Past in hiding

Memory and Survival in Nazi Germany

Plot

A HEART-STOPPING SURVIVOR STORY AND BRILLIANT HISTORICAL INVESTIGATION THAT OFFERS NEW INSIGHT INTO DAILY LIFE IN THE THIRD REICH AND THE POWERS AND PITFALLS OF MEMORYAt the outbreak of World War II, Marianne Strauss, the sheltered daughter of well-to-do German Jews, was an ordinary girl, concerned with her studies, friends, and romance. Almost overnight she was transformed into a woman of spirit and defiance, a celebrant of life acutely aware of the horrors around her, a fighter who, when the Gestapo came for her family, seized the moment and went underground. For two years, Marianne traveled across Nazi Germany with false papers, aided by a remarkable resistance organization, previously unknown and unsung.Drawing on an astonishing cache of photographs, letters, diaries, and documents, as well as interviews on three continents, historian Mark Roseman reconstructs Marianne's odyssey and the fortunes of her friends and family, revealing aspects of life in the Third Reich long hidden from view. Here are letters from Marianne's fiance, deported to the little-known Izbica ghetto; Gestapo records of the special protection that the Strausses and other well-placed Jews received from the Wehrmacht's intelligence division, and of Adolf Eichmann's decision to deport them nonetheless; Marianne's diary of her years on the run; and rare communications from Theresienstadt and Auschwitz that track the fate of her parents.As Roseman excavates the past, he puts forward a new and sympathetic interpretation of the troubling discrepancies between fact and recollection that so often cloud survivors' accounts. A detective story, a love story, a story of great courage and survival in the harshestconditions, A Past in Hiding is also a powerful investigation into the nature of memory, authenticity, and truth.