Benvenuti

Benvenuti al blog di Helga Schneider

Il mio nuovo libro esce presto…

For  the duration of these pages, the old, mad Germany that we had thought dead comes to life again.  J.M.Coetzee

Schneider packs a tremdous emotional punch into this brief but tremendously cathartic memoir. 
Booklist (starred review)

The book won’t let you go until you’ve finished reading the last page. Except for ahandful of post-war German authors, we are rarely given such a glimpse of life on the other side..”
Washington Post
 
This stunning, profoundly evocative memoir is a bridge across time directly into the ongoing agonies of our confused, violent, searching hearts. A triumph of vivid art and emotional courage.
Blanche Wiesen Cook (Eleanor Roosevelt biographer)

In this searing memoir 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….This book 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.
School Library Journal
 
Mothers come in all shapes and persuasions: this one enthusiastically joined the Waffen SS, abandoned her children, and embraced her tasks at Auschwitz, as gloomily recounted in her daughter’s memoir…Survivor’s tales come in as many shapes as mothers. This one, from the dark side, is as affecting as a kick in the stomach.
Kirkus Review
 
The simple certainty of Schneider’s pain, strength and intricate emotions resounds well after this story ends.
Publishers Weekly
 
One of the female guards at Birkenau was Helga Schneider’s mother, who abandoned her family in 1941 for the privilege of joining the SS. Mother and daughter met again twice the second occasion in 1998, with the mother 90 years old and half-senile in an Austrian nursing home and their ensuing dialogue, with its panics and cruelty worthy of a Fassbinder movie, provides this curious and disturbing memoir. On one side is the old woman, proud of her work in the camps at Ravensbruck and Auschwitz-Birkenau (only “the hardest, the toughest had been sent to Birkenau”), vain (”I’m still beautiful, I’m not decrepit in the slightest. How could I have a daughter who looks like an old bag?”), and finally needy for the love of the child she had left behind; and on the other is the abandoned daughter resentfully looking for revenge. The crime of being left will never be forgiven by the author, so she forces out confessions of larger crimes, against humanity in general and Jews in particular, and self-laceratingly rejoices in her mother’s lack of remorse.
The Daily Telegraph

“Let Me Go” by Helga Schneider is the author’s memoir of being abandoned by her mother in Germany in 1941 when her mother joined the SS to work in concentration camps. Thirty years later the author has a reunion with her mother, who was then in poor health, and tried to reconcile with her. But her mother had no regrets about her past. Finally, there’s a second and last reunion in a senior home in 1998. It’s a painful, gripping story.
Palo Alto Weekly

“Let Me Go” would make powerful theatre. The duelling exchanges – wheedling and aggressive, sentimental and icy, childlike and spiteful – combine to produce riveting drama.
Penny Hueston
The Age (Melbourne, Australia)
 
“This is an excruciatingly honest book, as you can tell.
It’s a book that’s left me deeply moved, hugely troubled, and I hope a little bit more civilised, a little further away from my own capacity for evil.”
Peter Terry (SAFM broadcasting, South Africa)
“Says more than a sane soul could bear about malign inheritance and familial guilt. Let me go is the sort of story that only slithers from the dank interstices of history at some gaping remove.”
TIME OUT
 
“Grips the reader completely… When Schneider’s account… is over… she can only turn away and conclude that it is “the failed story of a mother and a daughther. A “non-story”. But non stories are rarely so powerful.”
GLASGOW HERALD
 
“Let me go” by Helga Schneider has, for its epigraph, the words of Rudolf Höss, commandant of the Auschwitz death camp: “The feeling of hatred has always been alien to me.” When Helga Schneider was four, her mother, Traudi, abandoned her to work as an extermination guard in Auschwitz and Ravensbruck. In 1998, Helga received a letter asking her to visit her mother, then 90 and about to die. She had met her mother only once before this, when Helga had first learnt the facts about her mother’s past. This slim book is about these two meetings, and about the nature of parental damage and how forgiveness might come, if at all.
The Telegraph, Calcutta, India 
 

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Helga Schneider

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“Le storie – Diario italiano” 9 aprile 2008

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