Let Me Go

March 8, 2004
Schneider, who was born in Poland in 1937 and grew up in Berlin, shares the last encounter with her mother in Austria, after decades of separation, as readers become privy to her complex autobiography. In 1941, when Schneider was four, her mother abandoned her, her brother and her father to join the SS army in various concentration camps, including Auschwitz, and visited the family only once after leaving. Thirty years later, working as a writer in Italy, Schneider learns of the old woman's quickly deteriorating health and decides—albeit hesitantly—to pay her a visit. Schneider attempts to reconcile her ambivalent emotions toward a mother who unfalteringly announces, "Well, my daughter, like it or not, I have never regretted being a member of the Waffen SS, is that clear?" Schneider's first-person narration fluidly alternates between her inner thoughts and the conversation she has with her mother, and she's open about her overwhelming desire to come to terms with the convoluted circumstances of her youth. Schneider's voice is honest, and it's easy to understand the rapidly changing emotions that flow throughout: her panic attacks prior to the re-encounter, her desire to both forgive and physically harm her mother, her simple need to understand the truth. In the end, it's unclear whether the visit concretized Schneider's feelings toward her mother. She understands this situation doesn't have any one correct emotion and demonstrates this with explicit details of the conversation and what she felt at the time. The simple certainty of Schneider's pain, strength and intricate emotions resounds well after this story ends.

June 1, 2004
Adult/High School-When Schneider was four, her mother abandoned her children for a career in the SS. In the ensuing 57 years, Schneider saw her only once. Prompted by a letter from her mother's friend and emboldened by the presence of a cousin, she went again to visit the woman in a senior citizen's home in Vienna in 1998. In this searing memoir, she describes the visit and her struggles with a kind of instinctive mother-love, her feelings of abandonment, and a distaste at the thought of any connection to this morally repugnant person. Interspersed with the narrative of the visit are quotations from official records, Schneider's own recollections of a childhood in wartime Berlin, and scraps of horrific detail she remembers having heard about the experiences of concentration camp inmates such as those her mother guarded. "It was my job to assist the doctors," her mother says. Readers cannot help but be fascinated as well as horrified by this woman's unrepentance and the impenetrable shield she has built around her emotions. "I was only obeying orders." "I believed in Germany's mission." But when visiting hours are over, she cannot allow the daughter she abandoned to leave, grabbing her around the neck and kissing her wildly. This is a book for readers with some previous knowledge of the Holocaust, presenting a very different point of view. It is an excellent choice for discussion of the complex situations of people dealing with horrific events in their country's or their family's history whether they were peripherally involved, or not at all. A compelling and unforgettable story.-Kathleen Isaacs, Edmund Burke School, Washington, DC

Copyright 2004 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from April 15, 2004
This heartrending memoir chronicles the uneasy reunion between a daughter and the mother who left her husband and young children to join the infamous Nazi Secret Service in World War II. Abandoned by her mother at age four, Helga Schneider learned the terrible truth decades later; her mother wasa member of the SS and served as aguard at both Ravensbruck and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Compelled to unearth her family skeletons to understand her own identity, Schneider arrangesto visit her befuddled elderly mother in a Viennese nursing home before total senility sets in. Fraught with intense emotion, this reunion between two tormented souls is recalled with painful honesty by a grown daughter horrified by the unthinkable choices made by her own mother. Determined to plumb the depths of her mother's unrepentant intolerance, bigotry, and negligence, a legitimately angry and confused Schneider harangues and tricks the often confused but at times wily old woman into revealing the dark secrets of her past.Disgusted by her mother's revelations yet compelled to learn everything, she interweaves her mother's confessions with her own childhood.Schneider packs a tremendous emotional punch into this brief but tremendously cathartic memoir.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2004, American Library Association.)