Edith Hahn Beer Quotes
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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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In these German facilities alone, one million seven hundred fifteen thousand Jews were murdered from April 15, 1942, up until April 15, 1944.
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You see, even the inhuman ones were not always inhuman. This was a lesson that I would learn again and again—how completely unpredictable individuals could be when it came to personal morality.
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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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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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The trouble with these Nazis is that they have no self-critical faculty, so in their efforts to achieve greatness, they achieve nothing but a parody of greatness. Caesar conquered nations, took their leaders captive, picked their brains, and so enriched his empire. Hitler will burn down nations, torture their leaders to death, and destroy the world.
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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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I think my father knew how to be Jewish, but he didn't teach us. He must have thought we would absorb it with our mother's milk.
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I think that every time you hurt somebody you care for, a crack appears in your relationship, a little weakening—and it stays there, dangerous, waiting for the next opportunity to open up and destroy everything.
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I didn't think about it at the time, but of course now I realize that my father's insistence that we Jews must be better was based on our country's firm belief that we were not as good.
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Berta, whose boyfriend had walked so far to see her, went out without her star and was immediately arrested and sent to a concentration camp.
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It quickly became apparent that the Germans were interested in using our strength but not in preserving it. We received a ration of “flower coffee”—made not from coffee beans but from flowers, or maybe acorns. We each had half a loaf of bread, which had to last us from Sunday to Wednesday. At midday, we had a cold soup made from broken asparagus that couldn’t be sold, or a mustard soup with potatoes, and maybe a hard-boiled egg. At night, we had a milk soup; on lucky days, it contained some oatmeal.
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I am like Dante, I walk through hell, but I am not burning.
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No country wanted to pay for our rescue, including the United States. The dictator of the Dominican Republic, Trujillo, took a few Jews, thinking they might help bring some prosperity to his tiny, impoverished country. I have heard that they did.
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Alex Robichek had survived their Italian exile; that Uncle Richard and Aunt Roszi were safe in Sacramento.
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She brought forth a piece of wood into which she had burned a French saying which our friend Franz had used to cheer us, in Osterburg: La vie est belle, et elle commence demain. “Life is beautiful, and it begins tomorrow."
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Around four o’clock, when our bosses were having tea, the forewoman bumped me with her bony hip. This was a sign that she would take over for fifteen minutes while I went on a break. Every day she gave one of us a break like that. There was no more “reason” for her kindness than for the cruelty of the camp commander who had slapped Trude. It was the individuals who made their own rules in this situation. No one forced them to behave in an unkind manner. The opportunity to act decently toward us was always available to them. Only the tiniest number of them ever used it.
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You know, we have moments of passion when we are in pain. And then of course the moment ends, and with it the passion and the pain, and we forgive and forget. But I think that every time you hurt somebody that you care for, a crack appears in your relationship, a little weakening - and it stays there, dangerous, waiting for the next opportunity to open up and destroy everything.
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You must remind me: “Edith! Speak up! Tell the story.” It has been more than half a century. I suppose it is time.
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All the Jews of Polish origin were being sent back to the land of their forefathers, and so the two gentle sisters kissed us and packed and left. We sent them packages in care of the Jewish community in Warsaw, but of course the packages were returned because it was illegal to send anything to Jews. So we took the advice of a wily neighbor, wrote the address in Polish, and like magic the packages arrived.
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It was getting to be the end of the day. The sun was somehow setting again. A man could stand in the street and tell a perfect stranger a story of such incomprehensible evil that it really seemed as if the sun should stop shining altogether. But there was no alteration in Heaven, no sign that the cries of children had been heard.
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I signed their paper. It was a contract obligating me to spend six weeks doing farmwork in the north of Germany. If I didn’t show up at the train station tomorrow, the paper said, I would be treated as a wanted criminal and hunted down without mercy.
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One class. No masters. No slaves. No black. No white. No Jew. No Christian. One race-- The human race.
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But I think that every time you hurt somebody you care for, a crack appears in your relationship, a little weakening - and it stays there, dangerous, waiting for the next opportunity to open up and destroy everything.