Hiding in Holland: A Resistance Memoir
The authors of this striking memoir, Hiding in Holland, survivor Max Rothschild and his daughter Shulamit Reinharz, tell the story of a Jewish man who saved his life repeatedly during the Holocaust, eventually being hidden by Dutch Righteous Gentiles for three years. Hiding in Holland presents Max's roller-coaster ride of living and almost dying in Holland, exploring in depth what it meant to be an onderduiker. What was it like to hide in a brothel or with someone you didn't like? What was it like to switch hiding locations repeatedly? How did outsiders help? How did hiders deal with Nazi raids? And how did Max retain his sanity?
Max answers these questions by offering a new definition of "resistance" understood in terms of the Jewish person's experience. Shulamit introduces historical contexts that challenge the exaggerated stereotypes of the valorous Dutch. Together, this inner and outer perspective helps explain why the Netherlands had the worst record of Jewish annihilation of all Western European countries. Only now are Dutch government leaders acknowledging the truth.
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Having myself grown up in a Dutch environment of people who were fortunate to survive the German occupation, I find this an exceptionally touching and profound diary, written in the precarious confinement of hiding, by a man who was able to look backwards and forwards remaining true to his humanist and socialist ideals, and optimistically philosophizing on how to change the world after the war. - Tamar Kupferschmidt-Klipstein, Haifa
"Just make sure you survive!" His mother's deathbed admonition rang in twelve-year-old Max Rothschild's ears ever after. And survive he did - through the Nazis' valley of death and against all odds. Max's memoir, incorporating a wartime diary and letters, has been edited with filial devotion and scrupulous integrity by his daughter. It conveys the everyday obscenities of life in hiding in occupied Holland with granular precision. This is historical testimony of the highest order.- Bernard Wasserstein, Chicago and Amsterdam
Professor Shulamit Reinharz's newest book, Hiding in Holland: A Resistance Memoir, is an innovative and important historical conteibution to understanding the Holocaust, especially in the Netherlands, presented in a unique and ingenious manner. Unlike more conventional Holocaust memoirs, it intertwines her father's fascinating and determinied houthful experiences and survival techniques with the trenchant historical contextualization of a distinguished sociologist and Brandeis Professor Emerita, helping clarify misconceptions about Jewish resistance providing new revelations about both the Nazi occupation and the Dutch responses in Holland. Essential and engrossing reading for the general public as well as Holocaust scholars today. - Dr. Jud Newborn, Founding HIstorian, New York's Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust (1986-2000).
As an historian and former citizen of the small Franconian town where Shulamit's grandfather worked as a doctor and her father was born, I highly recommend Hiding in Holland as a very important read. In our world of persecution, expulsion and threat of life to everybody who is "unwanted," you will find out here what that means for an individual life. A deeply human, instructive and stirring book. - Thomas Medicus, Berlin, Germany
