Let Me Go - Softcover

Schneider, Helga

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143035177 ISBN 13: 9780143035176

Publisher: Penguin Books, 2005

Synopsis

Unforgettable and deeply arresting, Let Me Go is a haunting memoir of World War II that “won’t let you go until you’ve finished reading the last page” (The Washington Post Book World). In 1941, in Berlin, Helga Schneider’s mother abandoned her along with her father and younger brother. Let Me Go recounts Helga’s final meeting with her ailing mother in a Vienna nursing home some sixty years after World War II, in which Helga confronts a nightmare: her mother’s lack of repentance about her past as a Nazi SS guard at concentration camps, including Auschwitz, where she was responsible for untold acts of torture. With spellbinding detail, Schneider recalls their conversation, evoking her own struggle between a daughter’s sense of obligation and the inescapable horror of her mother’s deeds.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

The extraordinary memoir, praised across Europe, of a daughter's final encounter with her mother, a former SS guard at Auschwitz.
 
In 1941, in Berlin, Helga Schneider's mother abandoned her, her younger brother, and her father. Thirty years later-- when she saw her mother again for the first time-- Schneider discovered the shocking reason: Her mother had joined the Nazi SS and had become a guard in concentration camps, including Auschwitz-Birkenau and Ravensbrück, where she was in charge of a "correction" unit and responsible for untold acts of torture.
 
Nearly three more decades would pass before their second and final reunion, an emotional encounter at a Vienna nursing home, where her mother, then eighty-seven and unrepentant about her past, was ailing. Let Me Go is an extraordinary account of that meeting. Their conversation-- which Schneider recounts in spellbinding detail-- triggers childhood memories, and she weaves these into her account, powerfully evoking the misery of Nazi and postwar Berlin. Yet it is her internal struggle-- a daughter's sense of obligation colliding with the inescapable horror of what her mother has done-- that will stay with readers long after the book has ended.
 
Helga Schneider was born in 1937 in Steinberg, now in Poland, and spent her childhood in Berlin. When her mother left the family, she was brought up first by her stepmother and then in a boarding school. She has lived as a freelance writer for many years in Bologna, Italy.

From the Back Cover:

Praise for Let Me Go
 
"For the duration of these pages, the old, mad Germany that we had thought dead comes to life again."-- J. M. Coetzee
 
"This stunning, profoundly evocative memoir is a bridge across time directly into the ongoing agonies of our confused, violent, searching hearts. A triumph of vivid art and emotional courage."-- Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of Eleanor Roosevelt, Volumes 1 and 2
 
"Schneider packs a tremendous emotional punch into this brief but tremendously cathartic memoir."-- Booklist (starred review)
 
"The simple certainty of Schneider's pain, strength and intricate emotions resounds well after this story ends."-- Publishers Weekly

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0143035177
• ISBN 13: 9780143035176
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192