Helpful Score: 3
Short but powerful memoir. Helga Schneider's mother abandoned her family in 1941 to join the Nazis and was a prison guard in the camps. You can feel Helga's pain, shame, love and loathing. Difficult to read, but riveting.
Helpful Score: 2
This is a very interesting true story. The woman who wrote it is a journalist living in Italy; she finds out that her aged mother, who left the family when the author was a young girl, was a Nazi SS guard in the concentration camps.
This is memoir of Helga Schneider who was abandoned by her German mother in Berlin in 1941. As a young adult she relocated her mother and visited once; she learned that her mother had left her family behind to serve in the SS. Nearly thirty more years passed before she visited her mother again. Her mother was 87 and unrepentant about her role as a guard at Auschwitz. Let Me Go is the account of that meeting, as Helga tries to understand her mother and what happened to her.
The subject is not easy, and none of the characters are particularly lovable. What makes this audiobook 4 stars is the work of reader extraordinaire Barbara Rosenblat. She makes every character live and breathe.
The subject is not easy, and none of the characters are particularly lovable. What makes this audiobook 4 stars is the work of reader extraordinaire Barbara Rosenblat. She makes every character live and breathe.
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.
