When Shulamit Reinharz gave me her new book, “Hiding in Holland: A Resistance Memoir,” I was unsure whether I wanted to read another Holocaust memoir. But a couple of things piqued my curiosity. Reinharz is an admirable scholar in sociology, Jewish feminism and women’s studies. Additionally, she is the founding director of the Women’s Studies Research Center and the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, both situated on Brandeis University’s campus. I was curious as to how those academic laurels and honors would figure into a work of creative nonfiction about her father, Max Rothschild, surviving the Holocaust in Holland by hiding for three years.
I was also captivated by Reinharz’s structure, which is a prose duet between father and daughter. Throughout the book, Rothschild’s journal entries are interspersed among Reinharz’s observations and insights. The subtitle, “A Resistance Memoir,” intrigued me too. I wasn’t expecting to see “resistance” as a marquee word concerning Holocaust survival.
In a recent email interview with JewishBoston, Reinharz, a 2025 finalist for a National Jewish Book Award in Holocaust Memoir and Autobiography, said she did not initially recognize her book as a “resistance memoir.” On the advice of her publisher, she cut a third of the word count. “As a consequence of reducing the book so radically,” said Reinharz, “the book’s bones showed through. I could see patterns and themes I had not noticed before. One of these was resistance. And so, I reshaped the book to make that idea more prominent.”
As she revised, she noted there were many forms of resistance in the Holocaust, and her father had participated in almost all of them. “Resistance is what people perceived they were engaged in; it is what gave people the satisfaction of not giving in to despair,” she said. Reinharz extended the concept of resistance from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising to the creation of a Jewish children’s sports arena in her father’s hometown of Gunzenhausen in Bavaria, Germany.
Max Michael Rothschild was born in Gunzenhausen in 1921. The small town had been home to a Jewish community since the 1700s. His father was one of two physicians in town. Max had all the advantages of a comfortable, cultured life. He studied piano as a child and, at one point, had hoped to become a concert pianist. He also received a solid Jewish education, which informed his strong Jewish identity. Yet antisemitism was also part of his growing up when he attended school in Gunzenhausen.
When Max was 12 years old, his synagogue invited a young Zionist leader to give a talk, and it changed Max’s life. From that talk, he took away the idea that Zionism was the only solution for Jewish survival. The next year, he went to Munich to live with his grandmother and attend high school. He also continued his piano lessons and studied Judaism at an institute. At the same time, he participated in a Jewish socialist youth group.
Max was attending a Zionist training camp related to his youth group activities when it was interrupted by Kristallnacht in November 1938. He was deported to Buchenwald but eventually extricated from the concentration camp with other Jewish boys by their Zionist organization in Berlin. The organization had worked out a plan with their Dutch counterpart to bring the boys to work on Dutch farms for practically no money. In return, the Dutch government allowed them to stay for two years.
“Holland was considered a good place to find refuge because it was far better than going east where the Second World War had already begun,” Reinharz said. “Holland and Germany shared a border, so it was easy getting to and from Germany. And Germany did not invade Holland during the First World War.” Reinharz said that despite assurances from Germany that it would not invade Holland again, they crossed into the Netherlands in May 1940. “My dad’s supposed refuge was not a refuge at all, and in many ways was worse than his experience of Nazism in Germany,” she added.
Max survived the war in Holland in myriad hiding places from 1942 to 1945. In “Hiding in Holland,” Reinharz stated that her goal in writing the book was “to convey something about the disappearance of nearly the entire Jewish community of the Netherlands, the importance of Zionist organizations, the necessity of not cooperating with the oppressor, the significance of hiding as a form of resistance, and the fact that alongside the six million Jews who were murdered during the Holocaust, three and a half million Jews survived.”
Max was intent on protecting his girlfriend, Ilse, who would later become his wife and Reinharz’s mother. Ilse had her own places to hide, but most of the time she lived out in the open. Her blonde hair and blue eyes enabled her to pass as someone not Jewish. Reinharz is tender about her parents’ young love but not overtly sentimental. Their love story is a strong current throughout the book.
In 1946, Reinharz, their first child, was born in Holland. Max was unequivocal about immigrating to America, where his parents and sisters had settled in Massachusetts at the beginning of the war. But Ilse wanted to be near her surviving relatives in Israel. It was a tension in the marriage, and one that was never completely resolved. The Rothschilds lived in Israel for only 10 months before settling in northern New Jersey in the late 1950s.
In the basement of that New Jersey home, Reinharz found an extensive archive of her father’s documents and handwritten journals from the war in 1974. With her father’s permission, she packed up the boxes and brought them to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she was living at the time.
What started as curiosity about this historical treasure trove became a multi-year project of organizing the material in binders. But after all that work, the makeshift archive was untouched for decades until Reinharz had the papers and journals translated. They proved to be invaluable source material for “Hiding in Holland.” It also underscored the propulsive story of her parents’ survival through determination and a network of rescuers who put their lives on the line to hide Max and, when needed, Ilse.
By the end, Reinharz leaves her readers with new and profound insights into what it meant to survive the Holocaust through hiding. She has crafted an exceptional and multi-layered story. Her book is a wonderful addition to Holocaust literature. And knowing the obvious end does not detract from appreciating this extraordinary book told in two voices.
