From Stay Alive! Berlin 1939-1945, by Ian Buruma (Penguin, 2026), pp. 138-139:
The introduction of the star brought back the life-and-death question of who counted as a Jew. Some mixed families, temporarily protected by a “privileged” status, lived peculiar double lives. Marlene Herzfeld was five when the war began. I spoke to her in her house in Steglitz where she was bedridden. She was still living at home but was facing an operation—“my last chance, perhaps.” Hers was a story of great bitterness. “It would have been better for my mother if I hadn’t been born,” she said, in the firm tone of one who had learned to live with pain. Her mother had converted to her husband’s Jewish faith, and Marlene was classified as Jewish. But after divorcing her husband in 1937, her mother rejoined the Evangelical Christian church, and Marlene was baptized. She had to learn how to behave like a Christian: “I looked at a picture of Jesus, and I said, ‘That is our Führer.’ The pastor said, ‘Yes, indeed he is.’ ” It didn’t help. Marlene was still compelled to go to a Jewish kindergarten. Her mother’s family wanted nothing to do with them. They were spat at in the streets, kicked out of their apartment by the Nazi owner, and Marlene survived the war in an orphanage. Whenever there was a raid by Gestapo officers looking for Jews, she and a little boy with water on the brain had to hide until night in the woods. Marlene had a mournful look in her light blue eyes, as she spoke. “I was lucky that I was blonde,” she added.
The Mischling children of Erich and Sabine Alenfeld were treated as Aryans. Young Justus, ten years old in 1941, was a member of the Nazi youth organization the Jungvolk before he could join the Hitler Youth. The slang name for these boys was Pimpf, meaning “little rascal.” Justus was delighted to be a Pimpf. Sabine wrote to her husband, “Today [Justus] is doing his duty on the Reich Sporting Field…. He was head of his squad three times. Such pride!…Yesterday I handed him his official Hitler Youth dagger. God, was he proud, the little fellow.”
Far Outliers 