Dancing with the Enemy

August 1, 2013
The nephew of a Dutch Jewish dance teacher sent to Auschwitz gradually uncovers her tale of survival and triumph. Glaser's name appears solely on the title page of this work, though he has taken his aunt Rosie's wartime diary and fleshed it out for publication, adding numerous photographs and letters for an overall sense of the consummate spirit of his aunt. Having lived in Germany during her earliest years, when her father worked in a German factory, Rosie was fluent in German; the nonreligious Jewish family eventually moved to the Netherlands, where Rosie became infatuated with dancing. After her first love, a pilot, was killed on a flight in 1936, Rosie used her dance skills to make a new life for herself and ensure her self-preservation throughout the years to come. She became the wife of a dance instructor, helping him to run his thriving studio until the Nazi invaders made it increasingly difficult for Jews to work or even move around the cities. A flirtation with another man turned disastrous: Both men, the first out of jealousy, the other from venality, betrayed her to the occupiers. Yet every step of the way, from deportation to imprisonment in Auschwitz, Rosie managed to sway fate her way--or, as she states: "I quickly assessed the situation and tried to regain some semblance of control over my life." Alternating with her first-person narrative is the journey the Catholic-raised author took toward grasping his Jewish heritage and confronting the various skittish relatives for the truth, including the aged Rosie herself. A readable, personable study and a scathing indictment of Dutch passivity in the face of occupation, though without being able to read the actual diary, readers may wonder about the liberties taken by the nephew.

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September 1, 2013
How did the author's glamorous Aunt Rosie survive the Holocaust? Why does his family in Holland never talk about her or about their roots? He has been raised Catholic, but is his father Jewish? Did his grandfather really die of old age? Who betrayed Rosie and her parents to the Nazis? With lots of photos throughout of his father's sexy sister, a professional dancer, Glaser weaves together his interviews with Rosie in Sweden and his research into her amazing letters and diaries, and he tells the story in her voice parallel with his surprising discoveries of his own identity. She survived 18 months in Auschwitz, in luck to be used in invasive medical experiments, even if they did leave her sterile, singing and dancing with her capo-guard boyfriends. One of her jobs was to accompany and reassure prisoners before they went to the showers. With the personal and family secrets revealed, most shocking is the fact that 85 percent of Dutch Jews did not survive. An essential addition to the Holocaust collection.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)