Overview

"Helga Schneider was four when her mother suddenly abandoned her family in Berlin in 1941. When she next saw her mother, thirty years later, she learned the shocking reason why. Her mother had joined the Nazi SS and had become a guard in the concentration camps, including Auschwitz, where she was in charge of a ""correction"" unit and responsible for untold acts of torture. Nearly thirty more years would pass before their second and final reunion, an emotional encounter in Vienna where her ailing mother, then eighty-seven and unrepentant about her past, was living in a nursing home. Let Me Go is the extraordinary account of that meeting and of their conversation, which powerfully evokes the misery of obligation colliding with the inescapable horror of what her mother has done."

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9780786183807

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Reviews

Schneider writes with words that burn on the page...with a love and pity that could leave no one indifferent. -- Oggi (Italy) A courageous and terrifying document. -- Telerama (France) An exceptional document, an autobiographical testimony of the first order, this essential book confronts the reader with an absolute truth. -- La Razon (Spain) For the duration of these pages, the old, mad Germay that we had thought dead comes to life again. -- J. M. Coetzee, Nobel Prize-winning author Schneider packs...[an] emotional punch into this brief but tremendously cathartic memoir. -- Booklist (starred review) The story will bring tears to most listeners' eyes...Barbara Rosenblat's reading is astounding...When Rosenblat reads Schneider's mother's words, the listener is chilled by the evil in her voice, and when she reads Schneider's words, the listener feels the anger and confusion that permeate the book. -- AudioFile Mothers come in all shapes and persuasions: this one enthusiastically joined the Waffen SS, abandoned her children, and embraced her tasks at Auschwitz...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 Reviews (starred review) Rosenblat is completely believable. She is by turns sly, boastful, strident, angry, confused, and pitiable. When the elderly woman describes her participation in ghastly medical experiments and other tortures, Rosenblat's matter-of-fact reading makes the conversation particularly chilling and disturbing...This unforgettable memoir is a gripping and moving listening experience. -- Booklist (starred review) Only a versatile, sensitive reader like Rosenblat could narrate such emotionally fraught terrain, exposing the pain of a woman abandoned by her mother and forced to find her own moral compass. -- Publishers Weekly

Author Information

Helga Schneider was born in 1937 in Steinberg, now in Poland, and spent her childhood in Berlin. She has lived as a freelance writer for many years in Bologna, Italy. Barbara Rosenblat, one of the most awarded narrators in the business, was selected by AudioFile magazine as one of the Golden Voices of the Twentieth Century. She has received the prestigious Audie Award multiple times and has earned more than fifty AudioFile Earphones Awards. She has also appeared in film, television, and theater, both in London's West End and on Broadway.

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