TOW #4 - "The Nazi Officer's Wife"

The Nazi Officer's Wife started off with a bang, and Edith Hahn Beer in no way decreased her efforts throughout the first half of the story. It started off with her working in a German hospital as a young nurse pretending to be 21 instead of her 29-year-old self. She is hiding her real identity, which is an Austrian Jew and a certified lawyer. If the Germans were to get any idea that she was intelligent and/or a Jew, she would die. It was so interesting to horrifying to hear her fears, and she emphasized these through the use of juxtaposition. After the initial pages about her current life as a nurse and her secret identity, she described her childhood in Austria. Edith (called Grete in Germany) lived her life with loving parents, horrible sisters, and an occasional religion. She didn't really go to synagogue but she loved her life. Edith had many friends, boys were interested in her, and school came very easily to her. This was drastically different to her current life which consisted of being a complete different person and as she liked to call it, "hiding in plain sight." This juxtaposition between her two unique lives really depicts the struggle that she is facing right now and how hard it was for her to adjust to this new lifestyle. I think Edith Hahn Beer's main purpose in writing this story is to show the war from a completely new perspective. Yes, it's about Jewish people during the Holocaust, but it's not about concentration camps or many people dying. She wants to show that it wasn't just the outcasts, or what the Germans considered as those people, being taken out of their homes. There were some people that were in Germany fearing for their lives, and taking so many risks.