with hatred as she speaks of the Nazis and with pure terror when she comes close to being discovered. Indeed, readers might easily forget that this absorbing narrative is a memoir, not a novel.