Hiding in Plain Sight: How a Jewish Girl Survived Europe’s Heart of Darkness

Journalist van Os (The Netherlands in Focus) delivers an intense and intriguing portrait of Holocaust survivor Mala Shlafer née Kizel (1926–2021), a Polish Jew who survived the Nazis by passing as an ethnic German Catholic. Supplementing Shlafer’s detailed memories with his own dogged investigation, van Os recounts how his fair-haired and blue-eyed subject helped her family survive in the Warsaw ghetto by becoming a smuggler of food and clothing. She eventually escaped the ghetto and found work on a small farm in the countryside. On the advice of her employer, she obtained a baptismal certificate from a local priest and adopted an assumed identity. Soon thereafter, she volunteered for a work program and was sent to Germany, where she was taken in by the family of a glassblower in Zerbst. Though they believed “Hitler was God,” the Möllers treated Shlafer with kindness, which led her to speak up on their behalf after the war. Van Os supplements Shlafer’s remarkable story with lengthy asides into the Polish resistance, the nature of memory, Jewish smuggling networks, antisemitism in postwar Poland, and more; these detours slow the pace considerably, but provide valuable context. The result is an immersive study of survival. (Jan.)