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Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Ippisch is clearly a remarkable woman: a teenager when Germany invaded her native Holland, she risked her life to save Jews and to aid in the Dutch resistance, and, when caught and jailed by Nazis, she maintained a heroic silence. Her stoicism, ironically, impedes her writing, and the power of her memoir depends chiefly on the reader's ability to read between the lines. She presents her story in fragments-a paragraph about the first day of school in her rural village; a few pages about accompanying Jews to safe havens; etc. Unlike Helene Deschamps's recent Spyglass, this book does not stress the life-and-death dangers its heroine braved at every turn. Ippisch rarely shares her emotions (in a fragment called "Feelings," she explains, "It's not that we did not have feelings, we simply kept them to ourselves") and her matter-of-fact account downplays the real-life drama of her experiences. She is at her best when describing her imprisonment, at which point her writing is its most detailed-her account of corresponding with her family by means of tiny letters concealed under the laundry labels on her linens is just the sort of information likely to impress readers. A photo of half a dozen of these letters, held in the palm of the hand, is among the reproduced documents, memorabilia and other illustrations that enliven the sparse text. Ages 11-up. (Apr.)

School Library Journal

Gr 6 UpThe matter-of-fact tone of this episodic memoir belies the courage and heroism displayed by the author when she was a young woman in Nazi-occupied Holland. Daily risking her life, Ippischthe daughter of a Dutch Protestant ministerserved in her country's Resistance Movement helping Jews and other political foes of Germany move from one hiding place to another. Finally captured by the Nazis near the end of the war, she devoted her energies to staying alive while imprisoned and resisted demands that she provide information about the Resistance. There are many pictures and copies of documents (such as I.D. papers and newspaper front pages) interspersed throughout the text, which add historical authenticity and visual appeal to the autobiographical narrative. But the book is fragmented into often-incomplete passages describing isolated incidents in the author's life; some young readers will be confused and disappointed by these narrative sections. An optional purchase for libraries not owning Milton Meltzer's Rescue (HarperCollins, 1988) and Ina Friedman's The Other Victims (Houghton, 1990).Jack Forman, Mesa College Library, San Diego

Hazel Rochman

In Holland in 1943, teenage Hanneke joined the underground resistance movement against the Nazis. She acted as secret courier, helped hide Jewish children, and organized meetings; in the last months of the war, she was imprisoned and interrogated by the Germans. Now age 70 and living in Montana, she remembers those dangerous times, telling her story in brief vignettes, interspersed with photographs, news clippings, personal letters, and historical notes of the war years. There's no dashing romance or melodrama. When she finally returned home from prison, her family "smiled a lot and cried a little, but did not say too much." Readers feel the terrible waste, the barbarity that was part of daily life. Her style is direct, understated, even stoical, rooted in the concrete particulars of civilian life in an occupied country. Occasionally she makes a misguided attempt to be "literary," and the book begins and ends with vague cliches about trembling mouths and tears in large eyes. However, the power of this account is in the stark facts of what she witnessed and the courage she found to resist.