Hiding in Plain Sight

An extraordinary Holocaust survival story about a young 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 the Second World War.

When Dutch journalist Pieter van Os stumbled upon Mala's story, he set out to revive the world through which she had made her way from war-ravaged middle Europe to the nascent state of Israel before finally settling in the Netherlands. With her memoir and their interviews as a guide, Van Os physically retraced Mala's steps, stopping in at local archives and remote villages, searching for anyone who might have known or helped her seventy-five years before.

At times reading like an erudite detective story, this poignant, rich book is an engrossing meditation on what drives us to fear the 'other', and what in turn might allow us to feel compassion for them.

Hiding in Plain Sight is, at times, a detective story and at others, a poignant reminder that there were good people who helped, and others who lied to survive, remembering each step of the way that lying, and in turn surviving, was the best revenge of all. - Jessica Abelsohn, Australian Jewish News

Journalist van Os delivers an intense and intriguing portrait of Holocaust survivor Mala Shlafer nee Kizel (1926-2021), a Polish Jew who survived the Nazis by passing as an ethnic German Catholic ...The result is an immersive study of survival. - Publishers Weekly

You rarely see a journalistic book of this narrative-literary level. A unique book that reveals on every page how much careful research and great writing power lies behind it ... van Os shows the value of dwelling longer on a side path or a detail. In this way he knows how to paint a broad and multicoloured image of the blackest pages of recent European history. You are reading this book in one breath. - Judges' comments from the Brusse Prize for Best Dutch-language Journalistic Book