Pieter van Os at Boswell Book Festival 2023
An extraordinary Holocaust survival story about an Orthodox Jewish woman who managed to survive in wartime Poland by pretending to be a Catholic.
Polish Catholics believed she was one of them. A devoted Nazi family took her in as if she was their own daughter.
She fell in love with a German engineer who built aeroplanes for the Luftwaffe. What none of these people knew was that Mala Rivka Kizel had been born into a large Orthodox Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland, in 1926. By using her charm, intelligence, blonde hair, and blue eyes to assume different identities, she was the only member of her family to survive World War II.
When prize-winning historian Pieter van Os stumbled upon Mala’s story in a Warsaw piano bar, he set out to retrace her steps, searching for anyone who might have known or helped her seventy-five years before.
In conversation with Anna Somers Cocks
Translated by David Doherty
Part of New Dutch Writing, presented by the Dutch Foundation for Literature
https://www.boswellbookfestival.co.uk/2023/events/298
About the author(s)
Pieter van Os writes for NRC Handelsblad and De Groene Amsterdammer. His published works include the books The Netherlands in Focus, Father and Son Receive the Spirit (with Henk van Os), and We Understand Each Other Perfectly, about his years as a parliamentary journalist. After having lived in Warsaw for...
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