Ilse Koehn, a child growing up in Nazi Germany, does not know it but, under the Nazi classification system, she is Mischling, Second Degree, that is, she is a person with one Jewish grandparent. In this memoir, she recreates her domestic life, marked by her parents' sudden and painful divorce, and chronicles her public life, defined, in part, by her activities as a member of the Hitler Youth-all of which happen as war rages around her. As Harrison E. Salisbury says in his introduction to Koehn's account of her war-time childhood, Ilse's story "teaches us a lesson worth learning . . . Behind the gleaming ranks of those who seem totalitarian robots stand men and women, various and diverse, complex and complicated, some brave, some cowardly, some brainwashed, some violently idiosyncratic, and all of them very human."

The memoirs of a German girl who became a leader among the Hitler Youth while her Social Democratic family kept from her the secret of her partial Jewish heritage.