A Final Reckoning

A Hannover Family's Life and Death in the Shoah

By: Ruth Gutmann

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Hardcover | 15 December 2013

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A work of both childhood memory and adult reflection undergirded with scholarly research, A Final Reckoning resonates with emotional intensity and insight.

Ruth Gutmann's memoir, first published in Germany in 2002, recounts her life not only as a concentration camp inmate and survivor, but also as a sister and daughter. Ruth; her twin sister, Eva; stepmother, Mania; and father, Samuel Herskovits, were interned in both Thereisenstadt and Auschwitz-Birkenau between June 1943 and March 1944, where all but Gutmann and her sister perished. Ruth and Eva spent the remainder of the war in numerous other camps.

Gutmann's memoir is compelling in several respects. It spans her birth and early life in Hannover, Germany; her escape to Holland on a kindertransport; her forced return to Hannover; her deportation to the concentration camps (where Ruth and Eva attracted the attention of Josef Mengele, though they were ultimately spared from his murderous studies of twin siblings); and her life postliberation.

Particularly striking is Gutmann's portrait of her father, Samuel, a leader in the Jewish community of Hannover who was forced under extreme pressure to communicate and, in some cases, cooperate with Nazi officials. Gutmann uses her own memories as well as years of reflection and academic study to reevaluate his role in their community. A Final Reckoning provides not only insights into Gutmann's own experience as a child in the midst of the atrocities of the Holocaust, but also a window into the lives of those, like her father, who were forced to carry on and comply with the regime that would ultimately bring about their demise.

Industry Reviews

"Like most survivors, Ruth asks as the memoir of her wartime experience comes to an end, how she and her twin sister, Eva, were able to survive. Despite marrying and creating a family, she says she struggled with this burden the rest of her adult life."
--Kenneth Waltzer
"Written in measured and dispassionate prose, Ruth Gutmann's story of her German childhood and years in assorted Nazi concentration camps brings a compelling voice to the genre of Holocaust memoir. By quietly revealing how the Nazis slowly tore apart the fabric of her comfortable middle-class existence in the city of Hannover and by unashamedly confronting her father's efforts as a Jewish official to save his family and his community, she demonstrates the complete inadequacy of words like 'passivity' or 'collaborator' to illuminate the complex human response to evil."
--Muriel R. Gillick, author of Once They Had a Country: Two Teenage Refugees in the Second World War

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