Stella: One Woman's True Tale of Evil, Betrayal, and Survival in the Holocaust

A blonde, blue-eyed, beautiful Jewess, Stella Goldschlag exploited her looks and sex as a ``catcher'' for the Gestapo, hunting down hundreds of fellow Jews who were then sent to Nazi death camps. Wyden ( Bay of Pigs ), who fled Hitler's Germany in 1937 at the age of 13, was Stella's classmate in Berlin in a ``non-Aryan'' school they were forced to attend. In a gripping, extraordinary, deeply disturbing book, one of the most moving Holocaust documents, Wyden explains Goldschlag's unspeakable crimes in a psychically numbing way. Imprisoned and tortured by the Gestapo, she went to work for them after being promised that her parents would be spared. (The Nazis lied; her parents were later shipped to Auschwitz.) In 1990 Wyden tracked down Stella in Germany. Unrepentant, loathing Jews, she considers herself an unjustly maligned victim, having spent 10 years in Soviet prison camps. Wyden also interviewed Stella's daughter, Yvonne Meissl, born in 1945, now a nurse in Israel, who has recurring fantasies of shooting Stella dead to expunge her memory forever. Photos. BOMC, QPB and History Book Club alternates. (Nov.)