Helga Schneider was four when her mother abandoned her family in Berlin in 1941. When she next saw her mother thirty years later, she learned why: Her mother had joined the SS and had become a guard in concentration camps, including Auschwitz. Nearly thirty more years would pass before their second and last reunion in Vienna, where her eighty-seven-year-old mother, ailing and unrepentant, lived in a nursing home. Let Me Go recounts their final meeting and conversation, evoking the misery of obligation colliding with the horror of what the author's mother has done.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.