Clandestina

In 1942, Marie Jalowicz Simon, a nineteen-year-old Jew from Berlin, decided that she would do anything to avoid concentration camps. Because very soon many knew where those trains led, they knew that at the end of those trips there was only death. She then left the Siemens factory where she was a forced laborer, tore off her yellow star, assumed a false identity, and disappeared into the city. In the years that followed, Ella Marie Ella went into hiding wherever shelter was offered, staying with her most unlikely companions and hosts, from circus performers and committed communists to rabid Nazis. However, as she quickly learned, compassion and cruelty are often two sides of the same coin. Fifty years later, just a few months before her death, Marie agreed to tell her story for the first time. Told with unflinching honesty, Clandestina is a book like no other about everyday life, unspeakably hostile and sometimes absurd, but also overflowing with beauty and hope, in wartime Berlin. Relentless, the author describes with unusual frankness, without falling into sentimentality, her struggle to survive in the most compelling solitude. Until June 1945 she escaped raids, denunciations, violence, cold, disease and hunger. She also to the most stark scenes of abuse: her unique exploits reveal all the contradictions and ambivalences of the human being. No holds barred and full of humor, her unusual courage, insight and wit will keep her safe. Her memoirs are, at the same time, an unprecedented historical document and the legacy of an exceptional woman, of absolute lucidity and heroism.