Let Me Go

A powerful memoir in which Helga Schneider describes her\nrelationship and final encounter with her mother, a former SS guard\nat Auschwitz-Birkenau. In 1998, Schneider is summoned to her 90\nyear-old mother’s nursing home in Vienna. The last time she has\nseen her mother is 27 years earlier. Then, she had asked her to try\non her treasured SS uniform, and wanted to give her several items\nof jewellery, the loot of holocaust victims, which Schneider\nrejected. Prior to that meeting, the last time she had seen her\nmother was in 1941, when she was four. Her mother abandoned her\nfamily in order to pursue her career with the SS. During the\nconversation in Vienna, Schneider establishes that from the women’s\ncamp at Ravensbruck, her mother had moved to Auschwitz-Birkenau\nwhere she was in charge of a “correction” unit where brutal torture\nwas administered. She was also involved with gas chambers and\nlethal injections. She was close to the highest echelons of Nazi\npower and knew all the details of Nazi atrocities, which she\nconsidered, and still considers, to be legitimate. Her mother\ncontinues to regard her former prisoners as the sub-human inferiors\npredicated by Nazi ideology. Without self-pity, Helga Schneider\nskillfully interweaves her family history into the interview with\nher mother, describing her difficult upbringing and the raising of\nher own child against the background of the reality of her mother’s\npast. From the Hardcover edition.

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