PHILADELPHIA (JTA) — A former Reagan Cabinet member helped create a satisfying ending to a Holocaust survivor’s story.
Early on a recent morning, Drew Lewis, former transportation secretary for President Reagan, was flying from Philadelphia to Fort Worth, Texas, when he read a story in the New York Times about Edith Hahn.
The story explained that Hahn, an 83-year-old Jew who now lives in Netanya, Israel, was putting her personal letters and photographs from World War II up for auction at Sotheby’s of London.
According to the Times, Hahn had wanted to donate the material to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, but reluctantly decided to auction her personal archives because she needed money for two cataract operations.
Lewis — who is not Jewish — thought of his friend Dalck Feith, who also escaped from the Nazis. Feith, a member of the executive committee and board of the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia, was born in Austria and lost his whole family, except for one sister.
Lewis called Feith and asked if he would split the bidding price at the auction.
Feith agreed. “I didn’t care if it cost me a million dollars,” Feith said. “I already gave a million dollars to the [U.S.] Holocaust [Memorial] Museum, so I could give another million.”
A member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council for 10 years, Feith is a founder of the museum and was instrumental in bringing to Philadelphia the first Holocaust monument on public property. Lewis also contributed to the museum.
The auction house estimated that the sale of Hahn’s collection would bring a top figure of $34,000. But Lewis found himself in the midst of an intense bidding war among literary agents and film producers.
Lewis and Feith reportedly won out with a bid of $169,250. The two immediately said they were donating the collection to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.
Hahn’s collection of more than 250 letters and papers, including photographs, details her survival.
According to reports, Hahn was born in Vienna to assimilated Jewish parents. Her father died in 1936.
Hahn was training as a lawyer when Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938. She and her mother were forced into the Jewish ghetto in Vienna.
She exchanged letters with her closest friend, later her fiancé, Joseph Rosenfeld, whom she called “Pepi.”
They exchanged love letters when she was sent by the Germans to work on a farm. During her five months there, she took pictures of forced laborers in the field.
By October 1941, she was working in a paper factory near Leipzig. Her mother died in a concentration camp in 1942.
Ordered to report for resettlement, which meant deportation to Auschwitz, Hahn went underground in Vienna. A non-Jewish friend supplied her with identity papers, which Hahn used to escape to Munich, Germany.
In August 1942, she met and married Werner Vetter, a member of the Nazi Party.
In 1944, as the war turned against the Germans, Hahn fled with her infant daughter to the countryside. Vetter was drafted into the German army, captured by the Russians and sent to Siberia.
After the war, Hahn became a judge in the Soviet zone of Germany, but fled to Britain when the Russians wanted her to spy for them. She and Vetter later divorced.
In 1957 in London, she married Vienna refugee Fred Beer. Before Beer died in 1984, they visited Pepi and retrieved the letters.