The extraordinary memoir, praised across Europe, of a daughter’s final encounter with her mother, a former SS guard at Auschwitz

In 1941, in Berlin, Helga Schneider’s mother abandoned her (age four), her younger brother, and her father. Thirty years later—when she was reunited with her mother again for the first time—Schneider discovered the shocking reason: Her mother had joined the Nazi SS and had become a guard in concentration camps, including Auschwitz, where she was in charge of a “correction” unit and responsible for untold acts of torture.

Nearly three more decades would pass before their second and final meeting, an emotional encounter at a Vienna nursing home, where her mother, then eighty-seven and unrepentant about her past, was ailing. Let Me Go is the extraordinary account of that meeting. Their conversation—which Schneider recounts in spellbinding detail—triggers childhood memories, and she skillfully weaves these into her account, powerfully evoking the misery of Nazi and postwar Berlin. Yet it is her internal struggle—a daughter’s sense of obligation colliding with the inescapable horror of what her mother has done—that will stay with readers long after the book has ended.

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.

Praise from Europe:

“You will hold your breath as you read it.” —Corriere della Sera (Italy) “You emerge drained from this confrontation…a courageous and terrifying document.” —Télérama (France) “An exceptional document, an autobiographical testimony of the first order, this essential book confronts the reader with an absolute truth.” —La Razon (Spain)