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This unusual memoir is the story of a self-described "dark, pudgy, mean, defiant little brat," born in Berlin in 1929 of a half-Jewish mother and a Catholic father and sent to a concentration camp almost, it seems, as a bureaucratic formality. Raised Catholic, Cordelia Edvardson had little in common with her fellow inmates, some of whom despised her as a "German swine." Singled out for punishment, she was selected to act as a secretary for the monstrous "angel of Auschwitz," Josef Mengele. Impressionistic and naïve, Edvardson's third-person memoir retains a highly effective childlike quality ("she had learned that anything can happen, no matter what and no matter when, and for inexplicable reasons") that holds even in the most horrifying episodes. After World War II ended, Edvardson moved to Sweden, where this book was first published. She then converted to Judaism and moved to Israel.
Written more than a decade ago but just now translated into English (and beautifully so), this Holocaust memoir is pulsing with hidden life. Edvardson's unmarried half-Jewish mother fled her small judgmental German hometown for the anonymity of Berlin only to encounter the horrors of the Nazis. A timely marriage kept her from harm but left her Catholic-raised, prepubescent daughter vulnerable. Shy and precocious, Edvardson was faced with the unfaceable: either cooperate with the SS or put her mother in danger. So, full of grace and love, she submitted willingly to it all--the cramping fear, the belief in having been "chosen" to suffer, the suffocating loneliness, the filth and hunger, the satanic, psychically savage routine at Auschwitz as one of Mengele's slaves. And these horrific trials of body and soul were only the beginning: after being rescued, Edvardson had to begin the long work of coming to terms with survivor's guilt in a world anxious to "wipe the slate clean."
Donna Seaman
