Do You like book Let Me Go (2005)?
Trovo impossibile dare una valutazione in stelline a questo libro, come sempre quando si tratta di memoriali. É un racconto intenso, crudo, frustrante. Un racconto di rimozione, di non-rielaborazione, senza alcuna crescita. Una protagonista, la stessa Helga, che incontra sua madre per la seconda volta in mezzo secolo, ammette di averla perdonata per l'abbandono subito. Ma tant'é che tra una visita e l'altra trascorrono ventisette anni, e che Helga crolla come una bambina non appena la crudele madre la riconosce. Come può essere questo perdono, interiorizzazione, accettazione? Non é più crescita di quella della madre che non affronta il tempo, che vorrebbe essere la stessa donna di Birkenau, che non si pente delle proprie vittime. Frustrante, dunque, sotto questo punto di vista. Ma pur sempre una storia vera, per ricordarci che la rielaborazione della colpa è un lungo processo, un processo che, talvolta, non giunge a compimento o neanche ha inizio.
—eleonora -
Ultimately, this book was an amazing psychological profile of a female prison guard assigned to various Concentration camps during WW2. While this was the eventual focus of the story, the lead up to that insight was tedious and a bit...obvious. The author saw fit to tell us over and over again, early on, that she hated her mother, clearly assuming the audience would preemptively hate her mother, and so she'd better tell the reader she is with them. I saw this as unnecessary, since a form of revulsion would certainly be implied, and the larger goal I would expect should have been not the monstrosity of the individuals...but their normalcy. Perplexity at such evil and amazement would have been less...maudlin, more real to me.Whether intentional or not, I was far more moved by the vividness and contemporary feel of the mother who ultimately left husband and family to pursue a sense of purpose in following the Nazi party. By no means parallel to the modern era, I nevertheless couldn't help but ask, "what ideal is worth abandoning family over?". All around, a good read, not a riveting or even cathartic read, but good in it's insights and attempts to understand the unthinkable and horrific.
—Matthew
"I've lost. I've lost again." I agree. She got no answers. It seems the times she saw her mother were a waste of time because so many questions were left unanswered! I want answers! So yeah, I feel that leaving yet another time with nothing answered is a loss. I feel she wasted so many years feeling this anger or mixed emotions or whatever you want to call it due to her mother abandoning them that she missed that chance when she might have gotten some answers because she let so many years go by that by the time she was to confront the situation again, the mother was already senile. Maybe the mother saw her inward struggle with everything that she didn't think she was strong enough to hear the "truth" as she so claimed she wanted to know. Maybe that's why she never got those answers and if she was that conflicted and not strong enough to fight for those answers at an earlier time then maybe she just wasn't strong enough to handle the truth. The only bad thing is that we get no answers either. From all the Holocaust stories, this story was quite different and I feel I might have enjoyed it a lot more if those questions had actually gotten answered. I wish I had gotten a lot more insight to the mother regarding her character before she left. I wonder if that man mentioned was an influence, maybe some love interest (?), and the motive for her abandoning everything she knew and her babies and if he was the reason she pursued being a member of the SS. Maybe I missed something. I'm pretty sure she was in a hard situation being that she just couldn't understand how someone she loved and begged not to leave (her mother), someone who is our everything as children, could do such heinous things to people and feel proud about it and still have no remorse. I just wish I could have felt all that emotion everyone is talking about, but all I saw was a senile woman throwing tantrums with a few lucid seconds here and there that was very annoying.
—Dragonsfire
