 | |
| Author | Johanna Reiss |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Subject | Holocaust |
| Set in | The Netherlands, 1969 |
| Publisher | Melville House Publishing |
Publication date | 1 October 2008 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 250 |
| ISBN | 978-1933633558 |
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.
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]
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Tom Reiss is an American author, historian, and journalist. He is the author of three nonfiction books, the latest of which is The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo (2012), which received the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. His previous books are Führer-Ex: Memoirs of a Former Neo-Nazi (1996), the first inside exposé of the European neo-Nazi movement; and The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life (2005), which became an international bestseller. As a journalist, Reiss has written for The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times.
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Johanna Reiss is a Dutch-American writer whose work focuses on her experiences as a Jewish child during the Second World War. Her books have been compared to the writing of Anne Frank.
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