Top 35 Edith Hahn Beer Quotes
#2. We were sent to the Judengottesdienst, the children's service at the synagogue on Saturday afternoons. The maid was supposed to take us. But she was a Catholic, like most Austrians, and she feared the synagogue; and my mother - a working woman, dependent on her help - feared the maid.
Edith Hahn Beer
#3. 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.
Edith Hahn Beer
#4. Cowardly thoughts, anxious hesitation, Womanish timidity, timorous complaints Won't keep misery away from you And will not set you free.
Edith Hahn Beer
#5. That's all it takes, you see
a moment of kindness. Someone who is sweet and understanding, who seems to be sent there like an angel on the road to get you through the nightmare.
Edith Hahn Beer
#6. 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.
Edith Hahn Beer
#7. Understand now that everything was done so that the Germans would never see us; or, if they saw us, would not have to admit it; or, if they had to admit it, would be able to say that we looked fine and would never be irritated by a sense of guilt or pricked by a moment of compassion.
Edith Hahn Beer
#8. Alex Robichek had survived their Italian exile; that Uncle Richard and Aunt Roszi were safe in Sacramento.
Edith Hahn Beer
#9. The soul withdrew to a rational silence. The body remained there in the madness.
Edith Hahn Beer
#10. Even now, I have to smile when I think of this. I tell you, of all the things about Werner Vetter that appealed to me, this most of all warmed my heart: He had no respect for the truth in Nazi Germany.
Edith Hahn Beer
#11. 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.
Edith Hahn Beer
#12. The high-strung Frieda made the mistake of telling Frau Fleschner that she had a toothache. She was taken to a dentist. He pulled ten of her teeth! After one day, they put her back in the fields, spitting blood. She was twenty-one years old.
Edith Hahn Beer
#13. They wanted to know, you see. They were afraid that with our typical Austrian faces, we might be able to pass. They didn't want to be fooled. Even then, in the 1920s, they wanted to be able to tell who was a Jew.
Edith Hahn Beer
#14. The farmers had grown proud and haughty. They ate better than anyone else in Germany now. And, like Volkswagen and Siemens, they had slaves. All they had to do was feed the local Nazi power elite, and they could have all the slaves they wanted.
Edith Hahn Beer
#15. Obituary for Edith Hahn Beer from the Times (UK) This obituary was published in the March 26, 2009, edition of the London Times. Reprinted with permission of the Times, London. EDITH HAHN-BEER escaped probable extermination as a Jew in wartime Germany by assuming a
Edith Hahn Beer
#16. One class. No masters. No slaves. No black. No white. No Jew. No Christian. One race
The human race.
Edith Hahn Beer
#17. When an idea is idiotic to begin with, its applications never make any sense.
Edith Hahn Beer
#18. When Frieda, Trude, Lucy, and I walked to work, the German children hooted at us: "Jewish swine!" In town, the shopkeepers would not even sell us a beer. I wrote to Mama that Osterburg was a friendly town.
Edith Hahn Beer
#19. 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.
Edith Hahn Beer
#20. I thought: Now I am like Dante. I walk through hell, but I am not burning.
Edith Hahn Beer
#21. Colluded with German communists to build a secret radio and send messages to the Allies. In addition to his endless work week, Werner also had
Edith Hahn Beer
#22. The city people call us shit farmers," Otto sneered, "but now
Edith Hahn Beer
#24. We heard that girls who had left to get married were being deported with their husbands. A girl who had a love affair with a French prisoner was sent to a concentration camp, and the Frenchman was executed.
Edith Hahn Beer
#25. We were taught that the French were our archenemies, that the Italians were traitors, that Austria had lost the First World War only because of a "stab in the back" - but I must tell you, we were never sure who had done the stabbing.
Edith Hahn Beer
#26. He disliked wearing his uniform and always changed out of it right away when he came home. Symbols of authority irritated him - unless the authority was his own.
Edith Hahn Beer
#27. 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.
Edith Hahn Beer
#28. Breathed the air of freedom. My disguise became history.
Edith Hahn Beer
#29. They had been harboring a hatred for us which we had grown accustomed to calling "prejudice." What a gentle word that was! What a euphemism!
Edith Hahn Beer
#30. 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.
Edith Hahn Beer
#31. My father, who had dropped dead while working, had not really worked for our pleasant flat - the
Edith Hahn Beer
#33. Often, the teachers would ask me what language we spoke at home. This was a not-so-subtle way of discovering if we spoke Yiddish (which we didn't) and were therefore Jewish (which we were).
Edith Hahn Beer
#35. You must remind me: "Edith! Speak up! Tell the story." It has been more than half a century. I suppose it is time.
Edith Hahn Beer
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