My Wounded Heart

Fülszöveg

'My Wounded Heart is a real discovery, a huge, moving document about a private catastrophe in the midst of a political one' Eva Menasse, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
'I have never said of a book that every school should have one, but I am saying it now' Martin Walser, Süddeutsche Zeitung
When Lilli Jahn's Aryan husband and fellow doctor separated from her under pressure from the Nazis, she and her children were left unprotected and Lilli was arrested and sent to Breitenau labour camp. She was a prolific letter writer and, miraculously, almost all her letters to her children and friends have survived together with many of theirs to her, which she smuggled out of Breitenau once she knew she would be sent to Auschwitz. The full extent of these letters (more than 500 of them) only came to light on the death of her son, Gerhard Jahn, a deputy in the German parliament, in 1998.
Martin Doerry's narrative and, above all, the letters themselves show the deterioration of Germany... Tovább

Fülszöveg

'My Wounded Heart is a real discovery, a huge, moving document about a private catastrophe in the midst of a political one' Eva Menasse, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
'I have never said of a book that every school should have one, but I am saying it now' Martin Walser, Süddeutsche Zeitung
When Lilli Jahn's Aryan husband and fellow doctor separated from her under pressure from the Nazis, she and her children were left unprotected and Lilli was arrested and sent to Breitenau labour camp. She was a prolific letter writer and, miraculously, almost all her letters to her children and friends have survived together with many of theirs to her, which she smuggled out of Breitenau once she knew she would be sent to Auschwitz. The full extent of these letters (more than 500 of them) only came to light on the death of her son, Gerhard Jahn, a deputy in the German parliament, in 1998.
Martin Doerry's narrative and, above all, the letters themselves show the deterioration of Germany through the eyes of an ordinary family. We see Lilli's initial optimism begin to crack. We see her trying to run the household and mother her children from a camp far away, all the while relying totally on her twelve-year-old daughter Ilse. Perhaps most movingly of all, we see the children's heroic attempts to save their mother, their struggle to continue to believe in her return, and finally we see Lilli's own courage in the face of her inevitable end.
My Wounded Heart is a tribute to an ordinary woman of extraordinary courage, and essential to our understanding of the reality of Hitler's Germany.
Martin Doerry is Lilli Jahn's grandson and Deputy Editor in Chief of Der Spiegel. Vissza