”A Hidden Life shows that working through traumas can lead to a moving literary work.” - Quinta ”Gripping” - Algemeen Dagblad (Dutch daily) ”A touching and tragic story that is bound to impress.”. story is so sad, her hurt so palpable, it will take your breath away.” - Minneapolis Star-Tribune “ explores memory, violence and survival-and how well we can ever really know another person. how do you explain that people you’re close to, or thought you were, can just vanish?’” -Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times ’How do you tell children,’ she thinks, ’that life is one continuous goodbye, that with each day the end comes a little nearer. A Hidden Life is that second story, moving between 1940s Holland and 1960s New York City. ”Johanna Reiss wrote one memoir, then discovered another hidden underneath…. It will make you want to hold your own family closer.” -Kristen den Hartog, co-author of The Occupied Garden This book brims with courage and compassion.
As we read, we rush back and forth between 1940s occupied Holland and 1960s New York, searching for the pieces of the puzzle that might lay bare her husband’s-and her own-story. ”In A Hidden Life, Johanna Reiss weaves two great misfortunes into a brave and beautiful story. Writing in the sparest and most self-effacing prose, Joanna Reiss manages to break the reader’s heart.” -Hilma Wolitzer, author of Summer Reading and Hearts
”A Hidden Life is a compelling and chilling memoir about the tragic, far-reaching effects of world history on personal history. Reiss is again seeking and questioning a larger force.” -Lizzie Skurnick, Chicago Tribune (front page) ”A state of memory, a day-to-day account of the limbo one is left with when one’s life is snatched away…. ”A beautifully-written memoir … one of the most moving books I have read.” -Lucy Kavaler, author of The Astors: A Family Chronicle of Pomp and Power Then another darkness fell… searing journey.”-Leslie Garis, The New York Times Book Review ”Like so many Holocaust survivors, Reiss was emotionally crippled. Subtle and disturbing, the book is a powerful consideration of memory, violence, and loss, told in a stunning and sparse narrative style.Ī New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice In 1969, she finally made the trip.Īccompanied by Jim and their two young children, Reiss intended to spend seven weeks researching the book that would eventually become The Upstairs Room, her Newbery Honor-winning account of her time hiding in the attic of a farmhouse in which for a time a contingent of Nazi soldiers was billeted.īut unknown to the millions of people who went on to read her beloved classic, behind the dark and painful story of the book was a still darker tale: Reiss’ husband returned to America early and committed suicide at age thirty-seven, leaving no note.įor Reiss, an ongoing reckoning with universal tragedy becomes particular: she is forced to reckon, too, with Jim’s death-and explain it to her children. Devout Catholics, they refuse to support the Nazi regime in the wake of the Anschluss in 1938, and when Frantz is conscripted he takes a stand as a conscientious objector, refusing to swear his allegiance to Hitler, a decision which will test the limits of his beliefs.Īn intimate epic, A Hidden Life sees Malick revisit themes of faith versus religion, personal responsibility, and the destruction of an Edenic paradise.For years, Johanna Reiss’ American husband, Jim, encouraged her to return to Holland to chronicle the two years, seven months, and one day she had spent hiding from the Nazis in rural Usselo, Holland. Radegund, a sublimely beautiful Austrian mountain village. Frantz (August Diehl) is introduced tending to the land with his wife, Fani (Valerie Pachner), high on the slopes of St. Having pondered questions of contemporary spiritual malaise in Knight of Cups and Song to Song, Terrence Malick is on a surer footing with the true story of Frantz Jägerstätter, a man of faith who pays dearly for his convictions when Nazi ideology sweeps through Europe. This film was released on 17th January 2020, and is no longer screening.
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