A01=Helga Schneider
alone in berlin
anonymous is a woman
anthony beevor
antony beevor
Author_Helga Schneider
autobiography
berlin 1945
berlin a decade
berlin beevor
berlin travel guide
biographies
biographies and autobiographies
biography
caroline moorehead
Category=DNBA
Category=NHD
Category=NHWL
Category=NHWR7
diary of a
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eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
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eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
ferrante my brilliant friend
hitlers home front
let it go
let me go
memoir
my brilliant friend elena ferrante
roger moorhouse
secrets of the sewing bee
the last nazi
the view from the corner shop
war
women in the war
ww2
ww2 infographics
ww2 non non-fiction
ww2 non-fiction non-fiction
ww2 resistance
wwii
Product details
- ISBN 9780099443735
- Weight: 160g
- Dimensions: 129 x 198mm
- Publication Date: 02 Feb 2006
- Publisher: Vintage Publishing
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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Abandoned by her mother, who left to pursue a career as a camp guard at Auschwitz-Birkenau, loathed by her step-mother, cooped up in a cellar, starved, parched, lonely amidst the fetid crush of her neighbours, Helga Schneider endured the horrors of wartime Berlin. The Bonfire of Berlin is a searing account of her survival. The grinding misery of hunger, combined with the terror of air-raids, the absence of fresh water and the constant threat of death and disease served not to unite the tenants and neighbours of her apartment block but rather to intensify the minor irritations of communal life into flashpoints of rage and violence. And with Russian victory the survivors could not look forward a return to peacetime but rather to pillage and rape. It was only gradually that Schneider's life returned to some kind of normality, as her beloved father returned from the front, carrying his own scars of the war. This shocking book evokes the reality of life in a wartime city in all its brutality and deprivation, while retaining a kernel of hope that while life remains not all is lost.
Helga Schneider was born in German Poland but spent her childhood in Berlin where she was raised by her stepmother after being abandoned by her mother. She has lived in Bologna since 1963, and is the author of Let Me Go.
