In Ronald Balson’s lat­est his­tor­i­cal nov­el, A Place to Hide, Ted Har­ti­gan, a non-Jew­ish Amer­i­can in his nineties, recounts his expe­ri­ence as a young US State Depart­ment staffer deployed to Ams­ter­dam dur­ing The Third Reich of the thir­ties and for­ties. He tells his sto­ry to Karyn, a Jew­ish Dutch expa­tri­ate and a sur­vivor of the Nazi occu­pa­tion, who now lives in Tel Aviv. She agrees to record Ted’s life sto­ry with the hope that the for­mer State Depart­ment offi­cial might help find her sis­ter, from whom she’s been sep­a­rat­ed since the war.

Through Ted’s eyes, we see uncer­tain­ty and naiveté plagu­ing the Nether­lands before the Ger­man inva­sion. Will the country’s dec­la­ra­tion of neu­tral­i­ty earn it Nazi lenien­cy? After all, say the opti­mists, the Ger­mans have allowed the Dan­ish gov­ern­ment to remain in pow­er and main­tain a degree of auton­o­my in inter­nal affairs, which has pro­tect­ed Denmark’s own Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion so far.

Soon, Ted falls in love with Sara, a Jew­ish Dutch woman. While some cling to the hope that the Third Reich will go easy on Hol­land, Sara’s father, Saul, pre­dicts a dark future for his coun­try and his fel­low Jews. Yet his bru­tal hon­esty does not make him a cyn­ic; on the con­trary, he resolves to make a dif­fer­ence amid the unfold­ing tragedy.

After the Nazi inva­sion and the sys­tem­at­ic iso­la­tion of the Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion, Saul devis­es a plan to smug­gle Jew­ish chil­dren out of the Nazi depor­ta­tion hold­ing camps. By then, the State Depart­ment has dis­cov­ered the Nazis’ plans for the Final Solu­tion. Lever­ag­ing Ted’s diplo­mat­ic posi­tion, Saul helps facil­i­tate the secret adop­tion of Jew­ish chil­dren by Dutch Chris­t­ian fam­i­lies. He and his future son-in-law save scores of Jew­ish chil­dren this way, all the while arrang­ing hid­ing places for a small group of fam­i­lies. Despite the unprece­dent­ed destruc­tion of the Jews of Hol­land, an extra­or­di­nary col­lab­o­ra­tion between Jews and non-Jews still man­aged to save lives.

As the sto­ry of Ted’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in the res­cue effort unfolds, Bal­son returns the read­er to the bit­ter­sweet past of the inter­view­er. It becomes clear that as a young child, Karyn lost touch with her own fam­i­ly when her par­ents agreed to have her and her sis­ter adopt­ed by a Chris­t­ian Dutch fam­i­ly. Their par­ents would lat­er be killed at the hands of the Third Reich.

A Place to Hide is both a cau­tion­ary tale and a guide for coun­ter­act­ing an ongo­ing tragedy. It reflects two lessons that every young gen­er­a­tion must learn and every estab­lished one dis­re­gards at its per­il. First, we must under­stand that antic­i­pat­ing the inten­tions of a dic­ta­tor requires knowl­edge of his­to­ry and a dogged com­mit­ment to dis­cern­ing fact from fic­tion. Sec­ond, we should know that help­ing vic­tims of tyran­ny requires bal­anc­ing benev­o­lence with real­ism: our inabil­i­ty to save all must not dis­cour­age us from sav­ing some. With insta­bil­i­ty threat­en­ing peo­ple across the globe, ignor­ing these lessons jeop­ar­dizes count­less lives, the guardrails pro­tect­ing human rights, and our own humanity.