Product Description

In 1998, Schneider, in her sixties, is summoned from Italy to the nursing home in Vienna in which her 90 year old mother lives. The last time she has seen her mother is 27 years earlier, when her mother asked her daughter to try on her SS uniform which she treasures, and tried to give her several items of jewellery, the loot of holocaust victims, which Schneider rejected. Prior to that, the last time she had seen her mother was in 1941 (when she was 4 and her brother 19 months old), when her mother abandoned her family in order to pursue her career as an SS officer. As the conversation with her mother advanced, Schneider establishes that from the women's camp at Ravensbruck, she moved to Auschwitz-Birkenau where she was in charge of a 'correction' unit where brutal torture was administered. She was also involved in the gas chambers and lethal injections. She was close to the highest echelons of Nazi power and continues to regard as having been, legitimate. Her mother not only remains uncontrite, but continues to regard her former prisoners as the sub-human inferiors predicated by Nazi ideology. Helga Schneider's extraordinary, frank account is desperately sad and extremely powerful. She describes without sentimentality or self-pity her own difficult upbringing and the raising of her own child against the background of painful confrontation of the reality of her mother. She skilfully interweaves her family history into the interview with her mother and powerfully evokes the dreadful misery of Nazi and immediate post-war Berlin. This is an important document on many levels: holocaust history, the power of political ideology, moral responsibility.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #77247 in Books
• Published on: 2005-03-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Mail on Sunday
'Frightening and Fascinating'

The Guardian
'A powerful, painful book about moral responsibility'

Irish Times
'The book evocatively portrays the deprivations of wartime Berlin and the devastating emotional impact of one evil individual'

Customer Reviews

This book is a wake-up call!! listen to it!!
A seeringly moving and highly evocative book, the author, Helga Schneider, poignantly and movingly tells of her conflicting and ambivalent emotions towards her now elderly mother, a former member of the Waffen-SS, in a final confrontation of the non-story between daughter and mother.
One cannot fail to be disgusted, alarmed and moved to tears as the author takes you on her painful autobiographical journey in the exploration of her relationship with her mother.
Indeed, having abandoned Helga as a young child, her mother joined the SS in what she believed to be carryng out her duty and undivided loyalty to the Fuhrer and obligingly evokes 'the best years of her life'. Her mother became a guard at Birkenau concentration camp, for which she had undergone specialist training in 'unsentimentality' and 'dehumanization' and for which, henceforth, only the hardiest toughest members of the Reich were sent to. And it is this dehumanised, cold and unfeeling evocation of her mother that the author portrays to the reader.
It is truely shocking, as reader learns that since 1941, the author has only met her mother twice, for which the emotional repercussions of this are severely felt by the author as she takes the reader through the vivid account of her second meeting with her mother. With much unsuppressed anger, she questions her mother about what happened in the camps and is thrown by her mother's show of emotional indifference as she candidly selects personal memories from her harsh and cruel role in the work towards the 'Final Solution'. '...like it or not, I have never regretted being a member of the Waffen-SS, is that clear?' is how her mother aptly and coldly sums up her own true emotions about her role as a Party member of Hitler's Reich, in this violent episode of history.
This is surely a work of disturbing and gruesome truth(es) that will go down in history as a wake-up call to the menace of evil that potentially lingers within us, an essential testimony to the terrifying events of the 20th century...

excellent
I read this book in a day. It is a fascinating yet frightening story of some of the cruel and terrible things the SS did to the Jewish people. Helga's mother till the day she died showed no remorse for what she had done and died believing she did the right thing by following the 'final solution'. I would really recommend it

An interesting autobiography
It's hard to tell who this is about. As it was an autobiography I expected to read more about Helga's life; instead the focus is on her mother Traudi, making it more of a biography of her life.

Very interesting to read and at times it makes for uncomfortable reading. Nevertheless this is a worthwhile experience. I had expected it to be even more detailed that it is actually is, so it was somewhat of an easier experience than anticipated.

Overall it is well written but occasionally it drifts and it can be confusing as to whether you are reading the present or the recent past. The setting for the book is a visit to where Traudi is staying. She is 90 years old and it's just before she dies. Traudi left Helga and her brother Peter when she was 4; choosing her job for the SS over her children. Helga then met up with her again only once more before this visit. The relationship between mother and daughter is fascinating. I don't know if I hated her as much as Helga kept saying she did whether I would have stayed and suffered the abuse she was still dealing out at 90.

It is both fascinating yet frank. Helga takes her cousin Eva with her on the visit and facts are revealed that Eva finds distressing; adding to Helga's discomfort and concerns. Being quite short at 149 pages it means you can read it in one sitting which might be better as there no actual chapters. Instead there are suitable places to stop reading should you need to.

Worth a read but I don't know if I'll read the prequel 'The Bonfire of Berlin'.