Beran Christa (Denner)

Beran, Christa Vienna-born Christa Denner (later Beran) had a special relationship with one of her neighbors, Edith Hahn, a Jewish student who was employed as a private teacher for Christa and her sister. After the Nazi annexation of Austria, Hahn was sent to labor camps in East Germany. In June 1942 Hahn received orders to return to Vienna and report to the offices of the Gestapo. As two weeks previously, many of the Jews of Vienna, including Hahn’s mother, had been sent to concentration camps, she knew that she was about to face a similar fate. Therefore, Hahn returned to Vienna but went underground, sheltered in a series of hiding places by a number of friends including Denner. As the war progressed, the situation became more difficult. Without food-ration cards, Denner and her friends were having trouble providing for Hahn. One of these friends put Hahn in contact with a friend of hers, a member of the SA, who suggested a way by which Hahn could obtain a forged Aryan identity. In July 1942, Denner gave Hahn her own identity papers of and food ration cards. Denner then went to the police to report that she lost these documents. Hahn traveled to Germany under her new identity and settled in a village near Munich. Denner endangered herself by hiding a Jew, and by providing documents that allowed a Jew to live under a false identity. These were crimes that could have led to expulsion to a concentration camp, and eventually, to death. She received no compensation for her actions. Hahn lived under this false identity for years, marrying a German man and moving together with him to his hometown of Brandenburg/Havel, where she gave birth to a daughter. Only when the war was over did Hahn reveal to her husband her true identity. They soon divorced, and in 1948 – after East Germany became a communist regime – she moved to England. On June 4, 1985, Yad Vashem recognized Christa Beran (née Denner) as Righteous Among the Nations.