Berlin 1941. Marie Jalowicz Simon, a nineteen-year-old Jewish woman, makes an extraordinary decision. All around her, Jews are being rounded up for deportation, forced labour and extermination. Marie takes off the yellow star and vanishes into the city. In the years that follow, Marie lives under an assumed identity, moving between almost twenty different safe houses. She is forced to accept shelter wherever she can find it, and many of those she stayed with expected services in return. She stays with foreign workers, committed communists and even convinced Nazis. Any false move might lead to arrest. Always on the move, never certain who could be trusted and how far, it was her quick-witted determination and the most amazing and hair-raising strokes of luck that ensured her survival. This is Marie's extraordinary story, told in her own voice with unflinching honesty after more than fifty years of silence.

Author Biography

Marie Jalowicz Simon was born in 1922 and came from a middle-class Jewish family. She escaped the ghettos and concentration camps that claimed the lives of so many other Jews during the Second World War, by living in hiding in Berlin. After the war she taught classics and philosophy at the Berlin Humboldt University, but rarely spoke about her past. Shortly before her death in 1998, her son recorded her telling her story for the first time. This book is based on the tapes he recorded.