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Marie Jalowicz Simon

Biography

Marie Jalowicz Simon

Marie Jalowicz Simon was born in 1922 into a middle-class Jewish family. She escaped the ghettos and concentration camps during the Second World War by hiding in Berlin. After the war she was full professor of the literary cultural history of classical antiquity at the Berlin Humboldt University. Shortly before her death, her son, Hermann Simon, director of the New Synagogue Berlin Foundation-Centrum Judaicum, recorded Marie telling her story. He will act as spokesperson for the book.

Marie Jalowicz Simon

Books by Marie Jalowicz Simon

Underground in Berlin: A Young Woman's Extraordinary Tale of Survival in the Heart of Nazi Germany
written by Marie Jalowicz Simon, translated by Anthea Bell - History, Memoir, Nonfiction

In 1942, Marie Jalowicz, a 20-year-old Jewish Berliner, made the extraordinary decision to do everything in her power to avoid the concentration camps. She removed her yellow star, took on an assumed identity and disappeared into the city. In the years that followed, Marie took shelter wherever it was offered, living with the strangest of bedfellows, from circus performers and committed communists to convinced Nazis. As Marie quickly learned, however, compassion and cruelty are very often two sides of the same coin. Fifty years later, she agreed to tell her story for the first time.

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