The Evil That Surrounds Us: The WWII Memoir of Erna Becker-Kohen by Erna Becker-Kohen (review)

With this publication, Kevin P. Spicer and Martina Cucchiara make Erna Becker-Kohen's moving account of her wartime experience as an intermarried German Jewish convert to Catholicism available to an English-speaking audience. Becker-Kohen deposited her manuscript with the Leo Baeck Institute in 1976. A German edition of her memoir was published with an epilogue in 1980. The new edition includes a translation of the memoir and the 1980 epilogue, an introduction explaining its historical context (including how mixed marriages were treated and categorized in Hitler's Germany, the Factory Action of 1943 during which Becker-Kohen was arrested, and the controversy over the actions and inactions of the Catholic hierarchy and individuals during the Holocaust), extensive notes identifying historical events and people mentioned in the text, and a heart-rending afterword by Becker-Kohen's granddaughter, Esther-Maria Nägele, telling of the tragic murder of her parents in Libya in 1994.

Becker-Kohen's memoir is written in the form of a diary, although as Spicer and Cucchiara point out, it uses the literary format of a memoir. It is truthful but not neutral, written through the lens of Christianity (4–5) while chronicling nagging doubts and uncertainty about her conversion. It begins in 1937 when the couple was expecting their first (and only) child, Silvan, and can be divided into roughly three sections: living in Berlin until 1943 in social isolation and fear, being a refugee in the formerly Austrian provinces of Tyrol and Vorarlberg chased from one small town to another, and the postwar period in which she came to terms with devastation, loss of family and home, and ultimately the death of her husband.

The memoir sheds light on the impact of the Holocaust on intermarried families. Initially Becker-Kohen's marriage protected her from economic deprivation, deportation, and certain forms of persecution—such as wearing the yellow star. However, she was not spared from the hatred and malice of her neighbors. She was met with anti-Semitism in Berlin cloisters where she sought protection and in air raid shelters; she was subjected to Gestapo searches, denied a gas mask for herself and her son, and ultimately arrested but released during the Factory Action on March 6, 1943. On the run with Silvan, she faced hostile officials; a lack of reliable food, shelter, and transportation; a harsh and unfamiliar climate and landscape; and constant illness. Her husband, as a so-called race-defiler, in 1944 was put into forced labor where he contracted tuberculosis, causing him years of pain and suffering, which ultimately cost him his life.

Becker-Kohen also hints at the way gender and motherhood figured into her experience. While motherhood added the responsibility for the well-being of her son, putting her in further danger, it also provided her with purpose, companionship, hope, and at times much-needed sympathy from strangers. She often comments on her connection with children. In April 1945, she writes that children were her greatest joy; she trusted them more than adults. She alludes to the threat of sexual violence she faced as a woman as she sought refuge at the hands of strangers and recalls her husband finding it "unmanly" to shop for food when she was subjected to limited rations and hours in which to shop. Several of her preoccupations, struggles, and experiences might be attributed to gender, as has also been shown in research on gender and the Holocaust.

The overriding message of the text is one of ambivalence. She describes her internal turmoil over her conversion, her guilt over her husband's suffering as the price of her survival, the destruction of her family and the sorrow she caused them through her conversion, and the mixed reception she and Silvan received at the hands of the local population both in Berlin and in the Alpine villages. The title...