A Hidden Life (memoir)

A Hidden Life is a memoir by Dutch-American author Johanna Reiss. Reiss won the Newbery Medal for her account of her experiences as a child during the Holocaust, The Upstairs Room, which was followed by the sequel The Journey Back, both published by HarperCollins.

A Hidden Life
AuthorJohanna Reiss
LanguageEnglish
SubjectHolocaust
Set inThe Netherlands, 1969
PublisherMelville House Publishing
Publication date
1 October 2008
Media typePrint
Pages250
ISBN978-1933633558

Background

In A Hidden Life, Reiss recounts her visit to the home of her youth and the tragedy that followed. She had been 10 years old at the beginning of World War II, and spent nearly three years hiding from the Nazis with a family in Usselo in a rural part of the Netherlands. In the postwar period, she immigrated to the United States. After living there for several years, she decided to visit the family that aided her during the harrowing Nazi years. She made this journey in the summer of 1969, spending nearly two months in the Netherlands with her husband and her two young children. While there, she had to confront her painful memories. But during that time, a worse and more immediate tragedy befell her: her husband returned to America early and committed suicide. A Hidden Life, which Lucy Kavaler calls "one of the most moving books" she has ever read, is the story of one woman's perseverance through past and present tragedy.[1][2][3]

gollark: Now, part of that is probably that you can't really trust whoever is asking to use those resources properly, and that's fair. But there are now things for comparing the effectiveness of different charities and whatnot.
gollark: But if you ask "hey, random person, would you be willing to give up some amount of money/resources/etc to stop people dying of malaria", people will just mostly say no.
gollark: If you *ask* someone "hey, random person, would you like people in Africa to not die of malaria", they will obviously say yes. Abstractly speaking, people don't want people elsewhere to die of malaria.
gollark: Capitalism is why we have a massively effective (okay, mostly, some things are bad and need fixing, like intellectual property) economic engine here which can produce tons of stuff people want. But people *do not care* about diverting that to help faraway people they can't see.
gollark: Helping people elsewhere does mean somewhat fewer resources available here, and broadly speaking people do not actually want to make that tradeoff.

References
  1. "Twice Stricken". nytimes.com. 20 February 2009. Retrieved 25 May 2020.
  2. "A Hidden Life". kirkusreview.com. 1 March 2009. Retrieved 25 May 2020.
  3. "A Hidden Life: A Memoir of August 1969". jewishbookcouncil.org. 5 December 2011. Retrieved 25 May 2020.
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