Let Me Go

by H Schneider (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2004

  $3.38

  In 1998, Helga Schneider, in her sixties, was summoned from Italy to the nursing home in Vienna in which her 90-year-old mother lived. The last time she had seen her mother was 27 years earlier, when her mother asked her daughter to try on the SS uniform which she treasures, and tried to give her several items of jewellery, the loot of holocaust victims, which Schneider rejected. Prior to that, the last time they had seen each other was in 1941 (when Schneider was 4 and her brother 19 months old), when Fr Schnider abandoned her family in order to pursue her career as an SS officer. As their conversation continues, Schneider establishes that from the Nazi women's camp at Ravensbruck, her mother moved to Auschwitz-Birkenau where she was in charge of a 'correction' unit where brutal torture was administered. Her mother not only remains uncontrite, but continues to regard her former prisoners as the sub-human inferiors of Nazi ideology. Helga Schneider's extraordinary, frank account is desperately sad and extremely powerful.

• Used

  Paperback
  2005

  $3.24

  When Helga Schneider was four, her mother, Traudi, abandoned her to pursue her career. In 1998, Helga received a letter asking her to visit Traudi, now 90-years old, before she dies. Mother and daughter have met only once after Traudi left, on a disastrous visit where Helga first learnt the terrible secret of her mother's past. Traudi was as an extermination guard in Auschwitz and Ravensbruck and was involved in Nazi 'medical' experiments on prisoners. She has never expressed even the slightest remorse for her actions, yet Helga still hopes that at this final meeting she will find some way to forgive her mother.