An extraordinary story about a Jewish woman who pretended to be Catholic to survive the Holocaust.
Catholics believed she was one of them. A devoted Nazi family took her in. She fell in love with a German engineer who built aeroplanes for the Luftwaffe. But no one knew that Mala Rivka Kizel had been born into a large Orthodox Jewish family. She survived World War II using her charm, intelligence, blonde hair, and blue eyes to assume different identities.
Journalist Pieter van Os retraces Mala's footsteps through Europe to uncover her extraordinary journey and the stories of those who helped her. This poignant, rich book is an engrossing meditation on what drives us to fear the Other, and what in turn might allow us to feel compassion for them.
Pieter van Os writes for NRC Handelsblad and De Groene Amsterdammer. His published works include the books The Netherlands in Focus, and We Understand Each Other Perfectly, about his years as a parliamentary journalist. After having lived in Warsaw for four years, he now resides in Tirana, Albania. In 2020, he won the Libris History Prize and the Brusse Prize for best Dutch-language journalistic book of the year with Hiding in Plain Sight. David Doherty studied English and literary linguistics in Glasgow before moving to Amsterdam, where he has been working as a translator for over twenty years. His literary work includes novels by award-winning authors Marente de Moor, Peter Terrin, and Alfred Birney. Summer Brother, his translation of Jaap Robben's Zomervacht, won the 2021 Vondel Translation Prize and was longlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize.
Title: Hiding in Plain Sight: how a Jewish girl survived Europe�s heart of darkness
Author: Os, Pieter van
ISBN: 9781913348892
Binding:
Publisher: Scribe Publications
Publication Date: 2022-09-08
Number of Pages: 384
Weight: 0.3001 kg
'In almost every sentence, van Os compels admiration with his elegant prose, demonstrating his erudition but never showing off or taking away from the gravity of the subject matter ... Hiding in Plain Sight is more than a survival narrative. It is a history of Eastern European mentality.'
* de Volkskrant *
'I couldn't stop reading. A stunning book.'
-- Geert Mak, author of
In Europe'Based on the survival story of one woman, van Os wrote a poignant and disconcerting book about the terrible fate of the Jews, and at the same time about current obsessions with national character and identity.'
-- Judges' comments from the Libris History Prize
'You rarely see a journalistic book of this narrative-literary level. A unique book that reveals every page how much careful research and great writing power lies behind it ... Van Os shows the value of dwelling longer on a side path or a detail. In this way he knows how to paint a broad and multicoloured image of the blackest pages of recent European history. You are reading this book in one breath.'
-- Judges' comments from the Brusse Prize for Best Dutch-language Journalistic Book
