Hiding Places: A Father and His Sons Retrace Their Family's Escape from the Holocaust

Growing up in 1950s Connecticut, author Daniel Asa Rose had always felt alienated from his Jewish roots. Though his mother, a Holocaust survivor, told him stories of the “Not-sees,” these villains seemed as unreal to him as the ogres from his fairy-tale books. Safeguarded by American suburbia, there seemed little need to conjure up horrific stories from the past.

Decades later, feeling unmoored by a painful divorce, Rose takes his two young boys on a quest to reclaim this forgotten history. Arriving in Belgium, equipped only with a tattered diary written by his uncle, they seek out the barns, wine cellars, brothels, and other shadowy places where their relatives hid from the Nazis almost fifty years before. Along the way, Rose struggles to explain the realities of the Holocaust to his impressionable yet precocious sons. Combining childhood flashbacks, family lore, and absorbing travel adventures, this is a story of one family’s triumphant reconnection to their heritage.