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The Nazi Officer's Wife by Edith Hahn Beer

Decent Essays

“Silence. These were the habits that I wore as I lived what survivors of the Holocaust now call a U-boat, a Jewish fugitive from the Nazi death machine, hiding right in heat of the Third Reich.” With these words, Edith Hahn lays down the foundation for her captivating memoir. Born in Vienna, Austria in 1914, Edith Hahn was a Jewish girl who strived to go further in the education and not become a housewife. Despite her hopes and dreams, at the age of 27, and only one test away from achieving her law degree, Edith was turned away from her University due to the rules set up by Hitler and the Reich during the Anschluß. As they are witnessing the Nazi rise to power, Edith's sibling, all but her, leave. One sister takes refuge in Israel, and her brother in England. From then on, Edith and her mother were stripped of their home and forced to live in the slowly degrading conditions of the Jewish ghetto. One morning the Jews were told to form a line, shortly after, a Nazi truck pulled up looking for strong workers in the field. They chose Edith. For years Edith worked on a farm, with the promise that if she toiled in the field for the entire time that the sun was in the sky, her family would be kept safe. She is then transported to a box factory where cardboard boxes are produced. With an unreachable quota of boxes to fill, she worked endlessly to reach it. After sowing on a Jewish star to her jacket, the supervisors herded her and her fellow workers headed on a train to

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