Today, The New York Times published a great interview with Roxane, on the occasion of the upcoming publication (by Harper Collins, on august 31st) of The Sisters in Auschwitz in the USA. Read the full interview (by Nina Siegal) here.

Here’s an excerpt:

“NAARDEN, the Netherlands — Midway through “The Sisters of Auschwitz,” Roxane van Iperen’s book on two Dutch Jewish sisters who aided dozens of people during World War II, there is a moment of merriment that one doesn’t usually expect from a Holocaust narrative.

In a neighborhood “crawling with fascists,” she writes, the sisters, Janny and Lien Brilleslijper, organized a celebration of Yiddish culture at their countryside estate in Naarden, about 30 minutes from Amsterdam.

“There is dance, music, song and recitation,” van Iperen writes. “Simon drums, Puck plays the violin and Jaap builds Kathinka a little piano. Lien uses the death mask for a Yiddish story.” The attendees “quietly dissolve into the night — without a single Nazi, German soldier or overzealous neighbor even noticing they were there.”

How did this take place in 1943, during the most lethal phase of Jewish deportations from the Netherlands to extermination camps? “Luck, I guess. A lot of luck,” van Iperen said in an interview. “For a short while, nothing was very public, and after a while, people knew, the milkman and the baker knew, but for one reason or another they chose to keep silent.”

Van Iperen now lives in that house, whose name, ’T Hooge Nest, or the High Nest, appears on its facade. That was also the Dutch title of her book, which was published by Lebowski Publishers in 2018. It became a best seller in the Netherlands, spending more than 130 weeks on the national Bestseller 60 list.”