Fifty years ago, soci­ol­o­gist Shu­lamit Rein­harz stum­bled across dis­in­te­grat­ing box­es full of her father’s hand­writ­ten note­books, along with Ger­man doc­u­ments. It was not until forty-five years lat­er, when Rein­harz retired from teach­ing at Bran­deis, that she decid­ed to embark on writ­ing her father’s mem­oir and inte­grat­ing the mem­oir with his­tor­i­cal back­ground and inter­pre­ta­tion. Reinharz’s father, Max Rothchild, was a Jew born in Ger­many. In Jan­u­ary, 1939, at eigh­teen years old, he fled to the Nether­lands. His metic­u­lous diary describes his life before Germany’s occu­pa­tion, and the chal­lenges for Jews once Hol­land was occu­pied. His choic­es of hid­ing places, from depor­ta­tion to con­cen­tra­tion camp, are moti­vat­ed by a desire to be near the woman he loved. Even­tu­al­ly, Rothchild was res­cued by non-Jews who hid him for three years.

The nar­ra­tive of Rothchild’s sur­vival is grip­ping. The read­er is emo­tion­al­ly engrossed in mov­ing with him from hid­ing place to hid­ing place. We are in awe of how he kept in touch with peers in oth­er hid­ing places and how they helped each other.

Rothchild was an intel­lec­tu­al­ly curi­ous man who kept edu­cat­ing him­self through­out his life. In Hid­ing in Hol­land: A Resis­tance Mem­oir, he expands our knowl­edge of resis­tance and the dif­fi­cul­ties Jews faced in Hol­land. The mem­oir enhances our under­stand­ing of why so few Jews sur­vived the Holo­caust in Holland.