A Cannibal Who Consumed Her Own

...In trying to account for her apparent zeal in aiding the Nazis, Wyden draws up a list of possible motives: "Fear of her own possible deportation...

...Stella nonetheless managed to lead a comparatively charmed life until July 1943...

...Pointing to the thriving remnants (mostly transplanted) of the prewar German-Jewish world, and to the unusually sound mental health of second-generation survivors, he enthuses over the prospects for Jews today, proclaiming: "You see, Hitler, you didn't win...

...Stella quickly came to represent the "elite" of the catcher profession, "indeed its very embodiment," with her computer-like memory for names, dates and addresses...

...It lacked the story...

...Her friends recall that she began to act "like an instrument of the law, licensed by the Gestapo—not just ordered—to do away with the Jews...

...We are the same as you, only much more unhappy...

...More important, he succeeded in tracking down and interviewing Goldschlag, who now lives in rural Germany under a variety of pseudonyms...

...Luck and privilege were essential...

...Reviewed by Susan Miron Free-lance critic...

...Ach, you'll see, two years pass so quickly," an American official told her hapless father...

...contributor, "Partisan Review," "Salmagundi," "Forward" "While I don't possess a photographic memory," Peter Wyden writes in the opening pages of this riveting, and often revolting, biography, "certain people and scenes from my adolescence left a lasting imprint on my brain...

...Upon further inquiry, however, he came to realize that these accusations were true: Stella was not only a worldclass example of Jewish Selbsthass, but "a chronic perjurer, enmeshed in murderous conspiracies, responsible for countless deaths...

...Wyden could not help noticing that she "didn't seem to reflect at all...

...She was his school's "Marilyn Monroe: tall, slim, leggy, cool, with light blue eyes, teeth out of a toothpaste ad, and pale satin skin...

...Stella's family had neither...

...lottery of winners and losers, their fate was set...

...Fear of a still-likely Hitler victory...

...Having quite consciously relied on her looks since childhood as her way to be outstanding," Wyden writes, "she suddenly found them ephemeral, meaningless" as she lay in a bloody heap on the floor...

...Wyden concludes by rejoicing that he has finally "purged" Stella from his life by converting his "childhood fascination into a biography...

...The book's epigraph is aptly drawn from Primo Levi: "It is neither easy nor agreeable to dredge this abyss of viciousness, and yet I think it needs to be done...

...A year after she began her work as a catcher, though, they were sent away...

...In reconstructing the life of Stella Goldschlag, Wyden illuminates the largely unchronicled world of "U-boats," as the Jews in hiding were called, and their predators: the catchers (Greifer), raiders (Ordner), stool pigeons (Spilzel), and retrievers (Abholer...

...Loss of her bourgeois prewar identity...

...As it is, the figure that emerges is fully rounded and utterly human...

...What circumstances, in other words, led some among the hunted to become hunters...

...In 1946 he wrote a six-page article entitled "My Girl Stella" for magazine publication...

...Wyden deftly describes this period of frantic attempts to flee Germany before the last escape hatches were shut...

...The question that most troubles the author is, "How could she—when she was a Jew like the rest of us...

...He also contacted his subject's relatives, ex-husbands, friends, schoolmates, and surviving victims...

...Stripped of her strongest defense, she began working with two practiced catchers, enthusiastically turning over hidden Jews...

...In the...

...to pronounce them guilty for her travail because they were Jews —dirt...

...Nobody wanted it," he recalls...

...One of these is Stella at 14, on her way to gym class at Goldschmidt's inher ruffled black gym shorts...

...Thanks to the author's skillful interweaving of pithy quotation and narrative, Stella reads like a thriller...

...Yet that Hitler came as close to "winning" as he did makes the actions of his abettors, the Stellas of this world, seem all the more heinous...

...it was "as if a relative had been unmasked as a serial killer...

...Now a Christian convert, Stella insisted to the author that the Jewish eyewitnesses at her trial had been "merciless" and had told "only lies": "They hated me like the plague because I was blond and pretty...

...Stella's blond hair, perfect posture, cleverness, and verbal agility were among the assets for which she might have been remembered fondly, if not with a touch of envy, had she not also possessed a deadly streak of Jewish self-hatred that propelled her to become "a cannibal who consumed her own...

...Had he cared less for "fairness" (or less for Stella), he might have given us a simpler villain...

...If she wanted to live, she could not be identified with this dirt, she had to show that she had steel enough to help clean up, not to be cleaned away...

...To Stella, expelled from public school during the early Hitler years despite her Aryan looks, Jews were "losers...

...Then, presumed to have information on a Jewish forger, she was arrested and tortured...

...Wyden himself managed to escape Germany in 1937, finding refuge in the U.S...

...It amounted to a question mark, a young man's heart spasm...

...Wyden's fellow alumni of the Goldschmidt School were incredulous when they heard about Stella's treachery...

...Indeed, many of the scores of eyewitnesses and survivors the author spoke with remember the "blond Lorelei" as Berlin's premier informer...

...To help unearth the ugly details, Wyden enlisted a small army of historians, psychiatrists, archivists, researchers, and eyewitnesses...

...His work thus transcends mere biography, contributing a crucial piece to the puzzle of the Holocaust...

...She wished fervently to "rise above" her Jewishness—especially upon learning, not long after Kristallnacht, that her family's turn to emigrate would not come for two years...

...Wyden believes that this dealt a new blow to her already imbalanced psyche...

...a "catcher" working with the Gestapo to round up Jews in hiding, most of whom were sent on to Theresienstadt or Auschwitz...

...Perhaps above all, the author surmises, Stella hoped to keep her parents off the transports to the East...

...Fear of more torture in the basement...

...Grasping for parallels, he again cites Primo Levi, who was told by an Auschwitz "crematorium raven": "You mustn't think that we are monsters...

...After the War (in which he saw three years of military service), he learned about Stella's activities and became obsessed with her "unholy role reversal...

...During her war-crimes trial, she denied everything—a stance she maintains to this day...

...and the monkey-see-monkey-do echo given off daily by her new in-group, her fellow Jewish catchers...

...Wyden has done his dredging passionately, yet with precision and detachment...

...Stella's Gestapo handlers were immediately impressed by this "star waiting to be discovered...

...I had only clippings from the suspect Soviet-controlled East Berlin press with bizarre-sounding accusations...

...Like many of his classmates at the school for Jewish children in Berlin in the mid 1930s—and later, countless other men—Wyden longed for and fantasized about Stella Goldschlag...

...Where would they find another blond, blue-eyed Jewess who could wiggle her way into any male confidence, who knew the habits, contacts, hiding places, and psychology of the U-boats, who could spot these tenacious resisters on the streets and in the cafes, and who was herself so desperate, so greedy to survive, and tough enough to recover from torture with no visible damage...