Good Book

I enjoy reading and normally will go through a couple of books every 4 -6 weeks. Since I had Little Man, I hadn't read anything until our trip. I read The Nazi Officer's Wife by Edith Hahn Beer and highly recommend it. It is non-fiction, but is written so it reads very easily. It is about the author, a Jewish woman who grew up in Austria, and how she survived the Holocaust. It was so interesting to me to see how she went from being a middle-class, popular, law student in love with her boyfriend to a slave in a labor camp, to a hunted Jew on the Gestapo's wanted list hiding underground, to the wife of a member of the Nazi party. Her husband eventually becomes an officer in the Nazi army, and she has a child by him - the only Jewish child known to be born in a Reich hospital.

World War II and all that went on during that time has always intrigued and frightened me. I have read a lot of books about this time period and about people like this woman who survived it, and I never tire of them. My favorite is The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom. I guess the Holocaust holds a morbid fascination for me because it is incomprehensible how something like that could take place. After reading accounts like this one, I still cannot imagine the burdens these people bore and the autrocities that took place. But I like to read their stories because of their triumphant spirit. I like to think that if I had to face something like that, that I would be strong enough not only to survive it, but to not let it canker me.