Stella : One Woman's True Tale of Evil, Betrayal, and Survival in Hitler's Germany

In all literature there has never been another book like this - haunting, deeply personal, a document as exciting as any 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 well 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 not only had 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 illegitimatedaughter, 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.