Answer for question 4228.

[Error: unknown template qotd]I really don't think "Career" is such a big thing, unless you work requires a specific "skill".

What I mean is, for me, as an Admin or an Assistant, "Career" isn't that big a work. Paperwork? Count on me. Supplies par stock levels? Count on me. IT has no time to come fix your PC? Come on, you could have asked me for troubleshooting first. Copier machine not working? I'm here to help. Need a reservation somewhere? I have the number to call. Your dishwasher at home is kaput? Of course I know someone to get it done. You need to bind this report? Yes, I have a bookbinder. You need someone to be at the office to serve coffee and tea over the weekend? Of course I can come, since you asked me in the last minute. You need someone to drive you to the airport? I'll command the transport fleet at work. If no one's working, I'll drive you in my own car too!

My job encompasses so many things, I guess I can probably work anywhere. I don't really have a dream job. Well, if I could, of course I'd love to work somewhere dog/animal related, or books related. But these don't pay well. I need a well-paid job so that I can go on holidays, buy books, take care of the dogs, etc....

I've actually got at least 3 job offers in the past 2 years, but I'm just not interested to change. I know my way around this company, people know me, I know people, so why jump into an all-new environment and have to go build up connections again? You may say that I'm being lazy, and maybe I am, but work is stable, pay is good, there is no need to change jobs just yet.

So, I'm here to stay for a little more.

Book: On Hitler's Mountain: Overcoming the Legacy of a Nazi Childhood

On Hitler's Mountain: Overcoming the Legacy of a Nazi Childhood
Irmgard A. Hunt
Amazon Product Link

Growing up in the beautiful mountains of Berchtesgaden -- just steps from Adolf Hitler's alpine retreat -- Irmgard Hunt had a seemingly happy, simple childhood. In her powerful, illuminating, and sometimes frightening memoir, Hunt recounts a youth lived under an evil but persuasive leader. As she grew older, the harsh reality of war -- and a few brave adults who opposed the Nazi regime -- aroused in her skepticism of National Socialist ideology and the Nazi propaganda she was taught to believe in.

In May 1945, an eleven-year-old Hunt watched American troops occupy Hitler's mountain retreat, signaling the end of the Nazi dictatorship and World War II. As the Nazi crimes began to be accounted for, many Germans tried to deny the truth of what had occurred; Hunt, in contrast, was determined to know and face the facts of her country's criminal past.

On Hitler's Mountain is more than a memoir -- it is a portrait of a nation that lost its moral compass. It is a provocative story of a family and a community in a period and location in history that, though it is fast becoming remote to us, has important resonance for our own time.


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I'm feeling neutral about this book. Where I disliked the way it was written (sporadic references in German, with an immediate translation in English, but then after the same word pops up again without translation... and yes, I've already forgotten what it meant). In the first half of the book, the author kept jumping from calling her mom Mutti to her name (I forgot) and made it a little hard to follow.

Just as how there are parts I disliked the book, there are also elements that I liked a lot. This is a different view of the time of the war. Despite all the anti-Semitism and the propaganda of "making life better for Germans/Aryans" the general population also suffered. I'm not saying I like the suffering. It's just that a lot of focus has been put in the Jew stories, and well, this is war. I don't think life was rosy for the German population at that time. This showed that yes, people had a hard time too.

I'm impressed that her Mom, despite buying into Hitler's propaganda, was steadfast in not believing the whole "Jews are vermin" thing. The Mom forbade the kid to read that nation-published health book (stating Jews had blah blah blah problems and diseases), and also forbade her to tag along the other kids to bad-mouth the import workers.

And that is what makes me even more curious about why the people of Germany at that time bought Hitler so much. I know he is a good speaker, but there must have been a time when, I don't know, things just proved to be too much, and yet, they still believed him...

Book: The Nazi Officer's Wife

The Nazi Officer's Wife: How One Jewish Woman Survived The Holocaust
Edith Hahn Beer, Susan Dworkin
Amazon Product Link

Edith Hahn was an outspoken young woman studying law in Vienna when the Gestapo forced Edith and her mother into a ghetto, issuing them papers branded with a "J." Soon, Edith was taken away to a labor camp, and though she convinced Nazi officials to spare her mother, when she returned home, her mother had been deported. Knowing she would become a hunted woman, Edith tore the yellow star from her clothing and went underground, scavenging for food and searching each night for a safe place to sleep. Her boyfriend, Pepi, proved too terrified to help her, but a Christian friend was not: With the woman's identity papers in hand, Edith fled to Munich. There she met Werner Vetter, a Nazi party member who fell in love with her. And despite her protests and even her eventual confession that she was Jewish, he married her and kept her identity secret.
In vivid, wrenching detail, Edith recalls a life of constant, almost paralyzing fear. She tells of German officials who casually questioned the lineage of her parents; of how, when giving birth to her daughter, she refused all painkillers, afraid that in an altered state of mind she might reveal her past; and of how, after her husband was captured by the Russians and sent to Siberia, Edith was bombed out of her house and had to hide in a closet with her daughter while drunken Russians soldiers raped women on the street.
Yet despite the risk it posed to her life, Edith Hahn created a remarkable collective record of survival: She saved every set of real and falsified papers, letters she received from her lost love, Pepi, and photographs she managed to take inside labor camps.
On exhibit at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., these hundreds of documents form the fabric of an epic story - complex, troubling, and ultimately triumphant.


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It has been some time since I read this book, so I don't quite remember the details.

I do remember being utterly impressed with Edith. That, is survival. To have to "Lie with the enemy", to live with the enemy.

She must have had such a nervous and scary time.

This, also raised many questions in my mind - it meant that at that time, many of the German officials or government workers also weren't that heartless - they just had to do what they were told. Yet, in some small act or another, they managed to help.

As for the side story of her husband, the Nazi Officer, I can only say two words: Meh, men.

That holier-than-thou attitude, that I'm-the-man-you-woman-should-work-at-home-do-the-dishes-and-the-laundry mentality. Good riddance when he left.