How often in life do we have the opportunity to retrace the footsteps of our ancestors? To walk where they walked, to eat where they ate… to hide where they hid? Daniel Asa Rose figured that it would come around only once in his lifetime, and so he set out with his two boys to follow the trail of his Jewish family as they escaped the Holocaust.
aaa|Hiding Places|0684854783|aaa is the account of that adventure with tales of the author’s childhood woven in. It is a story that one moment will have you laughing and the next crying. What I found especially touching was the way that Rose was able to paralell his own coming of age with that of his sons, and how this trip changed them all in the same, yet different ways.
This story is also the story of a Belgian Jewish family and their escapes from the Nazis. We learn how they used diamonds to buy themselves fake papers, how they hid in chimneys and attics, how their children were killed… and how they survived. It is a refreshingly different kind of Holocaust story, with all the gruesome details intact.
The themes of family and fatherhood run deep through this book and are its shining qualities.
I always liked going to my Gramma’s farm, because it is where my mother grew up, and before my grandparents bought it, extended family owned it. It was like stepping back into time, and we really could walk where ancestors we had never met had walked.
But when I was really little I used to always worry about sitting on the couch because I wrongly assumed it was where my grandfather had died.
Now I think it’s kind of funny that I thought that!