Stella, by Peter Wyden

Stella: One Woman's True Tale of Evil Betrayal, and Survival in Hitler's Germany, by Peter Wyden
Simon & Schuster, 1992
339 pages, plus 16 pages of b&w photos, list of interviewees, Notes on Sources, Bibliography, index
Library: 940.5315 WYD

Description
In all literature there has never been another book like this-haunting, deeply personal, a document as exciting as a spy novel, a non-fiction, real-life Sophie's Choice.

Stella Goldschlag was blond, beautiful, and seductive. So blond, in fact, that strangers in Berlin in 1935 might have wondered whether she belonged in the Goldschmidt School-a school for Jewish children, founded shortly after the Nazis had removed all "non-Aryan" children from GErman schools.

It was there that Peter Wyden first met Stella. Wyden's family managed to escape to America before the outbreak of the war. Stella's didn't.

When Wyden returned to Germany in 1945 as part of the conquering United States Army, he discovered that Stella had not only survived the Holocaust that had claimed so many of his family and friends, but had become notorious as a "catcher" for the Gestapo, hunting down hidden Jews in wartime Berlin, a collaborator in Hitler's "Final Solution".

The facts were hard to believe, but their truth was borne out by dozens of Jews who had survived this woman's duplicity. What, then, had caused this transformation? What had happened to turn this fondly remembered classmate into a tool of the Gestapo, hunting out the few Jews who had managed to escape the dreaded clutches of the Nazi murderers?

These questions haunted Wyden for decades, finally compelling him to travel back into his past and into the history of so many of his friends who had died during the war. This book is the result of that journey, a trip that carries the reader into Stella's tortured past (she is alive today, and spoke freely with Wyden)through her three murder trials and the trauma inherited by her illegitimate daughter, a nurse in Israel, who rejects all contact with her mother.

It is a nightmare world of hunted Jews, extravagant villains, incredible heroes, and unimaginable evil,a world in which survival was all that mattered...to Stella most of all.

Table of Contents
Book One: Growing up with Hitler
1. The Memory
2. Stella
3. Berlin Boys
4. school for Refugees
5. Exit
6. 1938: The Year the End Began
7. The Third Fire

Book Two: The Great Divide: Getting Out or GEtting Stranded
8. 1939: Trying to Escape
9. Last Stopover to Freedom
10. On the Brink
11. "Everything is being surrounded by the SS"
12. "To the Bath"
13. Life as a U-boat

Book Three: Living with the Gestapo
14. The Decision: Making the Deal with the Devil
15. First Blood
16. The Keeper and the Catcher
17. The Catcher and the Lover
18. The Hertha Triangle
19. The Heino Triangle
20. Final Days

Book Four: Aftermath
21. Stella Again
22. The Trial
23. Stella's Daughter
24. Working for Eichman
25. "Dear Stella..."
26. Judgment
27. Mother's Shadow

Book Five: Overcoming
28. 1988: Year of Endings
29. "You See, Hitler Didn't Win"
The Interviewees
Notes on Sources
Select Bibliography
Index


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