Let Me Go - My Mother and the SS

In 1998, Schneider, in her sixties, is summoned from Italy to the nursing home in Vienna in which her 90 year old mother lives. The last time she has seen her mother is 27 years earlier, when her mother asked her daughter to try on her SS uniform which she treasures, and tried to give her several items of jewellery, the loot of holocaust victims, which Schneider rejected. Prior to that, the last time she had seen her mother was in 1941 (when she was 4 and her brother 19 months old), when her mother abandoned her family in order to pursue her career as an SS officer. As the conversation with her mother advanced, Schneider establishes that from the women's camp at Ravensbruck, she moved to Auschwitz-Birkenau where she was in charge of a 'correction' unit where brutal torture was administered. She was also involved in the gas chambers and lethal injections. She was close to the highest echelons of Nazi power which she continues to regard as having been legitimate. Her mother not only remains uncontrite, but continues to regard her former prisoners as the sub-human inferiors predicated by Nazi ideology. Helga Schneider's extraordinary, frank account is desperately sad and extremely powerful. She describes without sentimentality or self-pity her own difficult upbringing and the raising of her own child against the background of painful confrontation of the reality of her mother. She skilfully interweaves her family history into the interview with her mother and powerfully evokes the dreadful misery of Nazi and immediate post-war Berlin. This is an important document on many levels: holocaust history, the power of political ideology, moral responsibility...