Love, Education, and Next Projects

Born in Amsterdam in 1946, Professor Shulamit Reinharz grew up amid the lingering shadows of wartime trauma, an experience that shaped her later academic path and her role in the creation of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute. With Hiding in Holland: A Resistance Memoir (Amsterdam Publishers, 2024), she has crafted a unique form of Holocaust memoir, describing it as a “piano duet” between her father’s extensive writings and her own historical commentary. The result is a careful interplay between memory and historical verification.

The interview also explored Reinhart’s research in Gunzenhausen, the Bavarian town where her father’s story began before he was forced into exile. Today, with no Jewish residents since 1939, Gunzenhausen has become a setting for remembrance projects that Reinhart has actively supported. She spoke of Emmy Hetzner, a retired teacher who initiated a project with her ninth-grade students to research the town’s Jewish history, resulting in a comprehensive online archive. Reinhart’s own involvement with a German-Jewish Dialogue Group has led to symbolic but important acts of reconciliation, such as proposals to mark Jewish names on war memorials with Magen Davids, recovering neglected synagogue stones, and supporting a tree-planting initiative where one tree is dedicated to each Jewish family whose descendants have returned.

Central to Hiding are the interwoven themes of love, education, and hiding. Reinharz recounted how her father’s independence on a Dutch farm enabled him to master the language and build trust with locals. Later, in Amsterdam, he honed useful skills as an auto mechanic, participated in resistance activities, and nurtured enduring bonds. His relationship with Reinharz’s mother, which began in a Zionist youth group in Munich, sustained them despite being separated during periods of hiding. Their commitment to one another was paralleled by friendships with individuals like Laura Dorlacher and the Schroden couple, recognized as Righteous Gentiles, who risked everything to protect him.

Reinharz also reflected on the role of education during the Nazi era, describing how teachers indoctrinated students into antisemitic ideology, extending propaganda beyond the classroom into public rituals and community life. In this way, education became an instrument of hatred, embedding prejudice in young generations.

As the conversation concluded, Reinharz turned to her next project, which will tell her mother’s story as a two-time refugee. Unlike Hiding in Holland, which is built on her father’s testimony, the new work will examine her mother’s displacements across Germany, Holland, and the United States, offering a gendered perspective within Holocaust studies.

The exchange illuminated how Reinharz’s scholarship bridges her roles as academic, daughter, and custodian of memory. Hiding in Holland, already a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in Holocaust memoirs, stands as both a historical document and a meditation on love, friendship, resilience, and the responsibility to preserve stories across generations.

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