Discovery of a hidden force of nature

BroughtupadevoutCatholicin post-war Holland, Paul Glaser discovered his true identity by the slenderest of chances. At a conference in Poland, the organisers propose a trip to Auschwitz. He is uninterested but, walking past a display of victims’ carefully labelled suitcases, he sees his own name: Glaser.

Others notice, too, and ask if he is Jewish. Though indignant in his denials, he begins to suspect some of the inconsistencies in his upbringing — the lack of relatives, the gaps in his parents’ account of their lives.

Dancing with the Enemy is the story of how this uneasy man found out what had happened to his father, his grandparents and, most strikingly, his aunt — the dancing, singing survivor, Rosie.

It is her life that animates this extraordinary tale. Her letters and diaries have a dynamic absent in Paul’s own story. Rosie’s life is often heartstoppingly dangerous but her account is threaded with the kind of practical optimism that throws her subsequent sufferings into greater relief.

Rosie is a rebel. Brought up by loving parents, her youth was a whirl of dancing, tennis and flirtation with men. Her father managed the first margarine factory, Blue Band, in Holland after the First WorldWar;hermotherwasanindulgent woman who adored her wild daughter.

At 20, Rosie left to live with her boyfriend Wim, a pilot. When he was killed in an air accident, she married Leo, a dance expert, with whom she set up a dance school. But he emerged as a bully and she left him for lover, Kees. By the age of 25, she was separated from him, too, but her joie de vivre still exudes from every line of her diary.

WhentheGermansinvadedHolland, Rosie took no notice of the restrictions on Jews. She drank in bars alongside SS officers and kept her dancing school going.

Eventually denounced by her ex husband and imprisoned in a Dutch internment camp, she remained optimistic: “I kept busy talking to the Ger- mans — easy as I spoke the language fluently.” Deported to Auschwitz, she was one of only eight to survive from a group of 1,200 Dutch prisoners. She gave dance lessons for the SS officers, wearing clothing abandoned by victims of the gas chambers. And when the Russians broke through the German lines and the SS marched the prisoners out of the camp, Rosie furiously wondered why they didn’t “rush to defend the Heimat instead of guarding some half starved captives…”

Dancing with theEnemy resolves Paul Glaser’s personal identity crisis. But it also exposes many of Paul Glaser’s Aunt Rosie with dance students on the Drunen Dunes in Holland before incarceration the myths of resistance — and examines the psychology of betrayal, especially of the Dutch. Above all, it brings us the story of irrepressible, sexy Rosie, a woman able to see through her oppressors’ violent manner to the pathetically inadequate people behind the uniforms and regulations.

Anne Garvey is a Cambridge-based writer