A long labour : a Dutch mother's Holocaust memoir

Memoirs of a Jew, born as Henriette Dwinger (1918-2006) in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands; chs. 3-6 (pp. 53-127) relate her experiences in the Holocaust. Shandler was in Amsterdam when the country was occupied by the Germans in May 1940. She gave birth to a daughter that year, shortly before her German Jewish boyfriend was deported and killed. In 1942 she married Ernst Bollegraaf; her parents, as well as her brother and his family, were deported before the wedding. Shandler, a student nurse, then lived in Amersfoort, but worked at a Jewish psychiatric hospital in Apeldoorn, which was liquidated by the Nazis in January 1943, when all of the patients and staff were deported. Shandler managed to escape, and she and her husband went into hiding in the village of Varsseveld, near the German border, where her husband also began to work for the resistance. Shandler's daughter was sent to live with a family in southern Netherlands, and in December 1943 Shandler gave birth to another daughter. The family was then separated, and hid in various places until the liberation. They were reunited after the war and the family continued to grow; they left for Canada in 1951. Shandler's two sisters survived in hiding with their families, but her parents and brother perished in the Holocaust. The introduction by S. Lillian Kremer (pp. 9-23) discusses the suffering of Shandler and of Dutch Jews, three-quarters of whom perished in the Holocaust. 175 pages : illustrations, map, portraits ; 23 cm