Gone to Ground

One woman's extraordinary account of survival in the heart of Nazi Germany.

'The thread of danger settled round my neck like a noose and kept tightening.  Fear had me in its clutches.  I wanted to save myself, but I had no idea how.'

In the winter of 1941, Marie Jalowicz Simon, a nineteen year old Jewish Berliner, made an extraordinary decision.  All around her, Jews were being rounded up for deportation, forced labour and extermination.  Marie took off the yellow star and vanished into the city.

In the years that followed, Marie lived under an assumed identity, forced to accept shelter wherever she could find it.  Always on the move, never certain who she could trust, Marie moved between almost twenty different safe houses, staying with foreign workers, committed communists adn even convinced Nazis.  Any false move might have led to arrest, and it was only her fierce determination and blink luck which kept her alive.

This is Marie's story, told in her own voice with unflinching honesty after more than fifty years of silence.

Translated by Anthea Bell, with an indtroduction by Lisa Appignanesi and an afterwod by Hermann Simon, sone of Marie Jalowicz Simon.

Hardcover