Mary Dingee Fillmore

After a lifetime of private creative writing, I was seized by a subject too important to hide in my journal or a letter to friends. Living in a house where Jewish people were hidden inspired my novel, An Address in Amsterdam, to be published by She Writes Press in October 2016. Since my first lengthy stay in Amsterdam in 2001, I have been visiting, researching, writing, and talking about the Holocaust and resistance in the Netherlands. No, I'm neither Dutch nor Jewish, just a lover of the city of Amsterdam and its people, living and dead. I would have been a neighbor of the deported citizens had I been alive at that time, and I will always wonder whether I would have colluded passively, collaborated, or resisted as I would hope.

To develop my craft as a writer to be worthy of this topic, I earned my MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2005. I like giving talks which explore the many shades of grey in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, and the wrenching choices which good people face, then and now. The Vermont Humanities Council Speakers’ Bureau sponsors my presentation of “Anne Frank’s Neighbors: What Did They Do?," and I am always looking for ways to spread the message that action is always possible against persecution and oppression.

You can read more at maryfillmore.com or seehiddenamsterdam.com.