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Hiding in Plain Sight

how a Jewish girl survived Europe's heart of darkness

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

An extraordinary Holocaust survival story about an Orthodox Jewish woman who managed to survive in wartime Poland by pretending to be a Catholic.

Polish Catholics believed she was one of them. A devoted Nazi family took her in as if she was their own daughter. She fell in love with a German engineer who built aeroplanes for the Luftwaffe. What none of these people knew was that Mala Rivka Kizel had been born into a large Orthodox Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland, in 1926. By using her charm, intelligence, blonde hair, and blue eyes to assume different identities, she was the only member of her family to survive World War II.

When Dutch journalist Pieter van Os stumbled upon Mala's story, he set out to revive the world through which she had made her way from war-ravaged middle Europe to the nascent state of Israel before finally settling in the Netherlands. With her memoir and their interviews as guide, van Os physically retraced Mala's steps, stopping in at local archives and remote villages, searching for anyone who might have known or helped her seventy-five years before.

At times reading like an erudite detective story, 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.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      January 9, 2023
      Journalist van Os (The Netherlands in Focus) delivers an intense and intriguing portrait of Holocaust survivor Mala Shlafer née Kizel (1926–2021), a Polish Jew who survived the Nazis by passing as an ethnic German Catholic. Supplementing Shlafer’s detailed memories with his own dogged investigation, van Os recounts how his fair-haired and blue-eyed subject helped her family survive in the Warsaw ghetto by becoming a smuggler of food and clothing. She eventually escaped the ghetto and found work on a small farm in the countryside. On the advice of her employer, she obtained a baptismal certificate from a local priest and adopted an assumed identity. Soon thereafter, she volunteered for a work program and was sent to Germany, where she was taken in by the family of a glassblower in Zerbst. Though they believed “Hitler was God,” the Möllers treated Shlafer with kindness, which led her to speak up on their behalf after the war. Van Os supplements Shlafer’s remarkable story with lengthy asides into the Polish resistance, the nature of memory, Jewish smuggling networks, antisemitism in postwar Poland, and more; these detours slow the pace considerably, but provide valuable context. The result is an immersive study of survival.

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Languages

  • English

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