Brings Jewish persecution to life. | Divided Lives: The Untold Stories of Jewish-Christian Women in Nazi...

Divided LIves, a review by an appreciative reader and friend | Divided Lives: The Untold Stories of Jewish-Christian Women in Nazi Germany | Cynthia A. Crane

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	• Divided Lives: The Untold Stories of Jewish-Christian Women in Nazi Germany Cynthia A. Crane Palgrave Macmillan, 2000 - 352 pages average customer review:based on 9 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Riviting Stories

"Divides Lives" tells the stories of woman living a in a real life "twilight zone" during the Third Reich. Dr. Crane brings her characters to life and the reader is swept into their confusing and frightening world. I am not particularly enamored by Holocaust literature. I have had my fill of books, articles and movies which portray the horrors of the camps. However, this book is different. These stories would stand by themselves regardless of the setting. The implications for our modern world, alluded to in the author's musings, are staggering. Anyone who enjoys short stories or biographies will absolutely love this book. I can hardly wait for Dr. Crane's next work.

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Brings Jewish persecution to life.

Many of the mischling women interviewed in this book state that the young people of today, especially Americans don't have any feeling whatsoever for what happened in WWII. Sadly, they are correct in that we learn about the war, but we don't learn about real life during the war. Facts and technical outlines of battles can only give one the surface of the struggle. To dig deeper, you need to read first person accounts such as the ones given in this book...stories of persecution and oppression that will make the war seem all too real. The paper thin line of distinction between Germans and Jews comes to life here with the children of Jewish/Christian parents who are ranked according to the amount of Jewish blood they carry...first degree half-Jew or second degree quarter-Jew. Most are saved from the concentration camps by their affiliation with their Aryan (German) family, but all suffer some amount of anti-semitism and persecution under the Third Reich. This is a revealing portrait of the fate of the mischlinge, a people who are often forgotten in the gruesome and humiliating saga of the holocaust.

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Divided LIves, a review by an appreciative reader and friend

After reading this accumulation of sensitive and very private stories by the subjects still alive in Germany, I recommended to the author that this book should be required reading in high schools across the USA.
The women who dared have their stories told survived an unbelievable period in German history in the 1930s and 40s. Reading the painful recollections of the personal experiences of the subject Jewish women under the domination of the Third Reich reveals an awful human experiment too horrible to fully understand, but important that it be revealed.
Readers will not be disappointed in the revelations extracted by the author, who has a personal connection to this period in history. Her father was a fraternity brother of mine, and I only recently learned of the humiliations he suffered before he escaped to the United states at age ten. Humiliations that have affected him ever since.
The author learned why her maiden name isn't the same as her father's original last name. And that triggered the quest to learn more, and thus the research in Germany and this book.

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Insights can be uplifting

I remember reading a poem back when I was a boy about the poet's life in the segregation era south that his father white and his mother black and being subjected to bigots both black and white. Somehow the meaning felt true while reading this book.

From the little boy who was beaten by nazi teachers because his father was Jewish, to the little girl whose Jewish father fled to America but sent divorce papers to his gentile wife, the stories here are in many ways far from pleasant. But not all the perpetrators are from the same group. A husband kicked out of the nazi party because of his wife's heritage, balanced against that of a girl kicked out of the BDM because of her heritage, only to discover after moving into in her new town the local BDM leadress telling her she was going to be in the BDM whether she liked or not 'unofficially'. A girl whose policeman father was driven mad by the stress and murdered by the T4 fiends to the loss of so many Jewish relatives by each, this is a very insightful book.

Life was not happy for these women when they were girls. Being prevented form joining the BDM because of their heritage or kicked out if the BDM found out. Being kept out of many things. Being stuck in the middle of nazi germany with less than politically correct heritage under allied bombs. Somehow they survived to tell their stories.

I didn't think it was up the the standards of Hitler's Jewish Soldiers, but that book drew from a larger pool of individuals.
But within its small scale, it's pretty good.

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Great resource for the classroom!

Unlike Schindler's List, in Divided Lives, a book by Cynthia Crane, the reader is able to put a face with a name and learn about personal experiences before, during, and after the war. No longer are these people just statistics, but they are actual people who had a life that was turned upside down by the Holocaust. Divided Lives is the type of resource that could be used in schools, especially high school, to show the truth about what Holocaust victims went through day after day and the effects it had on the rest of their lives. Divided Lives not only shows students about the uniqueness of this period in history, but children can also connect on an emotional level and learn an appreciation for their own lives and the human race.

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Divided Lives is a book that brings together the horrifying life stories of women from Jewish-Christian marriages whose families were persecuted under Hitler?s Third Reich. These women, the ?Mischling,? ?half breeds,? or ?half Jews,? were subjected to an onslaught of anti-Jewish laws that divided spouses, family, and friends. From the early Hitler years through post- war Germany, the book chronicles these women?s personal struggles, joys, losses, and terror as well as how they maneuvered in a country that had betrayed them. Relatively little has been written about the plight of Jewish-Christian ?mixed? families, perhaps because of the complex and controversial split between their Jewish and Christian roots. Crane, whose family suffered under these laws, has collected, translated, and interpreted the life stories of ten women who survived. These are universal stories of hope and survival that transcend time, race, religion, class, and gender.

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