Why You Need to Read “Hiding in Holland” by Shulamit Reinharz

I don’t normally read books that deal with Holocaust-era Europe. My avoidance is the direct result of middle school and high school flashbacks of the nauseating impending doom in The Diary of Anne Frank or the heavy death and cruelty in Eli Wiesel’s Night. Obviously, this kind of reading is important, and we are all better off for it, but it feels like getting a root canal or eating Brussels sprouts.  

Hiding in Holland: A Resistance Memoir by Shulamit Reinharz is a blessing. Instead of being overwhelmed with the feeling of powerlessness, reading this book gave me so much personal power because it’s all about survival and resistance. To me, resistance is a mindset where you are determined to see yourself and others like you as equal human beings and act in ways that oppose and undermine the ideas and systems that say you are lesser. Resistance is first an inner structure; action is the scaffolding. 

This book combines Brandeis University Professor Reinharz’s research with hundreds of documents from her father, Max Rothschild. At every turn through his fight for survival as a Jew in Nazi-occupied Europe, comes the spirit of resistance. 

One cold day in the 1970s, Reinharz discovered a treasure trove of her father’s old journals, letters, receipts, and photos in boxes next to his basement furnace. A sociologist by trade, she was determined to accept the ambitious challenge of one day putting her father’s own words into studied historical context. As the title suggests, Reinharz’s father, a German Jewish teenager at the start of Hitler’s reign, survived the Holocaust by going into hiding in Holland in his early 20s. Hiding was not at all a passive action. It required planning, strategy, luck, and help from courageous and righteous Gentiles.  

This book is very much an intergenerational dialogue. Long sections of her father’s translated journals and letters are interspersed with the benefit of Reinharz’s scholarly research and corroborating first-hand accounts. For example, young Max first gets into Holland under the presumption that he and the other young Jews will soon be headed for pre-state Palestine. Reinharz gives us a behind-the-scenes look at the political wrangling between the Dutch and British governments that made mass migration of Jews impossible. Reinharz points to the hypocrisy of the Dutch government that had Queen Whilemena giving her speech to the U.S. Congress on the exact same day that he first went into hiding.    

In my view, the biggest factor that ended up saving Rothschild and several of his Zionist Youth Movement companions was getting sent briefly to Buchenwald.   

Rothschild credited his relatively short captivity in the concentration camp to the Hechalutz movement, which included Habonim, a Labor Zionist youth movement. Zionist movement leaders lobbied skillfully for their release. These days, many young Jews avoid calling themselves Zionists. Whether or not they have a love and loyalty to Eretz Yisrael, in a bid to distance themselves from “the settler colonial” charge, the suffering in Gaza, and the actions of the Israeli government, the Z word is a nonstarter. Reading this book reconnected me to early labor Zionism and the empowering and unifying vision of restoring Hebrew civilization. This kind of Zionism gave the promise of hope to young Jews who were watching European society slowly crumble around them. The once novel idea that we Jews need to be the ultimate masters of our fate in our historic homeland stands the test of both practicality and hindsight. “Zionism changed his life, it inspired him because it had so many wonderful ideas. Like rejecting assimilation as an answer to antisemitism,” Reinharz said. 

This book also cleared up several misunderstandings that I had about the Holocaust and challenged what I thought I already knew. I learned that the Netherlands was a Western European country with a tiny resistance movement and tragically had the highest percentage of murdered Jews. While the famous Diary of Ann Frank tells of two Jewish families staying put in one Amsterdam attic, for Rothschild and many others in hiding, taking the risks of moving on to the next hiding place was key to survival. At one hiding place, the difference between Rothchild’s survival and capture was leaving just a mere hour before Nazi soldiers came to arrest everyone there. 

Another thing that was not well understood by me until reading this book was the heroism of Jewish women during the Holocaust, who could more easily pass as Gentiles than Jewish men, who would have been circumcised. Like Ilse, Max’s fiancée, Jewish women who could pass had the brave mission of venturing into the outside world to find food amid the bombs and raids and inspections. She and other Jewish women who had fake identification papers as Gentiles joined the underground resistance as couriers, forming a vital communication network. These messages shared life-saving information about hiding places, escape routes, obtaining supplies, and family safety.  

For these women, “passing” became central to their survival. For myself, in addition to being a Jew, I am also visibly identifiable as an African-American. “Passing” for the sake of the social hierarchy is not available to me. Resistance means refusing to hide my identity as a Jew and encouraging others to do the same. As Reinharz explains of her father in the book, “he was hiding out of resistance, not out of fear.” So, if I ever had to hide, I, too, would do so from resistance and not from complicity.