Abandoned by her mother who left to pursue a career as a camp guard at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and loathed by her stepmother, Schneider endured the horrors of wartime Berlin cooped up in a cellar, starved, parched, and lonely, amidst the fetid crush of her neighbors. The grinding misery of hunger combined with the terror of air-raids, the absence of fresh water, and the constant threat of death and diseasetyphus, influenza, or simply the apparently petty inflammations of bedbug bitesserved not to unite the inhabitants of her block but rather to intensify the minor irritations of communal life...

When Helga Schneider was four, her mother, Traudi, abandoned her to pursue her career. In 1998, Helga receives a letter asking her to visit Traudi, now 90-years old, before she dies. Mother and daughter have met only once before since Traudi left, on a disastrous visit where Helga first learnt the terrible secret of her mother's past. also 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. desperately sad and extraordinarily...