"Stella: One Woman's True Tale of Evil, Betrayal and Survival in Hitler's Germany" by Peter Wyden (1992)

 

I saw this book in a souvenir shop of the Berlin's Jewish Museum - it attracted me instantly and I made a mental note to find it later. It took me forever to actually put my hands on the book that is out of print and difficult to find but once I started reading it, I could not put it down. It was very gripping and the last few chapters were particularly interesting as they discuss various psychological aspects and post-traumatic behaviour of not only war survivors but their children as well. I should probably go back and re-read them again. 

The unusual subject of the story - a Jewish woman collaborating with Nazis and hunting other Jews in a wartime Berlin - combined with clumsy but earnest writing (the author is bursting with a desire to tell this story, so it might appear unpolished) made for a gripping read. It is a very serious subject, documented with a real-life characters and places - on top of this, there is quite a lot of soul-searching as Wyden constantly goes back to his idealised school crush Stella who has in the meantime became a symbol of evil. Or survival? Wyden is aware that nothing is black-and-white and often asks himself what would HE do if he was in the same situation. And there is a very the thin line between being simply a opportunist (like a nurse Elly who had a relationship with Nazi Dobberke, but had not hurt anyone) and a full-blown collaborator (like Stella who had actually hunting people and sending them to Auschwitz). 

Wyden twists himself in a pretzel trying to understand how can someone like Stella send people to their deaths and still continue to live, apparently satisfied with herself - there is this monumental discussion of guilt and survival - but here I must put my own five cents in: I went trough a war myself. And with all the darkness and fear around me, I have never ever lost the sight of my moral compass and never hurt anybody, in fact I was always perfectly polite to civilians because this is who I am and forever will be. I understand there will always be some who will protect their own skin, but this is how the world turns, I am not one of them and refuse to accept something that is morally wrong and offensive. There were others, also arrested and tortured like Stella, who refused to collaborate with Gestapo and rather went to Auschwitz - so she is more of a crooked exception than a example.