A Past in Hiding

A historian reconstructs a Jewish woman's survival inside Nazi Germany: “Part detective story and part tragedy . . . a riveting story told by a master” (Publishers Weekly).

At the outbreak of World War II, Marianne Strauss, the sheltered daughter of well-to-do German Jews, was an ordinary girl, concerned with studies, friends, and romance. Almost overnight she was transformed into a woman of spirit and defiance, a fighter who, when the Gestapo came for her family, seized the moment and went underground.

On the run for two years, Marianne traveled across Nazi Germany without papers, aided by a remarkable resistance organization, previously unknown and unsung. Drawing on an astonishing cache of documents as well as original interviews across three continents, historian Mark Roseman pieces together Marianne’s odyssey and reveals aspects of life in the Third Reich long hidden from view.

As Roseman excavates the past, he also puts forward a new and sympathetic interpretation of the troubling discrepancies between fact and recollection that so often cloud survivors’ accounts. Interweaving Roseman's quest to uncover the truth and Strauss's story of love, courage and survival, A Past in Hiding is also a poignant investigation into the nature of memory, authenticity, and truth.