Museum of Jewish Heritage: “Invisible Years: Holocaust Drawers”

Invisible Years is an intimate portrait of an extended Jewish family living and hiding in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, written and beautifully designed by Daphne Geismar. Geismar and her cousin Sharon Strauss went on a fourteen-year odyssey after discovering that their mothers both had “Holocaust drawers,” in which they kept letters, journals, documents, and photographs. In this presentation, we will hear about the making of Invisible Years, and discover the stories of eight family members pieced back together again, speaking to one another in a way that they couldn’t during and after the war. Holocaust historian Prof. Robert Jan van Pelt joins the conversation, calibrating the personal stories to the distinct atmosphere that characterized the daily lives of Dutch Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors in the decade before and during the German occupation.