Helga Schneider

Il rogo di Berlino

Let Me Go

Lasciami andare, madre

Laß mich gehen. Roman.

A powerful memoir in which Helga Schneider describes her relationship and final encounter with her mother, a former SS guard at Auschwitz-Birkenau. In 1998, Schneider is summoned to her 90 year-old mother’s nursing home in Vienna. The last time she has seen her mother is 27 years earlier. Then, she had asked her to try on her treasured SS uniform, and wanted to give her several items of jewellery, the loot of holocaust victims, which Schneider rejected. Prior to that meeting, the last time she had seen her mother was in 1941, when she was four. Her mother abandoned her family in order to pursue her career with the SS. During the conversation in Vienna, Schneider establishes that from the women’s camp at Ravensbruck, her mother had moved to Auschwitz-Birkenau where she was in charge of a “correction” unit where brutal torture was administered. She was also involved with gas chambers and lethal injections. She was close to the highest echelons of Nazi power and knew all the details of Nazi atrocities, which she considered, and still considers, to be legitimate. Her mother continues to regard her former prisoners as the sub-human inferiors predicated by Nazi ideology. Without self-pity, Helga Schneider skillfully interweaves her family history into the interview with her mother, describing her difficult upbringing and the raising of her own child against the background of the reality of her mother’s past. From the Hardcover edition.

romanzo

La baracca dei tristi piaceri

An emotional memoir chronicles the uneasy reunion between a daughter abandoned at the age of four and the mother who left her husband and young children to join the infamous Nazi Secret Service in World War II.

Stelle di cannella

Il piccolo Adolf non aveva le ciglia

Io, piccola ospite del Führer

The powerful and moving memoir of Helga Schneider’s abandonment by her parents and her terrifying childhood in wartime and post-war Berlin. Abandoned by her mother, who left to pursue a career as a camp guard at Auschwitz-Birkenau, loathed by her step-mother, cooped up in a cellar, starved, parched, lonely amidst the fetid crush of her neighbours, Helga Schneider endured the horrors of wartime Berlin. The Bonfire of Berlin is a searing account of her survival. The grinding misery of hunger, combined with the terror of air-raids, the absence of fresh water and the constant threat of death and disease served not to unite the tenants and neighbours of her apartment block but rather to intensify the minor irritations of communal life into flashpoints of rage and violence. And with Russian victory, the survivors could not look forward to a return to peacetime but rather to pillage and rape. It was only gradually that Schneider’s life returned to some kind of normality, when her beloved father returned from the front, carrying his own scars of the war. This shocking book evokes the reality of life in a wartime city in all its brutality and deprivation, while retaining a kernel of hope that while life remains, not all is lost. From the Trade Paperback edition.

The Bonfire of Berlin

Hans Rosegger

Hans-Josef Hönig

wie Sie Ihr Fundraising zum Erfolg führen

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In una stanza d’albergo di Vienna, alle sei di un piovoso mattino dell’ottobre del 1998, Helga Schneider ricorda quella madre che nel 1941 ha abbandonato due bambini per seguire la sua vocazione e adempiere la sua missione: lavorare come guardiana nei campi – di concentramento, prima, e di sterminio, poi – del Führer. Che cosa spinge Helga, oggi, a incontrare questa vecchia estranea che è sua madre? La curiosità? La speranza che si sia pentita? O qualcosa di più oscuro e inquietante? «Verso di lei provo un rancore tenace, ma temo di non avere ancora rinunciato a trovare in lei qualcosa che si salva. Di qui il dubbio: è stata davvero spietata come dice o si mostra irriducibile perché io la possa odiare, liberandomi dell’incubo?». (H. Schneider)

Helga Schneider

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