Customer Reviews

Hidden Letters

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When you read HIDDEN LETTERS, the book is going to leave a mark. It's going to hurt down deep and leave you thinking about things long after you've finished the book. After receiving the book, I admit to approaching the book warily. The subject matter is brutal, and it's devastating to anyone who's a parent.

First, a little history on the book. The letters that comprise the human narrative within the pages were discovered in Amsterdam in 1997. They were written by an eighteen year old Dutch Jew named Philip "Flip" Slier. He was sent to a Dutch labor camp in 1942. When first sent there, Slier believed he was going to be treated humanely, though restricted. He didn't know the horror that awaited him, or that he would soon be dead.

At the time Slier first went to the work camps, letters shipped regularly between the families and the restricted men. As I read the letters, I was stunned by the naïve manner that Slier exhibited. He honestly thought he was only going to be there for a short time, and that his experiences there would be nothing more than what he would endure during some summer camp.

As a father of five, I know how innocent kids can be. They think they know so much, but they're blind to so many things. They often don't know they're in over their heads until it's much too late.

And that's what happened with Slier.

I felt somewhat guilty while reading his letters, almost voyeuristic into a world of pain and innocence. The letters are inane and even cheerful. At times Slier obviously felt he was on some grand adventure. At other times I could see that he was putting on a front for his parents, acting brave while he was scared to death, or at least mightily confused by what was going on around him.

That human element, and that innocence, is what is going to haunt me about the book. Slier also took a camera with him. He took several pictures and sent them back home to his parents and friends, and those people managed to hang onto them throughout the blackest days of World War II. I saw his face, and I saw how much of a kid he still was. He aged decades in months, and he finally got killed.

That's one side of the story, but the authors added a tremendous amount of history materials to further the reader's understanding of what was going on in this area at this time. More pictures and maps fill the book. On one hand, HIDDEN LETTERS is a short journal of tumultuous times in a young man's life, but on the other hand the book is a great historical record. I love history, and I equate it with the story of people rather than names and dates. But Philip Slier's story truly brings home the fact that history is made up of people more than dates or events.

HIDDEN LETTERS is going to satisfy the armchair historian's perusal of the time period, and will give some sense of people and what was going on to genealogists that have discovered they've got family members that were in this camps at the same time. For either of those groups, I'm sure the book would be a beneficial addition.

The parents saved those letters all those years. I can't imagine what it must have been like to pull them out every so often and read the last words of their lost son.

Hidden Letters is impossible to put down. Philip "Flip" Slier was interned in a Nazi labor camp in the Netherlands, but wrote loving, optimistic letters home--and took many photographs. Then he, and virtually all of his extended family, disappeared into the Holocaust.

When the letters were discovered in Amsterdam in 1997, a search was made for Flip's closest relative, who turned out to be his first cousin Deborah, whose father had moved his family to South Africa and thus enabled them all to live through the war.

Deborah and her husband, Ian Shine, spent ten years having the letters translated and researching the places and the people they described. They interviewed many survivors of the Holocaust and the war, and include information about almost all--including their photographs and ultimate fates. Over 300 photographs are included.

Flip could write and you fall in love with him as you read. When the letters stop, it is devastating.

This is a compelling, disturbing, and heartbreaking great read.

Kathleen Baxter, columnist, School Library Journal

So much has been written about the Holocaust that its difficult to add anything of value, but now we actually do have something that does just that; Deborah Slier & Ian Shine's new book "Hidden Letters".

Thanks in particular to the extraordinary layout and design, we move naturally and effortlessly between the specifics of Flip's life and letters to the wider context of the Final Solution as it was implemented all over Europe and the entire Soviet Union. The usual numbing statistics come to life....the effect is at once informative and deeply emotional.

Hidden Letters is a treasure trove of letters and postcards written in 1942 by an 18 year old Dutch Jew named Philip "Flip" Slier, sent almost daily from Flip to his parents from within the forced labor camp that held Flip. Flip was eventually executed in the Nazi death camp Sobibor. Now translated and reprinted, completely unedited and enhanced with annotation from Deborah Slier and her husband Ian Shine, Hidden Letters is a first-person account of life in Nazi-occupied Holland. Black-and-white photographs and interviews with those who knew Flip, as well as with Selma Wijnberg-Engel (the sole Dutch survivor of the October, 1943 uprising in Sobibor) round out this firsthand testimony. A welcome addition to academic and community library Judaic Studies in general, and Holocaust Studies collections in particular.

Sobibor, once the site of a large, efficient extermination camp located in a remote corner of eastern Poland is the final resting place of 34,000 Dutch Jews. The Germans tried to hide their heinous crimes by plowing under the secret killing fields of Sobibor, however sixty years later the letters of a Dutch teenager have surfaced to bear witness and to warn us to stay vigilant. Found by a workman demolishing a house in Amsterdam in 1995, the cache of 86 letters were written by Philip Slier to his parents while he was in the Molengoot labor camp.

The book "Hidden Letters," by Philip's cousin, Deborah Slier and her husband, Dr. Ian Shine, is the impressive, carefully researched work that contains the letters of Philip Slier in addition to photographs and biographies of his family and friends. By sharing the poignant story of her cousin's brief life, she also tells the wider story of the Jewish community of the Netherlands and explores the tragic events leading up to its extinction.

Although they initially believed that the German occupation was only a temporary nuisance, the book documents how the Jews of Holland were slowly robbed of their jobs, their homes, their identities and ultimately their lives. For readers like myself who have an intimate connection to the Holocaust, the disturbing and dangerous parallels to contemporary events are undeniable as we witness the words `Zionist' and "Israel" increasingly substituted for "Jew."

While Hidden Letters provides an illuminating window into the fate of Dutch Jews, this is also a cautionary tale. The complacency of world leaders, the compliance of misguided Jewish leaders and the control and manipulation of the media contributed to making Europe Judenrein. The nations preferred to look the other way as the Jews were offered as the korban, the sacrificial lamb they hoped would satisfy the Nazi bloodlust.

The letters of Philip Slier have appeared as a timely warning that we can't afford to risk being in denial, again.

Hidden Letters is an extraordinary document of a spirited, brave young Jewish man's experience in Holland under the Nazi regime. Rounding out his story, and providing context, is a magnificent array of documents including maps, photographs, family history and much more. You can read this book as an individual narrative, as primary source material, and as a cruel tragedy, all at once.

I cried when I was finished -- but also felt very grateful to the authors for putting so much time and care into this deeply moving book.

Once you meet Flip Slier, you'll never forget him.

I was most pleased with the quick response in filling my order. The book came in perfect condition and I was most glad to present it to my friend who is the rabbi. He had not heard of the book and it was nice to surprise him. The size of the book seems like what should be placed upon a coffee table, however, I probably would never place it there. My friend was quite impressed with the detail and thoroughness in the treatment of the subject. He also commented on the quality of paper and presentation.