Gone To Ground
Marie Jalowicz Simon recounts her wartime survival in Berlin, shedding her yellow star and navigating twenty safe houses.
- Author
- Marie Jalowicz Simon
- Publisher
- The Clerkenwell Press
- Price
- £14.99
- ISBN
- 9781781254141
- Published
- 2017
Gone To Ground by Marie Jalowicz Simon
This memoir recounts an extraordinary feat of urban survival in wartime Berlin. In the winter of 1941, Marie Jalowicz Simon, born into a Jewish family, removed her yellow star and disappeared into the city. Most of her relatives and friends were deported and murdered, yet she endured by constantly moving, changing her identity and trusting almost no one.
Simon slept rough when necessary and made use of more than twenty safe houses offered by communist sympathisers, foreign workers, ordinary Germans and, on one occasion, a committed Nazi. Her story is a testament to mental resilience, resourcefulness and an unwavering instinct for survival. Liberation brought fresh challenges with the arrival of the Red Army.
After the war Simon became a professor of classical antiquity at Berlin’s Humboldt University. Her memoir is a powerful reminder of the courage required simply to stay alive.
ISBN 9781781254141. The Clerkenwell Press. £14.99.