"The Sisters of Auschwitz" ("'t Hooge Nest") by Roxane van Iperen (2018)

First thing first, let's face elephant in the room: translation by Joni Zwart is clumsy and there were few moments at the beginning of the book where I could clearly tell sentence does not make sense, but I persevered trough initially slow introduction and the patience paid off - once the story started cooking, I could not put the book down. It is fascinating that the authoress Roxane van Iperen accidentally discovered the history of the forrest villa where she just moved in with her family, but perhaps it was not an accident. Perhaps the house waited for her to tell its story. It could not have been anybody else but van Iperen who became deeply involved in her research and eventually created this exciting book.

During the renovation of the house, van iperen discovered way too many hiding places around the house - what initially she thought was perhaps just a storage, turned out much more interesting. It turned out the house was a hiding place for Jews during WW2 and there was a whole group of around 25 people. Here is what van Iperen have discovered: two sisters (Lien and Janny Brilleslijper) with their families, friends and whoever needed hiding space, rented this well-hidden summer house (their husbands posing as non-Jews and fooling some sweet old ladies who were the original owners) and were hiding here from February 1943 to the summer 1944 - while the rest of the country suffered horrible transportations, arrests and murders, these people lived pretty comfortable with their books, music and birthday parties, right in the middle of what was actually a wealthy Nazi neighbourhood. 

There were instances where group's activities and apparent carefree attitude alarmed me (you would expect a bit more common sense than banging on piano until neighbourhood hears it) but this is all just in hindsight. Its easy to see things differently from our present perspective, who knows how will posterity judge ourselves in a current position. Later the story gets even more interesting, as sisters encounter Anne Frank and her sister. It is a story that needed to be told and van iperen burns with desire to tell it: her fire and inspiration easily grab the listener and therefore I can't give it less than five stars - clumsy translation and all - its just too important to criticise it.