Very striking memoir of WWII ( )

A daughter visits her mother whom she has not seen in 27 years - a mother who abandoned her family when the girl was young. That alone could be quite a story. But that mother abandoned her family to join the SS and volunteer to work at a Nazi concentration camp.

With lots of flashbacks, the story centers around a daughter's final visit to her mother. It's really easy to hate the mother who supported and help execute the atrocities of the Holocaust. She's demented and has some dementia and at times downright creepy.

How far must the loyalty of a daughter go? Does she love her mother unconditionally even though she was not much of a mother? What possesses a person to abandon a family to get a job that kills families?







( )

This is an account of a daughter’s merciless interrogation of her demented mother, more than half a century after her Nuremberg conviction for the crimes she committed when she was a concentration camp guard at Sachsenhausen, Ravensbruch and Auschwitz-Birkenau. The book is deeply troubling in its evocation of some fundamental issues of moral responsibility.
In 1941, when she was just four years old, Helga Schneider was abandoned by her mother who joined the Waffen SS as a concentration camp guard. She enlisted with enthusiasm and never wavered in her belief in Nazism. She was convicted with other camp guards at Nuremberg and served two years of a six year prison sentence. Helga’s father re-married but her stepmother was cruel and she endured a miserable childhood of neglect and harsh institutional care. Mother and daughter met again in 1971, three decades after she was abandoned. Helga, by then married with a 5 year old son Renzo, sought out her mother and discovered her past as a camp guard, her participation in sadistic medical experiments, her unwavering antisemitism and her commitment to the ‘final solution’. Their 1971 reunion was scarifying. Her mother tried give Helga bits and pieces of gold jewellery stolen from prisoners murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz as if to compensate her for a lost childhood. She displayed a complete lack of interest in her little grandson, Renzo. Mother and daughter parted in acrimony and they had no further contact until 1998, when Helga received a letter from a faithful friend of her mother, informing her that ‘Traudi’ was nearly 90, confined to a nursing home and likely to die soon. The name ‘Traudi’ is a pseudonym, adopted in the book to safeguard her mother’s identity.
Helga prepared herself for the confrontation with her mother by reading her criminal record, the trial testimony of Rudolf Hoss, Commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, and other accounts of the sadistic medical experiments and murder of prisoners in the camps where her mother worked. At the nursing home she was assured by staff that Traudi had an uncanny capacity for lucid recall of the war years but would be unable to recall any conversation she had with Helga on the following day. Her extended report of the interrogation that followed, over a period of two and a half hours, resembles an exorcism of the unclean spirits of Nazism rather than an attempted reunion or reconciliation.
When they met in the nursing home Helga was carrying a teddy bear taken from Traudi’s now deserted apartment, the sole relic of their brief mother daughter relationship. Traudi refused to recognise Helga and insisted that her daughter was dead. She did recognise the teddy bear, snatched it from Helga and refused to give it back. Their squabble over the bear ended when Traudi accepted Helga’s offer of a lipstick in exchange for the bear. Helga’s initial, reluctant feeling of ‘infinite pity’ for this frail irrational creature was soon followed by unqualified dislike. During the time they spent together Traudi behaved like a capricious and manipulative child. In the course of their meeting Traudi came to accept that Helga was indeed the daughter she had abandoned in 1941. The mother-daughter relationship, once established, became arena for conflict. The conflict was a central element in Helga’s endeavour to evoke Traudi’s experiences as a Waffen SS officer. She was unwilling to answer questions about her participation in the medical experiments and executions by gunshot and gas chamber.
Helga’s interrogation was designed to evoke her mother’s Nazi past. Prompted by ‘a demon somewhere inside’ she used flattery, threats and false promises to cajole Traudi into a celebration of her role as a concentration camp guard. She resorted to ‘blackmail’ to overcome Traudi’s reluctance to talk about Ravensbruch; she promised to return the following day with ice cream and yellow roses in order to elicit an account of Traudi’s participation in the medical experiments. The ‘demon’ makes several more appearances when Traudi was unwilling to go on with her recitation. Helga felt a ‘kind of fever…an intense craving’ to elicit further admissions. Later in the afternoon after Traudi accepted that Helga was really her daughter she wept and demanded to be called Mutti. Helga refused unless Traudi told her more about the Auschwitz doctors, Mengele and Viktor Brack and the gas chambers.
When Traudi could be induced to speak of her past, Helga presents her as lucid in recall, clinical in her extensive coverage of details of her work and without apparent shame or remorse. It is unnecessary to repeat the details; information on the medical experiments and murders is readily available elsewhere. Helga’s interrogation ends at last when Traudi affirms her belief that the extermination of the Jewish race was necessary:
‘I had a duty to obey, without argument, orders from above, and it those orders meant the gassing of millions of Jews then I was willing to collaborate. Which is why, believe me, I could not allow myself even the slightest weakness over mothers or children….I was convinced of the rightness of the Final Solution, and so I carried out my tasks with great commitment.…even during my detention I never stopped feeling proud and worthy to have belonged to the Germany of our great Fuhrer…Did you know I read Kant in Birkenau?’
At the end of their meeting, when it was time for Traudi to join the other residents for lunch, she wept inconsolably until Helga promised to return in the afternoon. Subsequent interviews with Helga reveal that did not return that day or ever again. A publisher’s note, inexplicably absent in the Heinemann edition, says that Traudi died some years later in 2001 and confirms that her participation in the extermination programme of the camps is documented war crimes archives.
This is an account of an exorcism by proxy. To rid herself of her mother’s malignant spirit, Helga makes her recite the horrors of her unforgiveable participation in the Holocaust. One may doubt that Traudi, in her advanced state of dementia, was capable of the detailed recall and coherence of the account she is said to have given of the work she did at Ravensbruch and Auschwitz. Helga interpolates testimony from the Nuremberg trials at strategic points in the text to reinforce their horrific nature. I suspect that much of what is attributed to Traudi is a paraphrase of those sources. We are meant to assume however that the things Traudi said in the nursing home, whatever the accuracy of the transcription, are consistent with her original voluntary commitment to Nazism. As Helga leaves however, she asks herself a strange question: ‘Were you really an inflexible Nazi, mother, or did you say all those horrendous things to help me to hate you’. Helga’s question reflects the ambiguity of the plea that became the title of her book, ‘Let me go, mother’. Traudi had let her daughter go, finally and definitively, when she was a very small child and she made no attempt to renew the relationship with her daughter when the war was over. The initiative came from Helga. Her mother’s ‘absence was a presence’, a continuing obsession that had always obsessed her and induced her to arrange their meetings in 1971 and 1998. The obsession ends with an exorcism. As she leaves the nursing home, Helga complies with Traudi’s child-like demand, calls her Mutti and kisses her with feigned affection; her mother’s physically diminished ‘presence’ has been transformed to an ‘irrevocable absence’.
There is a residual question of fairness and potential transgression in the use that Helga makes of her demented mother in the course of liberating herself from her malignant spirit. She was assured before questioning her mother that Traudi would remember nothing of their conversation on the following day. Perhaps she would revert to the belief that her daughter died years ago. At all events, Helga was told that she could do no harm by questioning mother about her Nazi past. There remains however a sense of transgression apparent in Helga’s confession that she felt driven by her own demons to overcome her mother’s resistance and exploit her childlike vulnerability. It is evident that Traudi in dementia was incapable of any adult response to her daughter’s interrogation and equally incapable of repentance or remorse. She was an instrument on which a persistent and well prepared exponent could evoke an old and loathsome music. ( )

I finished this unsuual memoir in less than 24 hours.

Sparse, powerful, and compelling.

I finished it the evening before Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is fitting. (The internationally recognized date for Holocaust Remembrance Day corresponds to the 27th day of Nisan on the Hebrew calendar. It marks the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In Hebrew, Holocaust Remembrance Day is called Yom Hashoah. In 2020 the date it falls on is April 21.)

This is a raw first person account. The crux is the last meeting a daughter has with her mother, a mother with whom she has had very little contact, a mother who is a Nazi war criminal. A daughter trying to get something (perhaps some motherly love, perhaps some understanding) and who’s also trying to pull away, wanting finally a conclusion, an ending. I was grateful that this wasn’t just about this last meeting between these two women. It was a better account because it included memories of the author’s and stories that had been told to her. Otherwise it wouldn’t have felt like a full book to me.

Understated horror. This is not a comfort read. Nothing was comfortable. Not Helga’s upbringing after her mother abandoned her, nothing about the only two meetings she had with her mother as an adult, nothing about her mother during the conversation or her mother prior to it, including her times in the camps, and nothing about the Holocaust details.

I’ve read probably hundreds of Holocaust books but none quite like this one.

For me it was too short and I wanted more details. I’m glad I read it though.

It was good, important. I “really liked” it. ( )

In 1941, when Helga Schneider was four and her brother Peter not even two years of age, they were abandoned by their mother. Their father, Stefan, was on the front, fighting for Hitler at the time, and an aunt and their paternal grandmother stepped in to care for the children. Soon after, Stefan remarried. Helga was not to see her mother, Traudi, for another thirty years. From Bologna (where she’d moved in 1963 as a sixteen year old) Helga travelled with her young son to Vienna to see Traudi who, she learned, had abandoned her children because of her fervent commitment to the National Socialist Party. In fact, Traudi had been a fanatical servant of the Fuhrer. During this 1971 meeting, Traudi showed complete indifference to her grandchild. Her chief interest was in proudly displaying her SS uniform to her daughter. She offered Helga a handful of heavy gold jewellery, stolen from Jews (it might come in handy one day) and revealed that she had participated in the exterminations at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

But Helga Schneider’s book isn’t about the 1971 meeting—after which she determined she would expunge the woman from memory. It is actually an account of the final, two-hour meeting she and her cousin Eva had with Traudi in 1998, twenty-seven years later. Gisela, a Viennese friend of Traudi, had written to Helga in August, 1998 to report that Traudi’s health was failing. She had been behaving in increasingly bizarre ways: purging recently purchased items from her apartment, cleaning obsessively—floors flooded with pail upon pail of water, attempting to order coffins for her dead children, and regularly getting lost in the city. She was now in a home for the aged and likely had little time left. If Helga wanted to see her . . . well, perhaps this was the last chance. Helga made the journey. Her book details the intense, emotional confrontation she had with her mother, a true believer if there ever was one. Traudi had begun as an “assistant” to the doctors who performed muscle-regeneration and bone-grafting experiments on prisoners in Ravensbruck. She had then chosen to undergo “dehumanization training” in order to work at Birkenau.

LET ME GO is an appalling and riveting document. Schneider judiciously incorporates some material from a text on Nazi medical experimentation and offers a play-by-play of the turbulent and complex emotions she experienced while in the presence of the frail ninety year old who was plainly cognitively compromised, yet possessed a razor-sharp recall of her time as one of Hitler’s henchwomen—one of his Furies.

I know of no other written text that details the kind of encounter Helga Schneider had with Traudi. However, the book put me in mind of the equally powerful 2006 documentary INHERITANCE , whose subject is Monika Hertwig, daughter of the infamous “Butcher of Plaszow”, Amon Goeth (famously “channeled” by Ralph Fiennes for Steven Spielberg’s movie SCHINDLER’S LIST).

Schneider’s book is short and can easily be read in a single sitting. I wish that the author had documented how she initially managed to find her mother at all and that she had also provided more information about her childhood, adolescence, and her life after the 1998 meeting. One can only come by these details by reading the press around the book and the relatively recent film, starring Juliet Stevenson, based on Schneider’s harrowing final encounter with the woman who had abandoned her fifty-seven years before. ( )