Edith Hahn Beer Quotes
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That's all it takes, you see -- a moment of kindness. Someone who is sweet and understanding, who seems to be sent there like an angel on the road to get you through the nightmare.
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When an idea is idiotic to begin with, its applications never make any sense.
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One day Anton Rieder, my old crush from high school, sat down next to me. He had been fatherless since we were kids. He knew the feeling—the loss of direction, the insecurity, the premature aging. “You are still beautiful,” he said. “And you were always gallant.” “I’ve enrolled at the Consular Academy. I’m going there not because I am so eager to be a diplomat, but because they have given me a scholarship.” “But it will be wonderful for you, Anton. You will be able to travel, maybe even go to England or America.” “Come with me.” “What?” “I know you go with Pepi Rosenfeld, but believe me, he’s too smart for his own good—his brains will always get in the way of his conscience. He’s not fine enough for you. I have always been in love with you; you know that. Leave him and come with me. I have nothing. Now your father is dead, and you have nothing. We’ll be perfect together.” He reached across the library table and took my hand. He was so handsome, so earnest. For a moment, I thought: “Maybe. Why not?” And then of course all the reasons why not spilled onto the long oak table, and Anton could not fail to see them there; and like a wise young diplomat, he rose and kissed my hand and took his leave.
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By 1940, Arado had 8,000 workers; by 1944 it had 9,500. Almost thirty-five percent were foreign-born. You may ask why the Nazis would allow so many foreigners to work in a high-security company. I tell you, I really believe it was because Hitler insisted that Aryan women must be protected breeding machines whose major task was to stay home and have babies.
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ONE OF THE first things the Nazis did was to distribute 100,000 free radio sets to the Austrian Christians. Where did they get these radios? From us, of course. Right after the Anschluss, the Jews were required to turn in their typewriters and their radios, the idea being that if we could not communicate with each other or the outside world, we would be isolated and more easily terrorized and manipulated. It was a good idea. It worked well.
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Mama had a decayed tooth that was killing her. Our Jewish dentist was no longer allowed to practice, but with Pepi’s help, Mama found an Aryan dentist who would pull the tooth. He wanted gold. Mama gave him a gold chain. He wanted more. She gave him another. He wanted more. She gave him her last. Three gold chains for one tooth.
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Baron Louis de Rothschild, one of the wealthiest Jewish men in Vienna, tried to leave the city. The Nazis stopped him at the airport and put him in prison, and whatever they did to him there convinced him that he ought to sign over everything to the Nazi regime. Then they let him leave. The SS took over the Rothschild Palace on Prinz Eugenstrasse and renamed it the Center for Jewish Emigration.
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Did the rest of the Austrians understand what was happening to the Jews? Did they understand that we were being dispossessed, that we were beginning to go hungry? By way of answer let me tell you a story. Once after the Anschluss, I was stopped by a policeman for jaywalking. He ordered me to pay a stiff fine. "But I am Jewish," I said. That was all he needed to hear to know that I was penniless and could not possibly pay, and he let me go. So you see, when they tell you that they did not realize how the Jews were being despoiled, you must never believe them. They all knew.
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Once, after the Anschluss, I was stopped by a policeman for jaywalking. He ordered me to pay a stiff fine. “But I am Jewish,” I said. That was all he needed to hear to know that I was penniless and could not possibly pay, and he let me go. So you see, when they tell you that they did not realize how the Jews were being despoiled, you must never believe them. They all knew.
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During that long terrible ride to Munich, I finally swallowed the bitter pill of my lover's rejection and poisoned myself with it. I murdered the personality I was born with and transformed myself from a butterfly back in into a caterpillar. That night I learned to seek the shadows, to prefer silence.
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You will ask how I felt about spending so much time with people who supported the Hitler regime. I will tell you that, since I had absolutely no choice in the matter, I no longer dared to think about it. To be in Germany at that time, pretending to be an Aryan, meant that you automatically socialized with Nazis. To me, they were all Nazis, whether they belonged to the party or not. For me to have made distinctions at that time—to say Hilde was a “good” Nazi and the registrar was a “bad” Nazi—would have been silly and dangerous, because the good ones could turn you in as easily and capriciously as the bad ones could save your life.
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The Nazi radio blamed us for every filthy evil thing in this world. The Nazis called us subhuman and, in the next breath, superhuman; accused us of plotting to murder them, to rob them blind; declared that they had to conquer the world to prevent us from conquering the world. The radio said that we must be dispossessed of all we owned; that my father, who had dropped dead while working, had not really worked for our pleasant flat—the leather chairs in the dining room, the earrings in my mother’s ears—that he had somehow stolen them from Christian Austria, which now had every right to take them back.
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We were taught that the French were our archenemies, that the Italians were traitors, that Austria had lost the First World War only because of a “stab in the back”—but I must tell you, we were never sure who had done the stabbing.
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You must understand that at that time, the concentration camps were prisons where opponents of the Nazi regime were detained. Von Schuschnigg was in a concentration camp; so was Bruno Bettelheim for a time. The inmates were made to work at hard labor and lived in dreadful conditions, but they often came back from these places. Not until the 1940s did the words "concentration camp" come to stand for monstrous cruelty and almost certain death. Nobody even imagined there would one day be a death camp like Auschwitz.
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Regularly the police posted notices to alert us to some activity, previously considered normal, which had now become a crime. Going to a dance hall, attending the cinema, drinking a beer in a café—all became crimes for us Jews. And the worst crime of all, said Frau Fleschner, pointing to the notice, was Rassenschande, racial disgrace—specifically, sexual relations between Germans and Jews. You could go to jail for that, she said.
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Being sick never worked as an excuse at the asparagus plantation at Osterburg. For example, the pregnant girl wanted to go home. She cried and pleaded. The doctor declared her fit for work. She willfully threw up in the fields every morning. An official from the work department, stuffed into his Nazi uniform, finally gave her permission to leave, but not for home—for Poland.
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But then the Nazis arrested Uncle Richard and Aunt Roszi too. They spent six weeks in prison. To get out, they gave the Nazis everything they possessed: real estate, bank accounts, bonds, dishes, silver. Then they left immediately, heading east. Russia swallowed them. My mother waited and prayed for word of them, but none came.
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In the morning, real nurses taught us the rudiments of anatomy and instructed us in the preparation of dressings and bandages. But then in the afternoon, representatives of the Frauenschaft, the women’s auxiliary of the Nazi Party, came to instruct us in our real mission: to boost the morale of the wounded and spread the propaganda of German invincibility. “You must make sure that every single soldier in your care knows that, despite the cowardly British air attack last May, the Cologne cathedral is still standing,” said the sturdy, uniformed instructor. “You must also tell everyone that there has been no bombing in the Rhineland. Am I clear?” “Yes, ma’am,” we all said. In fact, the Rhineland was being crushed by Allied air attacks.
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They never fought. I mean it: they never fought. In the evening, she did her sewing and he read his paper and we did our homework and we had what the Israelis call shalom bait, peace in the home.
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IN A MATTER of a little more than a year, I had gone from being the most despised creature in the Third Reich—a hunted Jewish slave girl dodging a transport to Poland—to being one of its most valued citizens, a breeding Aryan housewife. People treated me with concern and respect. If they only knew who I had been! If they only knew whose new life I was breeding!
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I could not make the war seem real for myself. Even though I had heard about the Nazi bombing of cities in Spain, I couldn’t imagine an air attack on unarmed civilians. Remember, there were still horses on the roads of rural Germany at that time. Very few people understood what modern war would be like.
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You will wonder how it was possible for me to endure the same kind of “tomorrow the world” talk that had sent me running away from Hainburg. The answer is simply that I had run out of places to run away to. Surrounded by a population that had been completely sold on monstrous ideas, I simply retreated down, down, down, trying to live in imitation of the German writer Erich Kästner, whom I had always admired and who responded to the Nazi years with what was called “internal emigration.” The soul withdrew to a rational silence. The body remained there in the madness.
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On occasion, Frau Mertens, looking clean and fresh, would walk out into the fields to see how things were going. She had a colonial largesse about her. By way of greeting, she said “Heil Hitler” to us, with a smile. We would straightened up from the muddy earth and stare at her. No one said a word. She seemed disappointed.
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It's easy to be a cardinal when your cousin is the pope.