Rating: 4/5
This book is the memoir of Hannelore Wolff, or Laura Hillman, who came from a large Jewish family. When the war broke out, her father was murdered by the Nazis on his way home from work. A month or so later, she received a note from her mother, Karoline, saying that Karoline and Hannelore’s brothers, Selly and Wolfgang, had been deported. Desperately upset and feeling very alone tucked away by herself in her Jewish boarding school, a sixteen-year-old Hannelore wrote to the Nazis requesting that they let her go with her brothers and mother. Amazingly, the Nazis complied to her wish.
Sadly, Hannelore was separated from Selly, Wolfgang and her mother just weeks after they arrived at their labour camp. Fifteen-year-old Selly was beaten to death in Majdanek concentration camp. Hannelore never heard from her mother or Wolfgang again.
Hannelore described life in the seven different labour and concentration camps she was deported to during WWII as a “journey through hell.” She was lucky enough, however, to appear (with the man who would later become her husband) on the famous “Schindler’s list.” Although she got there in the end, she went through horrific situations to reach Schindler’s live-saving factory camp. A few weeks before she discovered she was on the Schindler’s list, she was raped and taken from her labour camp to a concentration camp all in the same day. When she found out that she and her lover Bernhard “Dick” Hillman were on the famous life-saving list, she was ecstatic. However, when she and the other people on the list were loaded onto the train ready to be taken to Schindler’s factory, they found that they had been cheated. On leaving the train, they discovered themselves in Auschwitz.
At one point during her time in Auschwitz, Hannelore did not pass the health inspection. The Nazis classed her as too ill to work. She was sent to the gas chamber. Luckily, a row of the women who had passed the test marched past, back to their barracks, and when the guards were not looking Hannelore slipped into the row. In her memoir, Hannelore said that if the women going back to their barracks noticed her, they said nothing.
Fortunately, Oskar Schindler discovered that the Jews he had meant to save had been taken to Auschwitz, and he came to the cheated prisoners’ rescue shortly before another health inspection could take Hannelore back to the gas chamber.
When WWII was over, Hannelore married Dick. Together they had a son. Although Dick died in 1986, Hannelore is still alive at age 96. If you want to research her, Hannelore changed her name to Laura and, of course, her maiden name was changed to Hillman when she married Dick. By the end of WWII, sixty-three members of Hannelore’s family had been murdered by the Nazis. Only she and her two sisters, Rosel and Hildegard, survived the Holocaust.
I quite liked this book. It was very sad but quite well written.