The Evil That Surrounds Us

Description

In 1931, Gustav Becker and Erna Kohen married. He was Catholic and she was Jewish. Erna and Gustav had no idea their religious affiliations, which mattered so little to them, would define their marriage under the Nazis. As one of the more than 20,000 German Jews married to an "Aryan" spouse, Erna was initially exempt from the most radical anti-Jewish measures. However, even after Erna willingly converted to Catholicism, the persecution, isolation, and hatred leveled against them by the Nazi regime and their Christian neighbors intensified, and she and their son Silvan were forced to flee alone into the mountains. Through intimate and insightful diary entries, Erna tells her own compelling and horrifying story and reflects on the fortunate escapes and terrible tragedies of her friends and family. The Nazis would exact steep payment for Erna's survival: her home, her family, and ultimately her faithful husband's life. The Evil That Surrounds Us reveals both the great evil of Nazi Germany and the powerful love and courage of her husband, friends, and strangers who risked everything to protect her.

Introduction
Diary of Erna Becker-Kohen
Epilogue
Afterword

Sujets

• Personal Memoirs
• 20th Century
• Modern
• Holocaust
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Segunda Guerra Mundial
• The Holocaust
• Biography
• Modern history
• Memoir
• World War II
• Nazi Germany
• History of Europe
• Catholic
• Germany
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf
• Holocauste
• Seconde Guerre mondiale
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 12 septembre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253029904
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Evil That Surrounds Us
The Evil
That Surrounds Us
THE WWII MEMOIR OF ERNA BECKER-KOHEN
EDITED AND TRANSLATED BY
KEVIN P. SPICER AND MARTINA CUCCHIARA
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
This book is a publication of
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2017 by Esther-Maria N gele
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Becker-Kohen, Erna, 1906-1987, author. | Spicer, Kevin P., 1965- editor, translator. | Cucchiara, Martina, editor, translator.
Title: The evil that surrounds us : the WWII memoir of Erna Becker-Kohen / edited and translated by Kevin P. Spicer and Martina Cucchiara.
Description: Bloomington : Indiana University Press, [2017]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017029275 (print) | LCCN 2017035159 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253029904 (e-book) | ISBN 9780253029577 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253029867 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Becker-Kohen, Erna, 1906-1987. | Jews-Germany-History-1933-1945-Biography. | Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)-Germany-Personal narratives. | World War, 1939-1945-Personal narratives, Jewish. | Jews-Germany-Diaries. | Germany-Biography.
Classification: LCC DS134.42.B424 (ebook) | LCC DS134.42.B424 A3 2017 (print) | DDC 940.53/18092 [B] -dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017029275
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Contents
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
The Memoir of Erna Becker-Kohen
Epilogue by Erna Becker-Kohen
AFTERWORD BY
ESTHER-MARIA N GELE
Acknowledgments
WE WOULD LIKE TO THANK THE MANY INDIVIDUALS AND IN stitutions that have assisted us in the compilation of the memoir of Erna Becker-Kohen. First and foremost, we are grateful to Erna s granddaughter, Esther-Maria N gele, and her husband, Matthias N gele, for trusting us with this project and for their tireless assistance as we completed the work. We thank Dee Mortensen and Robert Sloan, our editors at Indiana University Press, as well as our anonymous readers for their kind and constructive feedback. Ilse Andrews and James William Chichetto, C.S.C., offered helpful suggestions on style and prose. Bluffton University Research Center and the Office of Academic Affairs of Stonehill College provided valuable financial support. We are also indebted to the many archivists, scholars, librarians, and local historians who have responded to our numerous inquiries, especially Anne Alsheimer, Elizabeth Anthony, Timothy V. Bender, Berta Birzele, Rudolf Brodkborb, Suzanne Brown-Fleming, Ron Coleman, Michael Cucchiara, Martin Dean, Michael Fliri, Amy Houston, Mary Jean Johnson, Martin Kapferer, Susanne Kaup, Gotthard Klein, Brigitte Kl pf, Sabine Kr -Tunner, Susanne Lamsouguer, Kassian Lauterer, O.Cist., Angela Martin, J rgen Matth us, Frank Mecklenburg, Johannes Mertens, Thomas Mitterecker, Lukas Morscher, Erwin Naimer, Audra Oglesbee, Heather Perry, Bertold P lcher, Katharina Rumpf, Brigitte Schneider, Vincent Slatt, Kathrin Tannheimer, Martina Wagner, Andrea Widauer, J rgen Wolf, and Hildegard Zellinger-Kratzl.
The Evil That Surrounds Us

Locations of Erna and Silvan Becker s flight in the 1940s. Map created by Barry Levely.
Introduction
ON JULY 3, 1931, GUSTAV BECKER AND ERNA KOHEN MARRIED . Gustav was thirty, Erna twenty-five. Photographs of Erna from the 1920s depict a vivacious young woman whose pretty face showed no trace of the strain and solemnity that marked her features in later years. But even then, all was not well. Gustav and Erna married during the Great Depression, and we do not know if the economic misery and political instability that was menacing Germany at the time was already casting a shadow over the couple s happiness. Perhaps Gustav and Erna resolutely banished all gloomy thoughts that day, secure in the knowledge that they were more fortunate than many, since earlier that year Gustav had found work as an engineer with the radio manufacturer Reinhardt Co. in Berlin. The newlyweds settled into comfortable bourgeois surroundings in Berlin-Treptow.
The Beckers were new to Berlin. Born in 1901, Gustav hailed from a Catholic family of civil servants in the medium-sized city of Darmstadt in southwestern Germany, where he had also completed his university studies in engineering. Erna was born in 1906 in Cologne. She was the third of five children of assimilated Jewish parents whose families had lived in Germany for generations. 1 When Erna was four years old, her father, Heinrich Kohen, moved his wife and children to Frankfurt am Main. He died soon thereafter, when Erna was only ten years old. But even in reduced circumstances, her mother, Isabella Kohen, made sure that her children received an excellent education. Erna and Gustav were thus evenly matched in class and education. According to Erna, the fact that she was Jewish and Gustav Roman Catholic posed no obstacle to their courtship and marriage. 2 In 1931, Erna and Gustav could not have known that their religious affiliations, which had mattered so little to them during their courtship, would define their marriage under Nazism.
On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany. As a Jew, Erna became an outcast overnight. As her husband, Gustav shared in Erna s bewildering experience of violence, fear, and social isolation, which engulfed Germany s Jews after January 1933.
Gustav s status as an Aryan decisively shaped Erna s experience of persecution in Nazi Germany. In 1939, Erna was one of 20,454 Jews in Germany married to an Aryan (non-Jewish German) spouse. 3 Erna and Gustav s mixed marriage was privileged, which meant that on account of her non-Jewish husband, Erna was exempt from the most radical anti-Jewish measures. 4 As of December 1938, the Nazi regime considered marriages between non-Jewish and Jewish German men and women privileged, provided couples did not raise their children in the Jewish faith. A childless mixed marriage was privileged only if the wife was Jewish and the husband Aryan. Hence, a childless marriage between a Jewish German man and a non-Jewish German woman was nonprivileged. A marriage was also considered nonprivileged if the Aryan partner, usually the wife, had converted to Judaism or, as alluded to above, if the couple raised their children in the Jewish faith. 5 Although Erna s marriage was privileged, her harrowing narrative of isolation, flight, and persecution shatters any notion of favorable treatment that the term implies. 6
The very poignancy and persuasiveness of the author s writing raise important questions about the text s creation and genre. The manuscript Erna deposited with the Leo Baeck Institute in 1976 resembles a diary in that it consists of a series of dated entries that begin in 1937 and end in 1963. 7 But the form of a diary is less important than the time of its creation. Inherent in the term diary is the expectation that the text was produced close to the day-by-day events it describes. A diarist is ignorant of the future, and her writings reflect a gradual acquisition of knowledge and shifting values that occur in life. 8 Although all telling modifies what is being told, the diarist s close proximity to events renders her account more authentic in most historians eyes. 9

Erna Kohen as a young woman. Courtesy of Esther-Maria N gele.

Erna and Gustav Becker on their wedding day in 1931. Courtesy of Esther-Maria N gele.
Holocaust memoirs, written months or years after the events in question took place, are more problematic for some scholars. There is the concern that the passage of time, coupled with the frailty of the author s memory, cannot but alter the past. Authors of memoirs further complicate the historian s task by usurping it through the imposition of certain literary conventions onto the text, such as chronology, a story line, and a narrative voice. 10 Readers of Erna s writings will quickly discern that the text s neat time line and story arc, roughly bracketed by the birth of her son Silvan in 1938 and the death of Gustav in 1952, resemble the literary format of a memoir, albeit presented in the form of a diary.
At the same time, the author s emotionally raw voice seems genuine and close at hand to her circumstances. This may be because Erna wrote her narrative in the immediate postwar period in Bregenz, Austria. 11 Perhaps she adopted the format of a diary because in writing her memoir, she did not rely just on her memory but used notes she kept on the spot throughout her ordeal. 12 The first definitive record of the memoir s existence may be found in a November 18, 1958, article in the Badische Zeitung . The article reports that Erna gave a public reading from the memoir to members and guests of the Catholic German Women s League in Freiburg im Breisgau. 13
Numerous scholars have utilized Erna s memoir in their work on Jews in Nazi Germany. 14 The editors research of persons, places, and events, discussed in the narrative and presented in extensive annotations, further strengthens the text s historic value. At the