Hidden Letters | 
| Creators: Deborah Slier & Ian Shine, Marion Pritchard
Publisher: Star Bright Books
Category: Book
List Price: $35.00
Buy New: $21.93
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Avg. Customer Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 133256
Media: Hardcover
Reading Level: Young Adult
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 200
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.7
Dimensions (in): 11.2 x 10.3 x 0.8
ISBN: 1887734880
Dewey Decimal Number: 940.531809492
EAN: 9781887734882
ASIN: 1887734880
Publication Date: February 28, 2008
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Product Description
Hidden Letters , written by Flip Slier to his parents from a forced labor camp in German-occupied Holland, were found 60 years after World War II. The letters are fastidiously annotated and illustrated with over 300 photographs, newspaper clippings, and original documents issued by the Nazi authorities, many never before published. This book is more than the story of one young man and his extended family; it is an important addition to the history of the Holocaust in Holland and the history of World War II. It is considered to be one of the most valuable contemporary sources on Jewish Dutch life during World War II. Adult/Young Adult. IN STOCK. PLEASE CALL 718-784-9112.
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| Customer Reviews:
Completely unedited and enhanced with annotation June 10, 2008
Hidden Letters is a treasure trove of letters and postcards written in 1942 by an 18 year old Dutch Jew named Philip "Flip" Slier, sent almost daily from Flip to his parents from within the forced labor camp that held Flip. Flip was eventually executed in the Nazi death camp Sobibor. Now translated and reprinted, completely unedited and enhanced with annotation from Deborah Slier and her husband Ian Shine, Hidden Letters is a first-person account of life in Nazi-occupied Holland. Black-and-white photographs and interviews with those who knew Flip, as well as with Selma Wijnberg-Engel (the sole Dutch survivor of the October, 1943 uprising in Sobibor) round out this firsthand testimony. A welcome addition to academic and community library Judaic Studies in general, and Holocaust Studies collections in particular.
The Voice Of Lost Innocence April 21, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
When you read HIDDEN LETTERS, the book is going to leave a mark. It's going to hurt down deep and leave you thinking about things long after you've finished the book. After receiving the book, I admit to approaching the book warily. The subject matter is brutal, and it's devastating to anyone who's a parent.
First, a little history on the book. The letters that comprise the human narrative within the pages were discovered in Amsterdam in 1997. They were written by an eighteen year old Dutch Jew named Philip "Flip" Slier. He was sent to a Dutch labor camp in 1942. When first sent there, Slier believed he was going to be treated humanely, though restricted. He didn't know the horror that awaited him, or that he would soon be dead.
At the time Slier first went to the work camps, letters shipped regularly between the families and the restricted men. As I read the letters, I was stunned by the naive manner that Slier exhibited. He honestly thought he was only going to be there for a short time, and that his experiences there would be nothing more than what he would endure during some summer camp.
As a father of five, I know how innocent kids can be. They think they know so much, but they're blind to so many things. They often don't know they're in over their heads until it's much too late.
And that's what happened with Slier.
I felt somewhat guilty while reading his letters, almost voyeuristic into a world of pain and innocence. The letters are inane and even cheerful. At times Slier obviously felt he was on some grand adventure. At other times I could see that he was putting on a front for his parents, acting brave while he was scared to death, or at least mightily confused by what was going on around him.
That human element, and that innocence, is what is going to haunt me about the book. Slier also took a camera with him. He took several pictures and sent them back home to his parents and friends, and those people managed to hang onto them throughout the blackest days of World War II. I saw his face, and I saw how much of a kid he still was. He aged decades in months, and he finally got killed.
That's one side of the story, but the authors added a tremendous amount of history materials to further the reader's understanding of what was going on in this area at this time. More pictures and maps fill the book. On one hand, HIDDEN LETTERS is a short journal of tumultuous times in a young man's life, but on the other hand the book is a great historical record. I love history, and I equate it with the story of people rather than names and dates. But Philip Slier's story truly brings home the fact that history is made up of people more than dates or events.
HIDDEN LETTERS is going to satisfy the armchair historian's perusal of the time period, and will give some sense of people and what was going on to genealogists that have discovered they've got family members that were in this camps at the same time. For either of those groups, I'm sure the book would be a beneficial addition.
The parents saved those letters all those years. I can't imagine what it must have been like to pull them out every so often and read the last words of their lost son.
A compelling, disturbing, and heartbreakingly great read September 10, 2007
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Hidden Letters is impossible to put down. Philip "Flip" Slier was interned in a Nazi labor camp in the Netherlands, but wrote loving, optimistic letters home--and took many photographs. Then he, and virtually all of his extended family, disappeared into the Holocaust.
When the letters were discovered in Amsterdam in 1997, a search was made for Flip's closest relative, who turned out to be his first cousin Deborah, whose father had moved his family to South Africa and thus enabled them all to live through the war.
Deborah and her husband, Ian Shine, spent ten years having the letters translated and researching the places and the people they described. They interviewed many survivors of the Holocaust and the war, and include information about almost all--including their photographs and ultimate fates. Over 300 photographs are included.
Flip could write and you fall in love with him as you read. When the letters stop, it is devastating.
This is a compelling, disturbing, and heartbreaking great read.
Kathleen Baxter, columnist, School Library Journal
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