concentration camp guards

"Originally written in a couple of humble exercise books, which were anonymously donated to the Memorial Human Rights Centre in Moscow, this... diary is one of the few first-person accounts to survive the sprawling Soviet prison system. At the back of these exercise books there is a blurred snapshot and a note, "Chistyakov, Ivan Petrovich, repressed in 1937-38"--Jacket flap.

Describes the reunion of Helga Schneider and her mother, who left Helga, her siblings, and their father and became a Nazi SS "Corrections" officer at Auschwitz and Birkenau.

Helga Schneider, abandoned in 1941 by her mother who joined the Nazi SS and went to work as a guard at Auschwitz, discusses her second and final meeting with the woman, who at age eighty-seven and confined to a Vienna nursing home, remained unrepentant about her past.