Helga Schneider: «How I grew up with a mother who tortured Jews in Auschwitz»

This story might seem like the plot of a film that takes your breath away. But the story of Helga Schneider it’s not the plot of a movie, it’s his life.

Someone will probably have read one of his many books: either The Berlin fire or in the famous one Let me go, mother, the author in her pages has always hinted at her incredible existence, often told in a synthetic, sometimes harsh style. How hard are her memories.

Born in 1937 in Silesia, a former Prussian land and at the time under the Third Reich, in 1941 Helga and her little brother Peter, while their father was already at the front, were abandoned in Berlin by their mother who had decided to enlist as an auxiliary in the SS , becoming a guardian in the Ravensrück women’s camp and then in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Helga and Peter are taken in by their father’s sister, Aunt Margarete, who had married the scion of a wealthy Berlin family. During the war, the aunt later committed suicide after being raped by a group of Soviet soldiers in front of her 7-year-old daughter. Meanwhile, during a leave from the front, the father meets a young Berliner, Ursula, who will later become his wife. But the stepmother only accepts little Peter and has Helga interned in a correctional institution for difficult children. Then, over the years, Helga’s life unfolded between the repatriation to Austria, the escapes from the family, the difficult life in Salzburg and then in Vienna, ending up in Italy where she married a Bolognese.

In 1971, having learned of her mother’s still alive existence, she felt the desire to visit her in Vienna. She will only then discover that her mother, who had been convicted by a Nuremberg sub-tribunal as a war criminal, after 30 years did not deny anything of her wicked past.

In Berlin you lived in contact with a Nazi family, what positions did you have in your life?
“Actually my stepfather was against Hitler and my stepmother was quite neutral, but my aunt Hilde, who worked in the propaganda ministry together with Joseph Goebbels, yes, she was a convinced National Socialist. For the rest, I was a child, and what I had suffered from Nazism and the war was hunger, fear of bombs and a stolen childhood. Only growing up did I understand what Hitler’s dictatorship was and the dramatic reality of the Holocaust. It is clear that I am firmly against Nazism, firmly against Adolf Hitler’s criminal regime and his perverse hatred of Jews. It was Hilde who sent us, together with other children, to the bunker under the New Chancellery to visit the Führer. He looked like a decrepit old man to me, she gave me a soft, clammy hand. It is one of those memories that cannot be erased, and which is now linked to the war in Ukraine. I live this war with pain and anguish: it is incomprehensible how after such a long time the exact same thing is happening. It’s amazing that all of Hitler’s Ultimate Evil is happening again in 2023! Has man never learned anything from history?’

But do you think it is necessary to keep memory or at a certain point it is necessary to let go?
“Remembering hurts. After the many books I’ve published about my mother’s history and Hitler’s dictatorship, yes, I would have liked to forget the past, but I can’t, especially since I’ve just finished a book entitled Nordendstrasse 67 my life. It’s the address of the house in Berlin where my brother was born and where I lived the early years with my real mother. As you see, I’m always all over again.’

They say the Germans feel guilty about what happened. Has your mother ever apologized to the Jewish population?
«No, unfortunately my mother never repented, she remained a National Socialist until the end of her days, convinced that she was then on the right side. She had told me that, before starting to be a guardian, she had done a sort of psychological desensitization course in order to be able to withstand the violence and cruelty used in the extermination camps. But I say: hadn’t this sort of brainwashing made her understand something? No, my mother never dreamed of apologizing to anyone. Many have asked me if I have been able to forgive her. I can forgive what she did to me, my brother and my father, but I certainly cannot forgive what she did to Jewish women in Auschwitz. I, in general, find it difficult to hate someone and it is certainly difficult to think of hating your mother, so I can’t say I hate her, but I have never felt any affection or love for her either. A few years ago I had phoned the institution outside Vienna where I knew she was being treated. That’s when they told me she had died, I think in 2001. No, I didn’t cry. Why should I? I asked if she had asked for children and she hadn’t asked for children, never a mention of me or Peter. I told myself that maybe, since she was already dead, she would finally let me go. But it was not so. She still hasn’t let me go. The memory is always there.”

And you today, remembering precisely what your mother did in the concentration camps, what message would you have for the Jewish community?
«It would not be enough to say that I feel sorry for the Shoah, I should say something more, much more, perhaps inexpressible with words. My mother tormented the Jewish women in Auschwitz-Birkenau and for me it is an unbearable thought. Every time I see a film about the Holocaust I feel bad, especially as we know that the reality was much worse”.

January 27th is celebrated Remembrance Daywhat effect does it have on her?
«For many years for Remembrance Day I went to schools to testify about Nazism, the war and the Shoah. I have often given this example to children: “Think for a moment that you are at the table with your family, mum, dad, siblings and perhaps even grandparents, and at a certain point the doorbell rings and there are dogs barking and then they knock down the door and a group of SS men enter shouting ‘schnell, pack a suitcase and in a quarter of an hour you have to be down on the street and get on the truck”. Some kids got teary-eyed even just imagining… It had happened to millions of families who saw their lives raped from one moment to the next. Several times I spoke about it with my writer friend Elisa Springer, who, betrayed by a fascist spy, was arrested in 1944 together with her family and deported. She told me how the SS arrived in Vienna in their shop, how they broke down the door, how everything changed. The story of the Holocaust, my mother, the war, Hitler, it’s all in a big corner of my brain. I wrote a lot about it – perhaps even to elaborate – but today, at 85, the weight is still there».

You have lived in Bologna for many years: why did Italy come to you?
«At the age of twenty I took a trip to Italy, and in Verona I met Elio, a boy from Bologna. I continued to Rome, but on my way back I stopped by him again. It should have been two days, but Elio did everything for me to stay with him. I didn’t have a family, while he had a large and noisy one, who liked me and welcomed me. And so I stayed. That boy then became my husband, even though I’ve been a widow for many years now».

She has a son. What relationship do you have?
“Unfortunately this is a bitter speech. Ours is a non-existent relationship. He distanced himself totally from my story, and from my life, he never accepted that my mother was a war criminal, as if he saw something of her in me, as if he was ashamed of her roots. My son preferred to change his first and last name, he doesn’t want to have anything to do with me. I feel helpless in front of his walls. Otherwise, this was my life.”