'A major contribution to our understanding of the Second World War in all its complexity.' John Keegan in his Introduction.
The inspiring story of a German-Jewish family named Frank which, like Anne Frank's family & 25, 000 other Dutch & other 'stateless' Jews, 'dived under' in Nazi-occupied Holland in 1942
- but miraculously survived. Told by the grandson of the head of the family, this is the gripping odyssey of the other Frank family: from childhood in an assimilated German-Jewish family at Breitenheim, through the deceptively good life of Berlin in the 1920s, to the rise of Hitler & their flight to apparently safe Holl&, the nightmarish ordeal of their thousand day long 'submersion' in a small apartment in The Hague, & the joy & pain of liberation & their final journey to America, the same route Anne Frank might have taken had she not been betrayed. Based on personal testaments, records & family interviews, the book describes their life behind closed curtains in constant fear of discovery. In 1945, after many adventures & appalling vicissitudes, they finally emerged to face the uncertainties of postwar Holland & the promise of the New World.