Plain hard cover.
How one woman escaped the Nazi Holocaust.




Editorial Review:
Edith Hahn was an outspoken young woman studying law in Vienna when the Gestapo forced Edith and her mother into a ghetto, issuing them papers branded with a "J." Soon, Edith was taken away to a labor camp, and though she convinced Nazi officials to spare her mother, when she returned home, her mother had been deported. Knowing she would become a hunted woman, Edith tore the yellow star from her clothing and went underground, scavenging for food and searching each night for a safe place to sleep. Her boyfriend, Pepi, proved too terrified to help her, but a Christian friend was not: With the woman's identity papers in hand, Edith fled to Munich. There she met Werner Vetter, a Nazi party member who fell in love with her. And despite her protests and even her eventual confession that she was Jewish, he married her and kept her identity secret.

In vivid, wrenching detail, Edith recalls a life of constant, almost paralyzing fear. She tells of German officials who casually questioned the lineage of her parents; of how, when giving birth to her daughter, she refused all painkillers, afraid that in an altered state of mind she might reveal her past; and of how, after her husband was captured by the Russians and sent to Siberia, Edith was bombed out of her house and had to hide in a closet with her daughter while drunken Russians soldiers raped women on the street.

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.

On exhibit at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., these hundreds of documents form the fabric of an epic story--complex, troubling, and ultimately triumphant.Edith Hahn was an outspoken young woman studying law in Vienna when the Gestapo forced Edith and her mother into a ghetto, issuing them papers branded with a "J." Soon, Edith was taken away to a labor camp, and though she convinced Nazi officials to spare her mother, when she returned home, her mother had been deported. Knowing she would become a hunted woman, Edith tore the yellow star from her clothing and went underground, scavenging for food and searching each night for a safe place to sleep. Her boyfriend, Pepi, proved too terrified to help her, but a Christian friend was not: With the woman's identity papers in hand, Edith fled to Munich. There she met Werner Vetter, a Nazi party member who fell in love with her. And despite her protests and even her eventual confession that she was Jewish, he married her and kept her identity secret.

In vivid, wrenching detail, Edith recalls a life of constant, almost paralyzing fear. She tells of German officials who casually questioned the lineage of her parents; of how, when giving birth to her daughter, she refused all painkillers, afraid that in an altered state of mind she might reveal her past; and of how, after her husband was captured by the Russians and sent to Siberia, Edith was bombed out of her house and had to hide in a closet with her daughter while drunken Russians soldiers raped women on the street.

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.

On exhibit at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., these hundreds of documents form the fabric of an epic story--complex, troubling, and ultimately triumphant.

she was a courageous and creative woman doing what ever she could to survive.
Although she expressed her constant fear of being caught and having to act in a manner far removed from her outspoken personality therefore having lived in constant terror I was unable to be moved by it somehow.

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RCABC by surface mail to Secretariat from her wish list.

Enjoy.
I'm fascinated by these kind of books and have great admiration for the survivors.

Arrived safely today. Thank you, uppity, for sharing this memoir. Last year three of my top rated non-fiction books were holocaust memoirs, including Survival in Auschwitz.

This was a bit of a different view from most Holocaust memoirs that I've read in that Edith never spent time in a work or death camp. However, it gave a very good view of what the public, Jewish and non-Jewish, was experiencing. The one view she didn't see much of was the Nazi Officer's view because she experiences that for a short time at the very end of the war, but still we are shown that it was a privileged existence. I found it interesting that she was horrified by the returned camp prisoners who had lost their sense of social norms and it was fascinating to see how quickly East Germany becomes a watchful communistic state, from which she flees. Thank you to uppity for passing it on to me. I'm going to lend it to a friend who wants to read it.

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Chosen from PokPok's Virtual Book Box. On its way to Wisconsin.

Received from Secretariat as part of Pok Pok's Non-Fiction VBB. Thanks so much! :)

Received from Secretariat as part of Pok Pok's Non Fiction VBB. Thanks so much! :)