A long labour : a Dutch mother's Holocaust memoir

In this unusual Holocaust memoir, Rhodea Shandler gives a woman's view of life under the Nazis in Holland. She begins by describing her early life in a closely knit Jewish family in northern Holland. There was anti-Semitism, she explains, but it was of a low level, and the Jews with their strong ties to community managed to live relatively normal lives. Then everything began to change with Hitler's rise to power in 1933. Through it all, she tells of life ongoing and how she became a nursing student in Amsterdam. It was while she was working in an Amsterdam hospital on May 9, 1940, that an explosion was heard, and she looked up to watch German paratroopers landing to take control of the city. Over the next few years she describes how the community attempts to cope even as Jews are being deported before their very eyes. Finally in early 1943, she and her new husband decide that they must go into hiding in the countryside. With the help of the Underground, they find a "safe" farm, but their situation changes when Shandler discovers that she is pregnant. Some of the most moving parts of the story describe her preparations for the child's birth, even as their "friendly" family turns against them, fearful of the new dangers a baby will bring. Then on a bitterly cold day in December 1943 the baby is born, and Shandler is left with the difficult task of caring for the child in the midst of continuing Gestapo raids. Shandler's memoir ends with the family's decision after the war to emigrate to Canada, and for Shandler to write of her struggle to give birth to the new. Memoirs of a Jew, born as Henriette Dwinger (1918-2006) in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands; chs. 3-6 (pp. 53-127) relate her experiences in the Holocaust. Shandler was in Amsterdam when the country was occupied by the Germans in May 1940. She gave birth to a daughter that year, shortly before her German Jewish boyfriend was deported and killed. In 1942 she married Ernst Bollegraaf; her parents, as well as her brother and his family, were deported before the wedding. Shandler, a student nurse, then lived in Amersfoort, but worked at a Jewish psychiatric hospital in Apeldoorn, which was liquidated by the Nazis in January 1943, when all of the patients and staff were deported. Shandler managed to escape, and she and her husband went into hiding in the village of Varsseveld, near the German border, where her husband also began to work for the resistance. Shandler's daughter was sent to live with a family in southern Netherlands, and in December 1943 Shandler gave birth to another daughter. The family was then separated, and hid in various places until the liberation. They were reunited after the war and the family continued to grow; they left for Canada in 1951. Shandler's two sisters survived in hiding with their families, but her parents and brother perished in the Holocaust. The introduction by S. Lillian Kremer (pp. 9-23) discusses the suffering of Shandler and of Dutch Jews, three-quarters of whom perished in the Holocaust. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism) Gives a woman's view of life under the Nazis in Holland. This book explains that there was anti-Semitism but it was of a low level, and the Jews with their strong ties to community managed to live relatively normal lives. It describes how the community attempts to cope even as Jews are being deported before their very eyes.