Let Me Go

A powerful, painful book about moral responsibility

Remarkable... Helga Schneider's frank account is desperately sad and powerful. Unforgettable

Let Me Go grips the reader completely

The book evocatively portrays the deprivations of wartime Berlin and the devastating emotional impact of one evil individual

When Helga Schneider was four, her mother, Traudi, abandoned her to pursue her career. In 1998, Helga received a letter asking her to visit Traudi, now 90-years old, before she dies. Mother and daughter have met only once after Traudi left, on a disastrous visit where Helga first learnt the terrible secret of her mother's past. 
 
Traudi was as an extermination guard in Auschwitz and Ravensbruck and was involved in Nazi 'medical' experiments on prisoners. She has never expressed even the slightest remorse for her actions, yet Helga still hopes that at this final meeting she will find some way to forgive her mother.

Helga Schneider

Shaun Whiteside

Praise for Let Me Go 
'A powerful, painful book'

'Grips the reader completely...so powerful'

'Desperately sad and powerful...Unforgettable'

Abandoned by her mother, who left to pursue a career as a camp guard at Auschwitz-Birkenau, loathed by her step-mother, cooped up in a cellar, starved, parched, lonely amidst the fetid crush of her neighbours, Helga Schneider endured the horrors of wartime Berlin. The Bonfire of Berlin is a searing account of her survival. The grinding misery of hunger, combined with the terror of air-raids, the absence of fresh water and the constant threat of death and disease served not to unite the tenants and neighbours of her apartment block but rather to intensify the minor irritations of communal life into flashpoints of rage and violence. And with Russian victory the survivors could not look forward a return to peacetime but rather to pillage and rape. It was only gradually that Schneider's life returned to some kind of normality, as her beloved father returned from the front, carrying his own scars of the war. This shocking book evokes the reality of life in a wartime city in all its brutality and deprivation, while retaining a kernel of hope that while life remains not all is lost.

Helga Schneider

Praise for The Bonfire Of Berlin

Praise for Let Me Go
'A powerful, painful book'

'Frightening and fascinating'

'Grips the reader completely...so powerful'

Praise for Let Me Go
'A powerful, painful book'

'Frightening and fascinating'

'Grips the reader completely...so powerful'

Praise for Let Me Go
'A powerful, painful book'

'Frightening and fascinating'

'Grips the reader completely...so powerful'

Books by Helga Schneider

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Praise for The Bonfire Of Berlin

Praise for Let Me Go 'A powerful, painful book'

'Frightening and fascinating'

'Grips the reader completely...so powerful'

Praise for Let Me Go 'A powerful, painful book'

'Frightening and fascinating'

'Grips the reader completely...so powerful'

Praise for Let Me Go 'A powerful, painful book'

'Frightening and fascinating'

'Grips the reader completely...so powerful'

Books by Helga Schneider

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter

Praise for Let Me Go
'A powerful, painful book'

Praise for Let Me Go
'A powerful, painful book'

Praise for Let Me Go
'A powerful, painful book'