Let Me Go

Helga Schneider

Random House

Otago Daily Times, March 27th 2004

“What can a daughter feel for a mother who refused to be a mother, so that she could join Heinrich Himmler’s evil organisation?”

Helga Schneider was only 4 when her mother abandoned her and her 14-month-old brother to serve as an SS officer in the Nazi concentration camps.  In  Let Me Go she recounts her final meeting with her mother.

For Schneider, this is an attempt to understand (if not forgive) this woman whose loyalty to the Nazi regime was greater that maternal love, who was able to participate in atrocities that her daughter finds unthinkable.   She writes with painful honesty of the pride with which her mother still talks of the oversight of torture sessions and executions, and her belief in Nazi ideals.  Seeking desperately for some indication of remorse, acceptance of moral responsibility, (or merely regret for deserting her children), the author is left shaken and confused.  Is her mother sincere in her conviction in the rightness of  the Final Solution, or is she giving her daughter a gift that will free her from any lingering attachment she still feels?  And can she ever know?     

Schneider writes bravely and openly of her ambivalence and uncertainty, weaving her personal story with the brutal reality of Hitler’s Germany to describe a legacy that haunts the children of Nazi regime as darkly as it does the children of the Holocaust.  Beautifully translated by Shaun Whiteside, this book is an intimate and moving reminder of the scars of history are shared by both German and Jewish peoples today.