Hiding in Holland: A Resistance Memoir (Holocaust Survivor True Stories) - Softcover

Reinharz, Shulamit

Softcover

ISBN 10: 949332270X ISBN 13: 9789493322707

Publisher: Amsterdam Publishers, 2024

Synopsis

Hiding in Holland is a powerful Holocaust resistance memoir based on the recovered wartime writings of Max Rothschild, a young German Jewish refugee who survived Nazi occupation in the Netherlands by going underground.

Arriving in Holland in January 1939 after being released from the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, Rothschild believed he had escaped further persecution. But by May 1940, the German invasion shattered that illusion. As anti-Jewish measures escalated from day to day, he and his girlfriend, Ilse, chose to hide, moving between safe houses, farms, and underground networks to avoid deportation by train to Polish extermination camps. Their survival depended on forged papers, constant vigilance, and the courage of Dutch Jews and non-Jewish allies, and a commitment to resistance.
Edited and contextualized by historian and sociologist Shulamit Reinharz, this memoir draws on decades of letters, diaries, and documents written in German, Dutch, Hebrew, English and French. The result is an unflinching, deeply personal account of daily life in hiding, moral resistance without weapons, the Dutch Hunger Winter, and the disillusionment that followed liberation.

Unlike many Holocaust narratives, hiding in Holland examines the gray zones of occupation: the limits of rescue, the failures of governments, and the lasting psychological cost of survival. It is both a historical record and a human story of love, defiance, and endurance in a country that lost over 100,000 of its Jews to German fascism, the highest percentage of all Western European countries.

About this title

About the Author

Born in Amsterdam in 1946 to German-Jewish Holocaust survivors, Shulamit Reinharz is the Brandeis University Jacob Potofsky Professor Emerita of Sociology and a Research Fellow in International Studies at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University.She is the former director of the Brandeis University Women's Studies Program, founder of the Women's Studies Research Center, the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute for the Study of Jews and Gender, and Kniznick Gallery of Feminist Art.The author of 17 books, her topics have ranged from On Becoming a Social Scientist (1979) and Feminist Methods in Social Research (1992) to American Jewish Women and the Zionist Enterprise (2005), Jewish Intermarriage around the World (2009), and One Hundred Years of Kibbutz Life: A Century of Crises and Reinvention (2011), and 100 Jewish Brides: Stories from Around the World (co-edited with Barbara Vinick) (2024).Prof. Reinharz received the 2024 Leo Baeck Medal for "contributions to scholarship and community leadership," the highest honor bestowed by the Leo Baeck Institute for the study of German-Jewish history and culture.

Edition details

• Publisher: Amsterdam Publishers
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 949332270X
• ISBN 13: 9789493322707
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 356