Beyond Anne Frank: Hidden Children and Postwar Families in Holland
A Reading and Talk by Diane L. Wolf

April 12 at 7:30 pm
At the BJE Jewish Community Library
1835 Ellis Street (at Pierce St.)
San Francisco

Co-presented by the BJE Jewish Community Library

The image of the Jewish child hiding from the Nazis was shaped by Anne Frank, whose house – the most visited site in the Netherlands – has become a shrine to the Holocaust. Yet Anne Frank’s experience as a hidden child in wartime Holland was an anomaly. Drawing on interviews with seventy Jewish men and women who, as children, were placed in non-Jewish families during the Nazi occupation of Holland, Beyond Anne Frank paints a compelling portrait of Holocaust survivors whose wartime experiences were tolerable, but for whom the end of the war marked the beginning of a traumatic era.

"Debunks the myth - perpetuated by the story of Anne Frank - of Dutch tolerance and resistance, demonstrating both Dutch complicity with the Nazis and indifference to Jewish suffering." -Publishers Weekly

Diane L. Wolf is professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis.