Let Me Go - Hardcover

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.

Helga Schneider, born in 1937 in Steinberg, now in Poland, spent her childhood in Berlin. When her mother left the family in 1941 to become a concentration camp guard, Helga Schneider was brought up first by her stepmother, and then in boarding-schools. Since 1963 she has lived as a freelance writer in Bologna.