In 1941 in Berline, Helga Schneider's mother bandoned 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 Ravensbruck, where hse 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 87, was ailing. LET ME GO is the 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.
Nearly three more decades would pass before their second and final reunion, an emotional encounter at a Vienna nursing home where her mother, then 87, was ailing. LET ME GO is the 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.
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