CNN - Review: 'The Nazi Officer's Wife'

(CNN) -- Those of us who did not witness the Holocaust sometimes have trouble appreciating just how deeply it affected life in Europe during the 1930s and 40s. As Nazi Germany extended its tendrils across the continent, entire populations were uprooted, displaced and destroyed.

"The Nazi Officer's Wife" isn't about all those people. It's about one.

Edith Hahn was a 24-year-old law student in Vienna when the Nazis closed their grip on Austria. She was bright and attractive. She was involved in the great political debates of the day. She was in love. Her future was unfolding like a glittering carpet before her. Then it was gone. With the Nazis in power, Edith no longer had a future. She was stripped of it because she was a Jew.

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Six years later, not only was Edith still alive, she was living the life of a middle-class German hausfrau, tending to her young daughter while her husband was serving as an officer in the German Army on the Russian front. She had given up her entire identity, had discarded all hope of seeing her family again, and had become what was called a "U-boat" -- she was a Jew submerged in Nazi Germany, masquerading as a loyal Aryan daughter of the Fatherland.

Edith survived when millions of other Jews were exterminated. What does that make her? In "The Nazi Officer's Wife," it becomes clear that she doesn't consider herself heroic. She does consider herself immensely fortunate, even blessed, to have lived through the horror of Hitler-era Germany.

Edith Hahn Beer tells her story of survival in an understated tone that makes her ordeal seem all the more harrowing. Today, we might have trouble understanding the position she was in. If anyone around her had discovered her true identity, she would have died instantly and excruciatingly. Never for a moment did she forget that. Not even at the moment her daughter was born. Edith worked as a Red Cross nurse and had heard women blurt out their most intimate secrets under anesthesia. When her time came, she refused drugs, opting for "natural" childbirth seven years before Dr. Lamaze introduced the concept to Western Europe.

Beer describes her younger self in Vienna as a rather starry-eyed dreamer who dared seek the university education usually reserved for young men. Her vision cleared quickly and dramatically once the Nazis took over her school. She reported for her final examination, which she needed to pass in order to practice law. A clerk informed her flatly she would not take the exam, she was no longer welcome in the school and she should get out. Five years of studies, up in smoke. "She turned her back on me," Beer writes. "I could feel her sense of triumph, her genuine satisfaction in destroying my life. It had a smell, I tell you -- like sweat, like lust."

It was the first of many hard lessons Edith Hahn Beer would learn as her world crumbled around her and a new, hostile one rose in its place. In the end, however, she expresses little bitterness over the hand fate dealt her. She didn't set out to dupe the Nazi war machine. It just worked out that way. She doesn't mask her scorn for the Germans and Austrians who stood by idly as the Holocaust unfolded. But she also doesn't overlook small acts of kindness that helped ease her own suffering.

"The Nazi Officer's Wife" could have been a flashy book filled with high drama and brimming over with grand emotion. That it isn't provides a reflection of the person telling the story. Edith Hahn Beer never wanted to be clever or brave, famous or notorious. She just wanted to stay alive.

L.D. Meagher is a senior writer at CNN Headline News. He has worked in broadcasting for 30 years.

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