Ind: A Family Affair: Sleeping with the enemy - a survivor's tale (Mar. 6, 2000)
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Edith Hahn Beer, an Austrian Jew using an assumed Aryan identity,
married Werner Vetter, a German Nazi. They had a daughter, Angela,
believed to be the only Jew born in a Reich hospital. Edith, 86,
reclaimed her name after the war and divorced Werner. She now lives in
Israel. Angela Schluter, 55, a divorced mother-of-three and an artist,
lives in London. (Features).
The Independent (London, England) (March 6, 2000): p7. (1234 words)
Edith Hahn Beer
I WAS 24 and had just finished my law degree when my mother and I were
sent to the ghetto in Vienna. It was just after Kristallnacht. My
father had died from a heart attack, and my two sisters had already
fled to Israel. In May 1941, I was sent to a labour camp in the north
of Germany, and then to a paper factory. When I returned, just over a
year later, my mother had been deported to Poland. I'd missed her by
two weeks, and never heard from her again.
I was also on the deportation list so went into hiding for six weeks.
A friend then rang a man who agreed to help me. When I arrived my
heart contracted - he was wearing a Nazi uniform. There was no turning
back. He advised me to ask a good Aryan friend of the same age and
colouring as me to report her papers missing, apply for replacements,
and give me the originals. He was my saviour. He didn't ask for money;
I think he did it because of our mutual friend.
In August 1942, I travelled to Munich with my friend's identity
papers, and worked as a seamstress in return for lodgings. That month
I went to an art gallery. I was sitting in front of a painting when a
blond man with a swastika pin in his lapel sat down beside me and
started talking to me about art. His name was Werner Vetter. He was
very nice. He had seven days left of his holiday and we saw each other
every day.
In October, he came back and told me he loved me and proposed
marriage. It was horrible, I was terribly embarrassed and didn't know
what to say. I gave him all kinds of platitudes to try and get rid of
him. He said he wanted to meet the father I had talked about, so I
told him the truth. It was a risk, but I trusted him because I could
see that he loved me. He then admitted that he was married, and was
going through a divorce. He said that we were now even because we had
both lied. He didn't mind that I was Jewish. I think I did love him. I
didn't consider all Nazis to be the same.
That December, I joined Werner in Brandenburg, outside Berlin, where
he worked in an aeroplane factory. I forced myself to forget
everything that was dear to me, all my experience of life, my
education, and became a bland, prosaic, polite person who never said
or did anything to arouse attention. We never talked about the Jews or
what might be happening to my mother. I avoided shops where I would
have to give the Heil Hitler salute, and refused to hang his picture
in the house. But I worked for the Red Cross in a hospital, and had to
wear a brooch which bore a swastika. I wanted a baby and got pregnant.
Werner insisted that we married. I later gave birth to Angela, not
daring to take any medication in case I revealed my identity.
In March 1945, Werner was sent to a Russian labour camp in Siberia.
When the war ended, I took my Jewish identity card, which my old
boyfriend had concealed in the covers of a book, and I got a court
order for my name to be changed.
In the summer of 1947, Werner returned. By that time I was working as
a judge, and I was Edith again. He didn't like the real me. He wanted
someone to stay at home and look after the house. After a few months
he said he wanted a divorce. I was distraught, but had to agree.
The Russians wanted me to work for the secret service, so I fled to
England with Angela, then four, and became a housemaid. I didn't tell
her about my past because I wanted her to grow up as a normal girl,
and not have to live in the shadow of this horrible holocaust.
I see Werner as the person who saved me. I don't know whether he is
still alive. I have no regrets. Should I regret that I wasn't burnt to
death, or gassed in a chamber? It was a miracle.
Angela Schluter
I FOUND out that my father was a Nazi when I was 16. My mother had
come up with the bright idea that I should get to know him. The last
time I had seen him was when I was 11. So I went to live with him for
six months in Germany. He told me that he had been a member of the
Nazi Party. I was shocked. I couldn't cope. I said I didn't want to
know. It was denial.
I didn't see my original birth certificate until I was 29. There was a
big swastika stamped on it. I couldn't deny that and it really shocked
me.
We didn't talk about my mother's past for many, many years. I always
knew, even as a child, that there was something very painful and very
bad about her family, and I wasn't to ask. Every year when I was
little she would send me six birthday cards from people who had been
killed in the Holocaust, including her mother, to give me the illusion
of some sort of family.
In 1984 my stepfather, Fred Beer, whom my mother had married in 1957,
died; she moved to Israel four years later. Once, when I visited her,
she showed me a load of papers and letters from the war. I was worried
that if something happened to her someone would go through her flat
and throw them out. I brought them back to Germany with me and put
them in a safe. I had a friend whose husband asked to see them. On my
mother's next visit, he started asking her questions. That was the
first time I heard her story. I was stunned. I find it amazing that
anyone could have lived through so much terror.
I don't like my father at all. I think he's terrible. When I went to
live with him at 16 I told him I didn't want to go to Christian
religious classes at school (I went to a Jewish school in London). He
just looked at me and hit me. I still can't open my mouth properly. In
the Holocaust Museum in Washington I saw a slide of his Nazi Party
card. I felt physically sick, and the hairs on the back of my neck
stood up. The last time I saw him was about 20 years ago.
The fact that my father was a Nazi is something I can only come to
terms with in denial. If I was to sit and think about it I couldn't
sleep at night. I still cannot see that Spielberg film. I'm not
ashamed of what my mother did because it was a question of survival.
I'm pleased he looked after her, and loved her, but I don't want
anything to do with him.
Over the last six, seven years my mother and I have started talking
properly. Her past has brought us closer together.
`The Nazi Officer's Wife', by Edith Hahn Beer with Susan Dworkin, is
published on Thursday by Little, Brown, at £18.99
For obituary: see The Times, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article5969736.ece
BBC World Service review: http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/people/highlights/edith.shtml
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mother conferred to her over 250 personal letters and documents which
tell the story of a woman’s struggle for survival in Nazi Germany. By
Ori Golan.
Elegant, eloquent and poised, Angela Schluter cuts the stereotypical
figure of the English woman brought up on everything English. And yet
Schluter’s family story takes part in a different country at a
different time. It is a story which she has only recently been able to
piece together, thanks to a personal archive which her mother, Edith
Hahn, has recently opened up to her. "It is a life story that was
recounted to me in piecemeal; my mother never spoke about her
experiences during the Holocaust. This was the first time that I got
the full, unedited, story of her life."
Edith Hahn’s story begins in Vienna 1914 where she was born into an
assimilated Jewish family. In 1938, when Hitler marched into Austria,
Edith was about to finish her law studies and was writing her
doctorate thesis. "My mother - like all Austrian Jews - was expelled
from University and was unable to disallowed to complete her studies"
says Angela, "She was unable to work on account of the racial laws
which excluded Jews from public life, and took up sewing with her
mother, although even that was illegal."
In 1938, while Jews were still allowed to leave Austria, Edith’s
sisters saw the impending disaster about to descend on Austria’s
Jewish population and seized the opportunity to flee for Israel.
Edith, believing that Hitler "was just a passing phase", decided to
stay with her mother in Vienna and pursued a romantic relationship
with a fellow Jewish law student who she had met at university.
"My mother’s love affair with Pepi (Joseph Rosenfeld) was taken out of
a fairy tale" says Angela. "The letters reveal a passionate love
between two young people who were deeply in love with one another. It
was a deep, innocent and unquestionable love. My mother and Pepi were
inseparable."
In 1939 Edith was sent to a labour camp in Osterburg, north west of
Berlin, where she was forced to work up to 80 hours a week in
appalling conditions. Throughout her six months at the camp, Edith
wrote frequently to her young lover, relating to the harsh conditions
of the camp. Some of her letters contained photographs of the camp
which she had taken secretly, even though this was strictly forbidden.
In her letters, Edith gave vent to her frustration of life in the camp
and her fears concerning Austria’s Jewry. She wrote; "Is it really
possible…that all the Jews in Vienna have to wear armbands. This is
impossible, it just can’t be…To think that I would never be allowed to
walk with you again… in our Vienna. No, that is impossible.."
Edith was subsequently sent to a second labour camp in Aschersleben,
near Leipzig, where she worked in a factory making cardboard
packaging. The factory, she describes, was large, very noisy and the
air polluted by paper dust, making breathing difficult.
"This love story between my mother and Pepi," explains Angela, "which,
through circumstances, took on an epistolary form, and the frequent
exchange of letters (mother sometimes wrote to him twice a day), has
enabled me to learn, and understand, what went on during those
terrible days. In one letter, dated May 1942, Pepi tells my mother
that her own mother was bout to be deported. She managed to obtain
permission to go back to Vienna, but by the time she got there, her
mother had been put on a train bound for Minsk, and was never heard of
again."
Back in Vienna, Edith found herself with nowhere to go and living on
her wits. Pepi was unable to take her in, as his mother, with whom he
was living, did not allow her to visit them. He managed to steal the
key to their neighbour’s flat where Edith stayed while the neighbours
were away. The relationship between the two lovers took on a rather
clandestine aspect and, although they met frequently, they did so
fleetingly and surreptitiously. The question of survival was becoming
increasingly urgent, with food and accommodation becoming increasingly
scarcer. It was about then that life was to take a dramatic turn for
the young Edith.
Close to desperation, she approached a Nazi woman mentioned to her by
a friend she had met in the labour camp. "I don’t know where she got
the courage from- or why this woman was willing to help her. It
defeated the logic of the times." says Edith’s daughter, "It is just
one of those inexplicable quirks of fate that life sometimes brings".
The Nazi woman telephoned a friend and told Edith to go immediately to
the Department of Racial Affairs and see an officer named Plattner.
"My mother, terrified, walked into a Nazi office and admitted to a
Nazi officer - a total stranger - that she was a Jew". Plattner told
Edith to find a female friend who would be prepared to go the police
and declare that she had lost all her papers in a boating accident. As
good fortune had it, Edith managed to find a non-Jewish friend,
Christine Denner, a childhood friend eight years her junior, who was
willing to help her out. Putting her life and that of her entire
family at great risk, Christine went to the authorities and reported
her documents missing. She was then handed a new set of identity
papers. (For this selfless act Denner was formally recognised in 1985
when she was invited to plant a tree under her name in the Garden of
the Righteous in Yad Vashem.) Thus, in 1942 Edith Hahn assumed the
identity of Christine Denner and immediately left Vienna for Munich.
Under her new identity, Edith volunteered as a trainee nurse for the
Red Cross. When asked about her family history, she explained that her
mother had died and her father took a second wife who she did not
like, which is why she left Vienna. The new Christine Denner had to
attend regularly Nazi lectures and swear an oath of allegiance to
Hitler. It was during this time that she met Werner Vetter - a member
of the Nazi party - at an art gallery. The young German fell head-over-
heels in love with the young "Christine" and soon after, sought her
hand.
"Werner," says Angela, "would simply not take ‘no’ for an answer. He
wooed her, entreated her, and finally persuaded her to marry him. It
was not simply a marriage of convenience for my mother; he was a good
looking, determined man and his love for mother was genuine. However,
while her old love, Pepi, who was more of an intellectual and saw
Edith as an equal, Werner saw her as a devoted wife, a domestic help
and an altogether acquiescent person with whom he would have a
comfortable life." But Pepi would not leave his mother in Vienna and
finally the ties between the two were broken.
In a rare moment of truth, and at the risk of being denouncement,
Edith revealed to Werner her Jewish identity. Werner, however, was not
deterred by this revelation and insisted on marrying her. The couple
married the following year, after, Werner’s divorce from his former
wife came through. "My mother was forced to lead a very isolated and
introverted life", says Angela, "She lived a quiet life, never
engaging in politics and avoiding any confrontations; even with her
own husband she was always very careful. You must also remember that
she assumed the identity of a woman who was eight years younger than
herself, and did not want to attract any untoward attention."
Angela, the couple’s only daughter, was born in 1944 in Brandenburg,
Germany. Although it was a difficult birth, during which Edith
haemorrhaged, she refused to be administered anaesthetic. "Having
trained as a nurse, my mother knew that women in labour confess all
sorts of things under the effect of anaesthetic and she feared she
might reveal her Jewish identity. She was not prepared to take the
risk, even though my birth almost killed her."
"I was welcomed into the world by Nazi doctors" says Angela
ironically, "They congratulated my mother on producing another child
for Hitler’s third Reich. I guess I was the only Jewish girl born in
Nazi Germany whose birth was officially recorded. My birth certificate
was stamped with a Swastika."
At the end of the war Edith retrieved her personal documents,
including her Law degree, which Pepi had slid behind the cover of a
book and had hidden in a suitcase. She also reverted to her former
identity and assumed the name of Edith Vetter.
Werner, Angela’s father, who had been captured by the Russians and
sent to Siberia. returned home in 1946, to find that Edith had become
a judge and was now in a prominent within the community. "She was no
longer the grey mouse he had become accustomed to" smiles Angela.
"Their relationship cooled and their marriage ended soon afterwards. I
met up with him a few times afterwards, but we never established a
father-daughter relationship." she summarises.
Edith was soon approached by the Russians who asked her to work for
them as a judge in the Brandenburg trials which followed the Nuremberg
trials. She was also told to spy on her friends and colleagues.
Fearing she was under KGB surveillance, Edith left for England with
her young daughter and, unable to speak English, procured a job
working in London with a woman doctor who spoke Yiddish.
In 1957 she married again and was widowed in 1984. Ten years ago she
left England and, at the age of 73, made a new life in Israel where
she now resides.
Angela recently decided to sell her mother’s archival collection
through London’s Sotheby’s; "My mother, who is now 83 needs to undergo
an operation on her eyes and we simply need the money. I believe it
will afford my mother the opportunity to lead a more comfortable life.
I also believe that her story should be told. By making it public,
more people will learn about this terrible time in our history."
Box 1
The extraordinary story of love and survival is told through a
collection of personal letters and official documents which was sold
by Angela Schluter. These included;
More than 250 letters written by Edith to Pepi
23 pages of letters from Pepi to Edith
More than 40 photographs of Edith, Pepi and Werner and Angela, their
daughter
Illicit photographs from Edith’s Labour camp
letters written under Edith’s assumed name
Edith’s German passport, stamped with a ‘J’
Letters from Werner smuggled out of Siberia in a spectacle case