This is my last post on it The Wife of a Nazi Officer: How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust. (The first three are here, here, and here.)
Sometimes what Edith Hahn Beer calls “personal behavior” comes as:
Frieda, a girl who had lost ten teeth, began to cry: “Why is asparagus more important than people.” [DRH note: Frieda and the author were among the slave laborers on a German asparagus farm.] Why do we live at all when the whole purpose of our existence is such misery?”
The overseer, miraculously moved by his outburst, let’s go back to the house.
You see, even those without humanity were always cruel. This was a lesson I would learn again and again—how completely predictable people can be when it comes to personal behavior.
German officer Werner falls in love with her and remains in love even when he finds out she is Jewish. But she’s not a good cook and she lies to him about that.
Of course, this was a bald-faced lie. To understand Werner Vetter, remember that it was perfectly possible for me to tell him that I was a Jew in Germany during the Nazi regime, but it was necessary for me to lie about being a good cook.
By lying to get rare assignments:
“Listen, Grete,” he said [Werner] said. “If you go to the pharmacy to look for special baby formula, don’t be surprised if they treat you like a sad heroine. Because to tell you the truth, I lied to them. I told them that you have already buried three children, so they should give you milk so that your fourth child will not enter forever.”
Even now, I have to smile when I think about this. I tell you, of all the things about Werner Vetter that attracted me, this warmed me the most: He had no respect for the truth in Nazi Germany.
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