Customer Reviews

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

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Daniel Rose grew up in Connecticut, in a lobster fishing town. He always felt different because of his Jewishness even though his family was assimilated. Later, after a fractured marriage, he wanted his young sons, aged 7 and 12 to really understand their heritage, especially in terms of the Holocaust, and so he took them to Europe to discover their roots. They looked up relatives who had survived the horror and still lived in Belgium, and from there they set out on a journey to retrace the actual events of the life one of their relatives, an ancient eccentric old man who gave them his diary as a roadmap.

In addition, in alternating chapters, we learn of Mr. Rose's Connecticut boyhood. Not only does he describe the events, but he's able to recapture every nuance of feeling that must have been difficult to dredge up from memory. He makes fun of his orthodox relatives, he battles the school bully, but most of all, he keeps coming back to the recurrent theme of the book --his hiding places.

Foremost though, is his relationship with his own sons, and the unique loving relationship between the three of them. Some of the things that they were exposed to on the trip were not pleasant, but they all came through it enriched by the experience. This was a difficult subject to write about, but somehow Mr. Rose managed to do it with humor. While I didn't laugh out loud, I found myself smiling throughout.

There's a lot of detail in the book, each one adding further insight into each of the characters. It's more than just description; the reader really feels the emotion. There's mystery here too as well as unsolved questions. And there sure is a lot to think about. Afterwards, I couldn't get the book out of my mind and I don't know if I ever will. I must thank Mr. Rose for writing it. Highly recommended.

I began reading this book early on a Saturday morning and didn't leave the house until evening - I didn't want to stop reading. I really loved the description of what it's like to grow up as part of a tiny minority in a very uniform U.S. town. I also liked hearing about the sense of well-being and inner strength that the author felt as a boy - I actually found it inspiring, although I'm a grown woman. The author is a travel writer who obviously feels at home in the world and among strangers, and I liked being in his company during his trip back to Europe with his two young sons. More than anything, I liked the descriptions of how it feels to subtly know one is different as a child, and I liked how the author found the gumption - as a boy and as a man - to gracefully confront those who distorted the truth. I felt that this book put into words many experiences I'd had, and I myself somehow felt more understood by the time I was done reading this book. I felt my own expriences made more sense from having read this book.

I always wondered what it is like to grow up Jewish in a Gentile culture. Now I know. This is not really a "Holocaust book." (Not that there's anything wrong with that.) It's a book about boyhood - with lots and lots of different levels. I enjoyed it thoroughly. Don't be put off by the subject matter. It's fun to read, not ponderous. Make a good movie. Bob Smith

I found this to be a really beautiful, dramatic memoir with the pacing of an espionage novel. It also has the curiosity and sensuality of the best sort of investigation of childhood. The author tries to come to grips with his childhood experience of being an outsider in a conformist, wealthy, white-bread Connecticut town. He also describes the pilgrimage he took with his own children to the places where his grandparents sought refuge during the Holocaust. My favorite parts of this book, though, had nothing to do with childhood or with the Holocaust: they had to do with conveying, ever so accurately, his experience of divorce - the cold house the author lived in after his wife left him, the terrors and love and longing to have his family back, and the ways he was finally able to heal himself and his family through a trip to the places where his relatives disappeared. Dan Rose's mother stands out as a gloriously portrayed figure - a survivor piecing together a bright life for herself of cocktail parties and art shows, all while contending with overwhelming grief. Dan Rose's pleasure in his children made me want children of my own!

An inspiring, thoughtful and funny book. A father is retracing his family's escape route fifty years later. While teaching his two sons history, family lore, geography and much about human courage and frailty, the author learns much about family bonds, love and loyalty from his sons. The boys add common sense to a voyage with a lot of bagage and helps the author resolve some difficult family issues. The book is serious and entertaining at the same time. You laugh and cry with the author and wish the book would not end. An obvious Father's Day gift -or for any sensitive person you may want to give some reading pleasure!

Hiding Places by Daniel Asa Rose is many stories in one. It's the story of a young boy growing up and how he perceives his differences and ways he tries to blend in or hide. It's the story of a father and two sons trying to forge a relationship with each other after divorce, and it's about one family's experience of hiding to survive the horrors of the Holocaust.

The book is honest and forthright. Daniel Asa Rose has opened up a window into his feelings about growing up Jewish in a predominantly WASP Connecticut town. This reader was able to relate, not so much to the hiding borne out of cultural and religious differences, but to the hiding that kids do because they feel that no one else has the same thoughts. Daniel Asa Rose gives a voice to those childhood thoughts that most of us have kept silent.

The author reveals himself to be a caring father, one who misses his sons greatly after his divorce and seeks to find a way to create a whole family out of the three of them. He doesn't spend much time talking about how painful the divorce itself was to him, but this shows through in the writing. This is not something seen from a male perspective too often. There are sure to be other fathers out there who will resonate with this aspect of the book.

Lastly, Daniel Asa Rose creates a portrait of his relative, J.P. Morgan (not THE J.P. Morgan) and his particular experience of survival during the Holocaust. At times, it is painful to read, but because it is the story of a singular person, it takes on greater significance than observing the Holocaust as a whole. J.P.'s survival and the tracking of his hiding places by Rose and his sons is nothing short of miraculous. But wouldn't most of those who survived the Holocaust describe their experience as such?

It's tempting to condemn this father for exposing his sons to the horrors of the Holocaust at the tender ages of seven and twelve. Without debating the issue too much, the final verdict is really up to his sons, Alex and Marshall--after all, it's a family thing.

Hiding Places is an important book that should be universal required reading because of its ability to enlighten. It will make you want to be, like Rose, a better thinker and a better person. This keenly-felt, beautifully written work will haunt you.

Daniel Asa Rose has succeeded in writing a memoir that touches the reader in so many ways.He opens by inviting us to his childhood home of Rowyaton ,Connecticut ,and by sharing his memories, opens the flood gates of our own memory. But, Daniel's comforting small town life disguised the history of terror which his glamorous art dealer mother survived. This life is contrasted by that of his mother's family, the New York Orthodox Jewish diamond dealers,foreign and covered with diamond dust, who both embarrased and haunted the young Daniel.They were made more mysterious by the fact that that their Jewish traditions were in no way reflected in the home that Daniel's parents created.

Years later, after a wrenching divorce Daniel takes his two charming and intelligent sons ages seven and twelve, to Belguim,France and Spain to track the steps that led to his family's survival. The results are both delightful and harrowing, but conclude in an triumphant reconciliation with identity. The European chapters are interspersed with the author's boyhood adventures and conflicts. The device, though initially slightly disconcerting, help us understand the arc of Daniel Rose's life. The book deals with the issues of identity with which we all struggle.The reader will not want the story of the Rose family to conclude, but when it does you will have been greatly enriched by the journey.

This is a moving, poignant memoir of a poetic, inchoate and only partially-self-aware Jewish soul growing and coming to grips with the rough-and-tumble of the greater Christian world, both European and American. The writing is beautiful, evoking the lost world of 50's suburban America, with all of its conformity and expectations for total assimilation of all character types into a homogenized "American" souffle. In the meantime, the narrator, whose mother's family ran and hid from the Nazis both inside and beyond the borders of their native Belgium during WWII, goes on a spiritual quest on behalf of both himself and his progeny, searching in Western Europe and at home for the roots of his nameless, heretofore unexamined, seemingly inexplicable and longstanding rage at the injustices of the world, which seems to arise, in part, from the destruction of his Jewish relatives and European Jewry in general. Successfully employing the technique of weaving two stories---that of the hiding places of his childhood in suburban Connecticut and that of his search for the life-and-death hiding places of his Belgian relatives---the author explores both the real and mystical connections between his ancestors' journeys and his own inner journey, as well as the connections he hopes both he and they will pass onto his young sons, who accompanied him to Europe. This book is a true delight, and maybe the only non-fiction book I've read which brought both knowing, happy tears of connection and community, as well as angry tears caused by the needless suffering of the author's relatives.

I was first drawn to this book by a haunting picture of two little girls on the book cover. I was impatient to learn their significance. I had to wait. In the opening of this story, the author relates his fear of the Not-sees (Nazi) as told to him throughout his youth by his mother who escaped Europe.

However, in an effort to come to grips with being Jewish and to learn the truth about what his family endured during World War II, an American divorced father and his two sons begin a quest to retrace the steps of an uncle who endured the Holocaust. Using a tattered journal's clues they searched for his hiding places and learned more than they expected about the war and its victims. Only after finding where and how the twins died did the author understand his great-uncles, other family members, and his mother. During the trip he also realizes what it means to be a father.

I could not appreciate the cover of this book until I learned the fate of the Jewish twin sisters and others who suffered.