The Nazi officer's wife - Edith Hahn Beer

Edith Hahn Beerwas 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 labour camp and when she returned home after months away she found her mother had been deported. Her boyfriend, Pepi, proved too terrified to help her, but a Christian friend was not. Using the woman's identity papers, she 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 paralysing 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 for mind she might reveal something of her past.