Don't expect to find a lot of stuff about Nazis or near-death experiences in here, but rather the day-to-day misery of a family of four trapped in close quarters with, and utterly dependent on, an extremely bitter, unpleasant and probably mentally ill woman who constantly complained about them, insulted them, made anti-Semetic remarks, cheated them of food, accused them of stealing, threatened to throw them out of the house to certain death, and occasionally physically beat them with her fists, rolling pins, scrubbing brushes, fireplace pokers and the like. Her husband was utterly cowed by her and often also the victim of her abuse and, although he was appalled by her behavior, he could not stand up to her.

The Dekkers may have hidden, fed and sheltered the Dutch-Jewish Benninga family in Nazi-occupied Holland for over two years, thereby saving their lives, but it seems like the Benningas would have been better off choosing just about ANYONE else to hide them. I think I would have been driven to murder or suicide by Mrs. Dekker's behavior long before the war was over. She was not only openly abusive towards the Benningas, but also made their lives miserable in petty ways, such as by removing the fuse that provided electricity to their attic room so they had no light, and refusing to let them open the attic windows even in the summer when the temperature reached 90 degrees -- she would even get up in the middle of the night and check to make sure they hadn't opened the windows while she was asleep! And of course her constant threats to throw them out or report them to the Gestapo were an ever-present source of apprehension.

The author, who was a teenager at the time he stayed with the Dekkers, was aided in his remembrances by the detailed journal his father kept while they were in hiding. This is certainly not a typical Holocaust memoir, since almost all the details are about the Benningas struggling to coexist with Mrs. Dekker, and not about typical Holocaust experiences like concentration camps, false papers, fleeing the Nazis, etc. I would almost think it better classed with memoirs about abusive families than memoirs about the Holocaust. But no matter how you choose to categorize it, it definitely made for riveting reading. ( )