From Publishers Weekly
Schneider, who was born in Poland in 1937 and grew up in Berlin, shares the last encounter with her mother in Austria, after decades of separation, as readers become privy to her complex autobiography. In 1941, when Schneider was four, her mother abandoned her, her brother and her father to join the SS army in various concentration camps, including Auschwitz, and visited the family only once after leaving. Thirty years later, working as a writer in Italy, Schneider learns of the old woman's quickly deteriorating health and decidesâ€"albeit hesitantlyâ€"to pay her a visit. Schneider attempts to reconcile her ambivalent emotions toward a mother who unfalteringly announces, "Well, my daughter, like it or not, I have never regretted being a member of the Waffen SS, is that clear?" Schneider's first-person narration fluidly alternates between her inner thoughts and the conversation she has with her mother, and she's open about her overwhelming desire to come to terms with the convoluted circumstances of her youth. Schneider's voice is honest, and it's easy to understand the rapidly changing emotions that flow throughout: her panic attacks prior to the re-encounter, her desire to both forgive and physically harm her mother, her simple need to understand the truth. In the end, it's unclear whether the visit concretized Schneider's feelings toward her mother. She understands this situation doesn't have any one correct emotion and demonstrates this with explicit details of the conversation and what she felt at the time. The simple certainty of Schneider's pain, strength and intricate emotions resounds well after this story ends.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From School Library Journal
Adult/High School–When Schneider was four, her mother abandoned her children for a career in the SS. In the ensuing 57 years, Schneider saw her only once. Prompted by a letter from her mother's friend and emboldened by the presence of a cousin, she went again to visit the woman in a senior citizen's home in Vienna in 1998. In this searing memoir, she describes the visit and her struggles with a kind of instinctive mother-love, her feelings of abandonment, and a distaste at the thought of any connection to this morally repugnant person. Interspersed with the narrative of the visit are quotations from official records, Schneider's own recollections of a childhood in wartime Berlin, and scraps of horrific detail she remembers having heard about the experiences of concentration camp inmates such as those her mother guarded. "It was my job to assist the doctors," her mother says. 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. "I was only obeying orders." "I believed in Germany's mission." But when visiting hours are over, she cannot allow the daughter she abandoned to leave, grabbing her around the neck and kissing her wildly. This is a book for readers with some previous knowledge of the Holocaust, presenting a very different point of view. It 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.–Kathleen Isaacs, Edmund Burke School, Washington, DC Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From AudioFile
Helga Schneider recounts in chilling detail her 1998 visit with her mother, an unrepentant Nazi who abandoned her family in 1941 to join the Nazi SS and become a guard and torturer in the concentration camps. The story will bring tears to most listeners' eyes. Schneider, who saw her mother once in the intervening years, conveys her utter horror that her mother could be such a thoroughly vicious and repugnant person. Barbara Rosenblat's reading is astounding, and as she did in her award-winning performance of The Nazi Officer's Wife, she demonstrates her brilliance at bringing the written word to audio. 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. D.J.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
*Starred Review* This heartrending memoir chronicles the uneasy reunion between a daughter and the mother who left her husband and young children to join the infamous Nazi Secret Service in World War II. Abandoned by her mother at age four, Helga Schneider learned the terrible truth decades later; her mother was^B a member of the SS and served as a^B guard at both Ravensbruck and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Compelled to unearth her family skeletons to understand her own identity, Schneider arranges^B to visit her befuddled elderly mother in a Viennese nursing home before total senility sets in. Fraught with intense emotion, this reunion between two tormented souls is recalled with painful honesty by a grown daughter horrified by the unthinkable choices made by her own mother. Determined to plumb the depths of her mother's unrepentant intolerance, bigotry, and negligence, a legitimately angry and confused Schneider harangues and tricks the often confused but at times wily old woman into revealing the dark secrets of her past.^B Disgusted by her mother's revelations yet compelled to learn everything, she interweaves her mother's confessions with her own childhood.^B Schneider packs a tremendous emotional punch into this brief but tremendously cathartic memoir. Margaret Flanagan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"In 1998, Helga Schneider, then in her sixties, was summoned from Italy to the nursing home in Vienna where her ninety-year-old mother was then living. The last time they had seen each other was twenty-seven years earlier, when her mother had asked Schneider to try on her treasured SS uniform, and tried to give her several items of jewellery, the loot of holocaust victims, which Schneider refused. It was the first time they had met since 1941 (when Schneider was four and her brother was nineteen months old), when her mother abandoned her family in order to pursue her career as an SS officer." "Before reluctantly visiting her on this occasion, Schneider looked at her mother's file at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre and discovered that her past was even more horrific than she had previously imagined: in Ravensbruck, a concentration camp for women, her mother had collaborated on 'medical' experiments on prisoners, and trained to be an extermination camp guard, a career path permitted only to the most hardened. Never at any stage had her mother recanted or expressed even the slightest remorse about her past; yet Schneider still hoped that she would show some sort of redeeming quality that would finally enable her daughter to accept her - on some level - as a mother." Helga Schneider's frank account of her last meeting with her mother is both sad and powerful. She describes without sentimentality or self-pity her own difficult upbringing and the raising of her own child against the background of her painful confrontation with the reality of her background. Powerfully evoking the misery of Nazi and immediate post-war Berlin, her book provides a terrifying insight into the psyche of an otherwise unremarkable woman whose life was given a seemingly unshakable sense of purpose and fulfilment by the most evil and repellant aspects of the Third Reich.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Schneider, who was born in Poland in 1937 and grew up in Berlin, shares the last encounter with her mother in Austria, after decades of separation, as readers become privy to her complex autobiography. In 1941, when Schneider was four, her mother abandoned her, her brother and her father to join the SS army in various concentration camps, including Auschwitz, and visited the family only once after leaving. Thirty years later, working as a writer in Italy, Schneider learns of the old woman's quickly deteriorating health and decides albeit hesitantly to pay her a visit. Schneider attempts to reconcile her ambivalent emotions toward a mother who unfalteringly announces, "Well, my daughter, like it or not, I have never regretted being a member of the Waffen SS, is that clear?" Schneider's first-person narration fluidly alternates between her inner thoughts and the conversation she has with her mother, and she's open about her overwhelming desire to come to terms with the convoluted circumstances of her youth. Schneider's voice is honest, and it's easy to understand the rapidly changing emotions that flow throughout: her panic attacks prior to the re-encounter, her desire to both forgive and physically harm her mother, her simple need to understand the truth. In the end, it's unclear whether the visit concretized Schneider's feelings toward her mother. She understands this situation doesn't have any one correct emotion and demonstrates this with explicit details of the conversation and what she felt at the time. The simple certainty of Schneider's pain, strength and intricate emotions resounds well after this story ends. (May) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

In an emotional memoir, a daughter reunites with her mother, a former SS guard at Auschwitz. Read by two-time Audie Award winner Barbara Rosenblat. Ann Kim Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

School Library Journal

Adult/High School-When Schneider was four, her mother abandoned her children for a career in the SS. In the ensuing 57 years, Schneider saw her only once. Prompted by a letter from her mother's friend and emboldened by the presence of a cousin, she went again to visit the woman in a senior citizen's home in Vienna in 1998. In this searing memoir, she describes the visit and her struggles with a kind of instinctive mother-love, her feelings of abandonment, and a distaste at the thought of any connection to this morally repugnant person. Interspersed with the narrative of the visit are quotations from official records, Schneider's own recollections of a childhood in wartime Berlin, and scraps of horrific detail she remembers having heard about the experiences of concentration camp inmates such as those her mother guarded. "It was my job to assist the doctors," her mother says. 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. "I was only obeying orders." "I believed in Germany's mission." But when visiting hours are over, she cannot allow the daughter she abandoned to leave, grabbing her around the neck and kissing her wildly. This is a book for readers with some previous knowledge of the Holocaust, presenting a very different point of view. It 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.-Kathleen Isaacs, Edmund Burke School, Washington, DC Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

AudioFile

Helga Schneider recounts in chilling detail her 1998 visit with her mother, an unrepentant Nazi who abandoned her family in 1941 to join the Nazi SS and become a guard and torturer in the concentration camps. The story will bring tears to most listeners' eyes. Schneider, who saw her mother once in the intervening years, conveys her utter horror that her mother could be such a thoroughly vicious and repugnant person. Barbara Rosenblat's reading is astounding, and as she did in her award-winning performance of The Nazi Officer's Wife, she demonstrates her brilliance at bringing the written word to audio. 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. D.J.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews