The Innocents: The Untold True Story of My Family in the Holocaust

Summary

A fresh, unforgettable, and deeply personal true story of World War II, the Holocaust, and the Third Reich that brings to light the vile Nazi policy under which Germans with Jewish ancestry were persecuted and condemned to death—including two young children from an ordinary working-class Christian family whose lives were forever torn apart.

It all started with the discovery of a manuscript, hidden away in a box in a house in Norfolk, England, unread for more than thirty years—a discovery that propelled journalist Sharon Ring to learn more about her relatives, including two young German children named Heini and Edie, and their past. The Innocents is her dramatic and deeply moving account of these siblings and the horrors they endured through World War II and the Holocaust.

Heini and Edie, aged 9 and 5, grew up in Berlin during the Third Reich. Though they were raised as Christian, under the Nuremberg Laws, the siblings were classified as “Mischlinge”—“Michelinge”—hybrid, mixed blood, mongrels because they had two Jewish grandparents. As Mischlinge, they were subject to the same degradations and cruelties as other Jews and were eventually condemned them to death. There were thousands of “Mischlinge” like Heini and Edie across Germany and Europe, yet their tragic experiences within the historical record of the Holocaust have largely remained untold.

At its heart, The Innocents is an eye-witness account of two young lives, enhanced by historical research, that moves from innocence and excitement to pain and terror—from singing at the Berlin Olympics to enduring torture and starvation at Auschwitz and Buchenwald to surviving the torment of an infamous Death March.

Emotionally searing, The Innocents is an extraordinary tale of a working-class family of Berliners forced to remain in the city of their birth even when the state removed all their rights and condemned them to death as Jews. It is a powerful true story of evil monsters, of lives torn apart, and of miraculous survival against all odds.