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

__My Wounded Heart__ tells the heart-breaking story of a gifted Jewish doctor, the mother of five children, who, after being divorced by her Aryan husband, is arrested on an absurd charge and sent to a corrective labour camp in 1942. Lilli was a prolific letter writer and miraculously almost all her letters to her children and friends, together with a huge number of their letters to her (smuggled out of the camp at Breitenau before she was sent to Auschwitz), survived the Second World War and only came to light on the death of her son in 1998. In the letters and in Martin Doerry's superb commentary, we see the deterioration of a whole country through the eyes of an ordinary family driven asunder by pressure from the Nazi regime. We see Lilli's initial optimism and love of her husband begin to crack. We see her trying to support and run the family home from Breitenau camp, but relying totally on her twelve-year-old daughter, Ilse. And we see the difficulties for the children of living with their father's mistress, now his wife, after a bombing raid destroys the family home. And perhaps most moving of all, we see Ilse's heroic attempts to meet her mother, even though it means going into the labour camp itself, and Lilli's courage in the face of her inevitable end. "From her idealistic youth until the end of her life, Lilli Jahn was a prolific letter writer. A resourceful and strong-minded young woman, she studied medicine in Cologne and in her letters discussed theater, music, literature, art, and religion. She wooed and won her Protestant friend and fellow medical student, Ernst Jahn, by letter, and in 1926 she married him. Together they set up house and a medical practice and started a family." "But in 1933, when Hitler took power, everything changed. Ernst Jahn came under increasing pressure from the local Nazis to divorce his Jewish wife, which he did in 1942. From that moment Lilli and her five children were left unprotected. Arrested and sent to the Breitenau labor camp, Lilli was angry and afraid, but she could at least write and receive letters. Miraculously, almost all her letters to her children and friends have survived, together with many of theirs to her that were smuggled out of Breitenau as Lilli realized she would be sent to perish at Auschwitz." "In these letters, and in the narrative by Martin Doerry, Lilli's grandson, we see the deterioration of Germany under National Socialism through the eyes of an ordinary family. We watch as Lilli's initial optimism begins to crack, and as she tries to run the household and mother her children from a labor camp far away, relying on her twelve-year-old daughter Ilse. Perhaps most movingly of all, we see the children's heroic attempts to save their mother, and their struggle to continue to believe in her return."--BOOK JACKET. "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"--Publisher's description A series of letters offer an incredible and tragic insight into the life of an ordinary Jewish woman under persecution in the Nazi regime