My Wounded Heart: The Life of Lilli Jahn, 1900-1944 - Hardcover

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9781582343709: My Wounded Heart: The Life of Lilli Jahn, 1900-1944

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1582343705 ISBN 13: 9781582343709

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2004

An international sensation already sold in fifteen languages, this heartbreaking collection of recently discovered letters captures the destruction not only of a life but also of an entire nation.

Born in 1900 to wealthy Jewish parents, Lilli Jahn stood firmly among the German bourgeoisie. A doctor by training, she married a young Protestant physician. Her husband divorced her in 1942, after sixteen years of marriage and five children, leaving her with no means of supporting her family (Jews were no longer allowed to practice medicine), and no protection from the dangers to come. Arrested by the Gestapo in 1943, Lilli perished in Auschwitz in 1944.

My Wounded Heart is a collection of three-hundred-odd letters between Lilli, her children, and their circle of friends, extending from the mid-1930s to just before her death. Full of everyday details of life from both Lilli and her correspondents, these extraordinary letters are both informative and moving. In the end, we are witness to her daughter's attempts to meet her mother, even though it means going into the labor camp itself, and Lilli's courage in the face of her inevitable end.

Introduced by and with narrative commentary from Lilli's grandson, My Wounded Heart is a literary and historic work on par with the wartime diaries of Anne Frank and Victor Klemperer.

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About the Author:

Martin Doerry is Lilli Jahn's grandson and the editor in chief of Der Spiegel magazine. He studied German literature and history in T�bingen and Z�rich and completed his Ph.D. in modern history.

From Publishers Weekly:

By the time the Gestapo arrested Dr. Lilli Jahn in 1943, she had been forced to stop practicing medicine, ostracized by her German neighbors in Immenhausen and divorced by her non-Jewish husband, Ernst, after he'd had a child with a fellow doctor whom he subsequently married. Confined to her home, Lilli found joy in her five children until her deportation. One of the most unusual stories to come out of the Holocaust, Lilli's tale is told largely through letters she wrote, dating from her courtship with Ernst in 1923 through her final 1944 letter from Auschwitz ("I'm well, I'm working at my profession," she writes in the censored message), and from more than 250 letters from her children between 1943 and 1944, when Lilli was incarcerated at a forced labor camp in Breitenau. Its graphic depiction of the fate of Jews in so-called "privileged" mixed marriages and the way national politics affected domestic life make this a valuable addition to the Holocaust canon. The children's letters detail their daily activities. For her part, Lilli had only one goal: "I'm being careful and my one thought is to come back to you fit and well and, I hope, soon." Doerry, Lilli's grandson and editor of the German magazine Der Spiegel, could easily have turned this into a maudlin and melodramatic story. Instead, he has wisely chosen to let the letters speak for themselves, confining himself to inserting details and filling in historical information where necessary. The result is a heartbreaking story that powerfully illustrates love's power to wound—and to heal. 16 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW.
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