When the Germans invade her city, Rachel Klein is a teenager falling in love. Within a year, she’s delivering illegal papers and confronting Nazi soldiers. In this “compelling and touching tale” (Laurel Corona), Rachel finds her courage and faces wrenching choices. A Kirkus Indie Book of the Month.Follow Rachel Klein as she faces double danger as a young Jewish woman and resistance worker in … worker in the Amsterdam of Anne Frank.
On May 10, 1940, the Nazi bombers blast the night and shatter Rachel Klein’s sleep – along with her life as she knew it. She’s eighteen, and falling in love with a Gentile in a secret relationship. As the Nazi terror escalates, her romance deepens quickly, and so does her boyfriend’s involvement with student protests. Soon, he must disappear rather than face arrest. When Rachel witnesses the first roundup of 425 Jewish men in the Jonas Daniel Meijerplein, she knows that she too must act, and joins the resistance.
Despite the ever greater danger as the Nazis tighten their grip on the city, Rachel makes daily deliveries of illegal papers to addresses all over Amsterdam. She ingeniously evades the Nazis and their Dutch collaborators for months, although she has some close calls. As the roundups intensify, Rachel agonizes about whether to go into hiding. Ultimately she persuades her parents to accompany her to a dank basement, where she gets to know herself and them in a different way, and meets a new man.
A young woman can find her courage in any situation, no matter how terrible, and love is always a possibility.
A Kirkus Indie Book of the Month
Winner, Sarton Women’s Book Award for Historical Fiction
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For all those who read The Diary of Anne Frank, Mary Dingee Fillmore enlightens and expands our knowledge of Amsterdam and its people during the Nazi occupation. Through meticulous research, personal knowledge of the city, and page-turning writing, the author gives us new insights into the incremental horror the Nazis wrought on the Jews of Amsterdam. An Address in Amsterdam also reminds us that one person can always make a difference. The novel is both timely and timeless.
A powerful read. The novel starts slowly, echoing the gradual way that life changed under Nazi occupation. Rachel is an ordinary teenager, worrying that her parents will find out she’s sleeping with her boyfriend, until she becomes more aware of the atrocities being committed around her, and is pulled into the resistance. The tension builds as she runs small errands, delivering packages and then underground newspapers, and then takes increasing risks as she becomes involved in providing false papers to Jews trying to flee. When her own family finally recognizes the danger they face, she goes into hiding with her parents. The descriptions of the cellar where they must hide in dark, cramped conditions, dependent on their host for scraps of food and the only human contact with the outside world, is so vivid and heart-wrenching.
We are so familiar with the Anne Frank story that it no longer shocks us. In this well-researched novel, Fillmore brings this era to life in a fresh way, raising profound questions about courage and loyalty under the most extreme conditions. These issues seem more relevant than ever in the current political situation.
What a perfect book to read following the election of Donald Trump! Fillmore shows us the transformation of a typical teenage girl into a courageous resistance worker in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation. Rachel and her family believe things won’t be all that bad when the Nazis first arrive on their streets, after all, they live in Holland, a peaceful, progressive city. The Dutch will certainly stand up for their Jewish citizens against any attempts by the Nazis to discriminate against them. The terror around them grows incrementally, one small law and exclusion at a time until Jewish families are being rounded up and taken from their homes, beaten in the streets, and sent to the who knows where in the East.
Rachel. our heroine, and her family change as the Amsterdam changes. Rachel starts as a young girl in love and finds herself drawn into the underground, helping to hide Jews from the Nazis at the same time trying to convince her German Jewish father that their own family is in danger.
Fillmore spent many years researching this book and it shows. Her descriptions of Amsterdam are beautiful. Her understanding of Amsterdam in the 40s is deep. Teaches us never to think “it can’t happen here.”
An Address in Amsterdam, by Mary Dingee Fillmore, is a culmination of the author’s decades long love affair with the city itself and her thorough research into its dark days during WWII. Fillmore expansively captures the exquisite light, the beauty of the canals, the architectural details, and fauna of the city. In contrast, the lives of the Jewish family at the center of this story become darker, and more constricted. Courage and cowardice, trust and treachery, love and loyalty drive 18 year old Rachel Klein from a world of sheltered privilege to one of danger and passion. The hiders and the hidden are written in this engrossing book with the complexity of real people confronting the madness of the Nazi occupation.