"Divided Lives brings together the real-life stories of women who one day awoke to find they were not who they thought they were. Before the rise of Hitler these women for the most part had never thought of themselves as Jewish: their parent or spouse was fully assimilated into German culture, they were not particularly religious, and many had even been baptized. Yet as part of his attempts to define Jewish "race," Hitler called the children of Jewish-Christian marriages Mischlinge, or half-breeds, somewhere "between man and ape." This split status, which to some degree allowed these women to fare better than those considered fully Jewish, by no means shielded them or their families from persecution under the Nuremberg Laws. Today these women continue to struggle: with the nightmares of the Third Reich and the Holocaust, with the loss of their families in concentration camps, and with their own identities - divided between Jewish and Christian roots."--BOOK JACKET.