Let Me Go -- Helga Schneider

I don't read non-fiction very often, but someone recommended this one to me, and I'm glad that I read it. Well, as glad as you can be about reading a Holocaust memoir.

When Helga Schneider was four years old, her mother abandoned the family to join the SS, specifially to be a guard at Auschwitz-Birkenau and Ravensbruck. She only saw her two more times. The first visit (thirty years later) didn't go well, to put it very mildly:

"Hold your hands open," you said. I'll never forget that. You had pulled me by one arm, as though to tell me a secret, into the bedroom of the little apartment in the suburb of Mariahilf; and you had opened a little box: It's a standard gesture, one that usually heralds a present of some kind.

"Hold your hands open." And then you filled them with rings, bracelets, cuff links, pendants, brooches, a watch, and a handful of necklaces, large and small. For a moment I looked uncomprehendingly at all that gold. They I understood, and it was as though my hands were on fire. I pulled my palms apart, and the jewelry clattered onto the floor. You stared at me, puzzled.

Another thirty years later, they met for the last time. Her mother was 87 years old, dying, and unrepentant. About everything. There are moments that it seems like she might almost be putting on a show for Helga, but overall, no. She was unrepentant.

It's a little book, easily read in one sitting, but I had to put it down and walk away from it a few times. I read it a few days ago, but it's stayed with me--parts of it keep coming back to me. Rough, emotional, raw. But worth it.