My Wounded Heart: The Life of Lilli Jahn, 1900- 1944 - Softcover

'As heart-breaking, in its own way, as the diary of Anne Frank' Sunday Telegraph 'Martin Doerry has edited the letters with delicacy and skill ... It will be a hard-hearted reader who can finish this book dry-eyed' Sunday Times 'Though harrowing, her letters offer a moving portrait of resilience in the face of evil, and speak of a time when Germany had departed from the community of civilised human beings ... (it) is an essential document' Independent 'One of the fascinations of this remarkable, and heartbreaking, book is its presentation of history as it is authentically lived ... The intimacies and domesticities recorded in the book are enormously moving' Daily Telegraph

My Wounded Heart tells the story of a gifted Jewish doctor, the mother of five children, who, after being divorced by her Aryan husband, is arrested on an absurd charge and sent to a corrective labour camp in 1942. Lilli was a prolific letter writer and miraculously almost all her letters to her children and friends, together with a huge number of their letters to her (smuggled out of the camp at Breitenau before she was sent to Auschwitz), survived the Second World War and only came to light on the death of her son in 1998. In the letters and in Martin Doerry's superb commentary, we see the deterioration of a whole country through the eyes of an ordinary family driven asunder by pressure from the Nazi regime. We see Lilli's initial optimism and love of her husband begin to crack. We see her trying to support and run the family home from Breitenau camp, but relying totally on her twelve-year-old daughter, llse. And perhaps most moving of all, we see llse's heroic attempts to meet her mother, even though it means going into the labour camp itself, and Lilli's courage in the face of her inevitable end.