Reviewed by Raanan Geberer for Readers' Favorite

The Time Between by Bryna Hellmann-Gillson looks at several young Jewish women and how they responded to the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam during World War II. Hannah, like Anne Frank, spent her early years in Germany, but her family moved to the Netherlands after the Nazis’ anti-Semitism became too much to bear. When the Germans occupy Amsterdam, at first life goes on as normal – for example, the “Jewish Market” continues to thrive – but soon, the Gestapo begins to round up hundreds of Jewish men, ostensibly to work in Germany. Hannah finds work in a hospital. Pam, the sister of Hannah’s boyfriend Adrian, works in a nursery and helps Jewish children go into hiding. While still seeing Adrian, who has joined the underground, Hannah begins an affair with a handsome German officer whom she convinces herself is different. But soon, the officer wants her to spy for him, with a special interest in Adrian’s activities. Pam finds out, and she and her friend Jo try to kill Hannah but fail. What will happen to them now?

In The Time Between, Bryna Hellmann-Gillson does a masterful job of showing us the girls’ personal and inner lives and their interactions with each other, and relating it to the tumultuous world of World War 2. She shows how the girls, at least one of whom was a “Christmas Tree Jew” with little Jewish background, try to adapt to situations that would have been incomprehensible to them just a few years beforehand. We can almost feel Hannah’s mixed feelings when her German lover, Conrad, takes her to a party and she hears other Nazi officers making toasts to Hitler and pontificating about how marriages between Jewish men and Aryan women were a threat to the Reich. When writing, the author spoke to several Dutch women who were girls during the Nazi occupation, and her research no doubt helped the book feel so realistic. All in all, she brings to life the often-neglected history of the German occupation's impact on Dutch Jewry.