Gretel Beer

Who is Gretel Beer?

Gretel Beer was an Austrian-born English author of cooking books and travel reports. She also served as the Women's Page Editor for The Daily Telegraph.

Baer was born into a Jewish family as Margaret Weidenfeld. She was mostly raised by her aunt Olga Springer the widow of a physician, as her mother Regina Pisk died when Margaret was five years old and her father, Duny Weidenfeld, did not keep up a household. After attending primary school at Marchegg, a small town east of Vienna near the border with Slovakia, she attended a federal Realschule at Vereinsgasse in Vienna's 2nd district, where many Jewish Viennese lived.

In the spring of 1938, after the annexation of Austria by Germany, she and 48 other pupils were forced to leave this school and attend a Jewish class somewhere else in Vienna. At the entrance hall of her school, which is now called Bundesrealgymnasium Vereinsgasse, since 1989 the names of the expelled pupils are displayed on a memorial inscription.