Invisible Walls

Ingeborg Hecht's father, a prosperous Jewish attorney, was divorced from his titled German wife in 1933 - two years before the promulgation of the Nurmberg laws - and so was deprived of what these laws termed ""privileged mixed matrimony"". He died in Auschwitz. His two children, called ""half-Jews,"" were stripped of their rights, prevented from earning a living and forbidden to marry. Hecht writes of what it was like to live under these circumstances, sharing heartbreaking details of her personal life, including the death of her daughter's father, who was killed on the Russian front; the death of her own father - who had been forbidden all contact with his family - after he was deported in 1944; her own fears of dying, and her feelings of shame at faring better than most of her family and friends. Hecht also offers a description of life after the war, when the government attempted ""restitution"" to the survivors.