An Address in Amsterdam: A Novel

by Mary Dingee Fillmore

A Kirkus Indie Book of the Month
Winner, Sarton Women's Book Award for Historical Fiction

When the Germans invade her city, Rachel Klein is a teenager falling in love. Within a year, she's delivering illegal papers and confronting Nazi soldiers. In this “compelling and touching tale” (Laurel Corona), Rachel finds her courage and faces wrenching choices.

Follow Rachel Klein as she faces double danger as a young Jewish woman and resistance worker in the Amsterdam of Anne Frank.

On May 10, 1940, the Nazi bombers blast the night and shatter Rachel Klein's sleep—along with her life as she knew it. She's eighteen, and falling in love with a Gentile in a secret relationship. As the Nazi terror escalates, her romance deepens quickly, and so does her boyfriend's involvement with student protests. Soon, he must disappear rather than face arrest. When Rachel witnesses the first roundup of 425 Jewish men in the Jonas Daniel Meijerplein, she knows that she too must act, and joins the resistance.

Despite the ever greater danger as the Nazis tighten their grip on the city, Rachel makes daily deliveries of illegal papers to addresses all over Amsterdam. She ingeniously evades the Nazis and their Dutch collaborators for months, although she has some close calls. As the roundups intensify, Rachel agonizes about whether to go into hiding. Ultimately she persuades her parents to accompany her to a dank basement, where she gets to know herself and them in a different way, and meets a new man.

A young woman can find her courage in any situation, no matter how terrible, and love is always a possibility.

338 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 4, 2016

About the author

After a lifetime of private creative writing, Mary Dingee Fillmore was seized by a subject too important to hide in her journal or a letter to friends. Living in a house where Jewish people were hidden inspired her novel, An Address in Amsterdam, to be published by She Writes Press in October 2016. Since Mary's first lengthy stay in Amsterdam in 2001, she has been visiting, researching, writing, and speaking about the Holocaust and resistance in the Netherlands.

See Mary's author website at http://www.maryfillmore.com, and visit her on Facebook or at http://www.seehiddenamsterdam.com.

To develop her craft as a writer to be worthy of her topic, Mary earned her MFA at Vermont College in 2005. Since then, she has published poetry in literary journals as well as gaining recognition for her essay, “Freeing the Hidden Camp.” The Vermont Humanities Council Speakers’ Bureau sponsors Mary’s presentation of “Anne Frank’s Neighbors: What Did They Do?,” which explores the many shades of grey in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, and the wrenching choices which confronted good people. Mary also wrote a nonfiction book in 1987 (Women MBAs: A Foot in the Door, G.K. Hall), and contributed a chapter to Ourselves Growing Older (Simon and Schuster).

Mary has been a resident at the Vermont Studio Center and a graduate assistant at Vermont College's MFA program. To keep on learning, she attends writing conferences such as The Muse and the Marketplace, the Associated Writing Programs, Write Angles, and the International Women's Writing Guild. For more than thirty years, Mary has studied with Deena Metzger, the author of the invaluable Writing for Your Life.

Since 1982, Mary's other work has been as a facilitator bringing people together for a purpose, which she still enjoys after more than thirty years working throughout the US and elsewhere. She lives with her longtime partner, astronomer Joanna Rankin, in Burlington, Vermont.