Johanna holds a copy of her book, A Hidden
Life, at her desk in her Manhattan apartment.

Johanna Reiss (pronounced “reese”) is busy these days being interviewed and giving readings from her new book, A Hidden Life: A Memoir of August 1969.

August 1969 was when Johanna traveled from New York City to Holland with her two young daughters to check facts for a book about her experience as a Jewish child during the Nazi occupation in World War II.

Johanna was eight when the Germans marched into her town of Winterswijk in 1940. After two years of experiencing increasing restrictions on her young life and that of her family, and after the family had been threatened with deportation, she and an older sister, Sini, went into hiding. They were hidden by a farmer, Johan Oosterveld, his wife Dientje and Johan's mother Opoe in a simple farm house in the rural town of Usselo. Johanna and her sister hid in a tiny upstairs room for over two and a half years, or, as Johanna puts it, two years, seven months, and part of one day.

Johanna’s American husband Jim had urged her for years to write the book, and he joined her for part of the time she was in Holland. He returned home before Johanna did, and 13 days later Johanna received a phone call from New York informing her that Jim had committed suicide.

He was 37, and had left no note. Johanna searched for one for years. The story that was given out about Jim’s death while Johanna was still in Holland was that he had died of a heart attack. Her daughters were in their teens before Johanna thought the time was right to tell them that their father had committed suicide.

After her husband's death, Johanna repressed her fear, she says, at being the only person, with no nearby relatives, who was responsible for her two daughters. They were aged seven and nine at the time. How would she support them?

Social Security helped, as it happens, with payments for each daughter until she was 18. That, plus a succession of jobs, doing translations, conducting writing workshops, and royalties earned by her books enabled Johanna to support her children until they became self-sufficient. (They would celebrate New Year’s Eve at a MacDonald’s.) Both daughters have Ph.D’s. One is an art historian and the other is a school psychologist. They are married, with two children each, ages 7 to 15, who are the delight of their grandmother.

Johanna has never cared a great deal about religion, but ever since her daughters, whose husbands are not Jewish, asked her if there wasn’t more to being Jewish than the Holocaust, she has been having family Passover seders and Hanukkah parties.

In the years immediately following her husband’s death, Johanna managed to write the book that her husband had wanted her to write. First, though, she took her children to Block Island, Rhode Island, for a five-week trip that she and Jim had planned. When they returned, she would work at a job during the day and tuck her daughters into bed each night, with lots of stories and hugs and kisses, and then she would write. It was her salvation. In that way, she remarks, Johan, the Dutch farmer who saved her life during the war, saved her life a second time.

She wrote The Upstairs Room, which was published by HarperCollins in 1972, as a story to tell her children, and did not anticipate that it would become a book for a great many children around the world. Johanna does not think of herself, really, as a writer. She must be one, though, she says, because she does write—she is impelled to write about whatever “has hit her hard.” She has written a sequel to The Upstairs Room, titled, The Journey Back, published by HarperCollins in 1976, as well as a book that was published in Holland in 1988 about the North Sea Flood of 1953 that killed 1,835 people in the Netherlands.

The Upstairs Room is for readers aged 12 and up. The “and up” is accurate, because Johanna’s account of her experience in hiding is a gripping one for readers of all ages. It was designated a Newbery Honor Book by the American Library Association (Children’s Librarians Section) and received other prestigious awards. It has never been out of print and is still in print in Dutch, German, Italian, and Spanish.

The book is a true account of Johanna's years in hiding. She has been asked if it is really true, for example, that after the downstairs part of the Oostervelds’ house was made into the German headquarters, Johanna once slipped out of the upstairs room to peek into the kitchen, and found herself staring into a the eyes of a German soldier.

Yes, the story is true, and it was known that Johan and his wife were childless. When the soldier asked, “Who’s the kid?” Johan saved the day, Johanna recounts, by saying, casually, that the kid was his niece. Then he sent his wife out of town to bring back his sister's girl, who was about Johanna’s age, to stay with them for a few days in order to back up his story.

Johan also saved the lives of Johanna and her sister, as well as his own life and the lives of his wife and mother, by constructing a very small hiding place behind a false back in a closet of the upstairs room. On one occasion, Johanna and Sini barely managed to squeeze into it just before an inspection of the closet by the Gestapo.

Sini's painting of cows is indeed appropriate,
Johanna says, given the sisters' background.

Johanna would not make up things like this, she says, because in her view, any falsification of facts about a Holocaust experience “leaves the door open for Holocaust deniers.” Whatever Johanna writes has to be rooted in reality. She once tried to write a fairy tale, and it didn’t work out.

Johanna (“Annie”) de Leeuw was born on April 4, 1932, in Winterswijk. Her father was a cattle dealer. Johanna contrasts her late husband Jim’s background—Yale, Fulbright Scholar, Harvard M.B.A.—with her own, which she sums up as “cow.” Her father had been unable to persuade her ailing mother to leave Holland while it was still possible, and after a failed attempt to leave on his own, went into hiding not long before the Dutch police came looking for him. They were rounding up Jews for the weekly transport to a “labor camp” (read, “death camp”) in Poland.

After her father left, Johanna’s mother was hospitalized, and Johanna managed to visit her before going into hiding with her sister Sini. Johanna’s eldest sister Rachel also went into hiding after their mother had died. An older brother had died in the hospital the previous year, of a ruptured appendix.

Johanna, her two sisters and her father were among 35 Jews who returned to Winterswijk after the war out of the pre-war Jewish population of 300, and they were the largest family group to survive. Johan Oosterveld was hailed by his community as a hero, for some months, anyway, for saving the lives of Johanna and her sister Sini, and he reveled in it. In the late 1980’s, The Upstairs Room was staged as a play in Winterswijk, and the play will be put on again in February 2010.

The Oostervelds are recognized at Yad Vashem, the Israeli holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, as among the “Righteous Among the Nations,” non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. The Virtual Wall of Honor on the Yad Vashem web site lists the names of Johan and his wife Gerritdina (Dientje's full first name) but it lists Johan's mother as Dientje's mother, which is incorrect. It was Johan's mother, Opoe (her full first name was Hermina) who lived with Johan and his wife and helped to hide Johanna and her sister. Johanna became quite fond of Opoe. When asked if she herself could have done what the Oostervelds had done for her and Sini, Johanna acknowledges that she doesn’t know.

Johanna herself was reluctant to talk about her experience in hiding when she returned to Winterswijk, because, she explains, other survivors had graphic tales to tell of Nazi violence, and it was assumed that while in hiding, she must have had an exciting life. “What did she do?” she would be asked. “I sat,” Johanna would reply.

Johanna did not keep a diary while she was in hiding, but she did not need to. She observed, and she remembered. She received some school lessons during this time from her sister Sini, who was 20 when they went into hiding and was a mother figure for Johanna.

Johanna tells a story about her having to keep walking around the tiny room one hundred times each day so that her legs would get at least some exercise. Sini was not always attentive, however, and Johanna could count as she pleased, skipping so many numbers that in no time she’d announce, “I did it, one hundred.” “Very good,” Sini would say, and so fast.”

Johanna says that Sini fretted while they were in hiding about missing out on life, on romance, in particular. Johanna herself had not had enough life experience, she says, to whine about such things. In any event, Sini, who was very pretty, did indeed have romance in her life, according to Johanna, beginning with the Canadian soldiers she kissed and kept kissing when they liberated Usselo.

Both of Johanna’s sisters later married men who were hidden during the Nazi occupation and showed some effects of their wartime experience. Sini was divorced eventually and, Johanna says, has had other romantic interests up to the present. Sini is 87.

Sini and Rachel, who is 91, live in Holland, where Johanna visits them each summer, and they have never given up hope that Johanna, who has lived in the U.S. for 50 years, will return to Holland to live. They broached the subject when Johanna and her young daughters were visiting in Holland after Jim’s death. When Johanna pointed out a house to her daughters that could be had for a song (the dollar was high then), the girls got so alarmed at the thought that Johanna might move them to Holland that one of them fell off her bike.

After the war, Johanna returned to Winterswijk and went back to school. After high school, she went to a teachers college, and taught elementary school for two years near Utrecht. Johanna had always hated school, she says, and she quit her teaching job when it caused her skin to itch—literally, with a skin disease. Her stepmother (her father had remarried) promoted the idea of Johanna’s taking a trip to America, doubtless hoping that she would find a husband there, and she came to the U.S. in 1955 for what was supposed to be a one-year visit.

At first, Johanna stayed with an aunt and uncle in Pearl River, New York, north of Manhattan, and then roomed with three other women, one of whom was named Betty. Betty was crucial to Johanna’s future. When Johanna could not get a teaching job because of her foreign accent (teachers could not have foreign accents at the time, at least in New York), Betty found her a job, and an apartment. When Betty became engaged to a Harvard graduate student, she introduced Johanna to her fiancé’s roommate and coached her on getting him to propose. He did, more or less. The roommate was Jim.

Johanna can relax in the apartment she and
Jim had rented and she was persuaded to buy.

After the wedding, Johanna and Jim lived in Detroit, where Jim was working, and then in New York City, first on Staten Island and then in Manhattan.

Johanna has always worked, doing translations and such, usually at home. After Jim’s death, she held a variety of jobs, beginning with one as a receptionist at an ice cream plant, and she continued to write. She was writing when a friend who was running the New York City Rent Stabilization Board told her she could have a job there. The woman who was the office manager had not been told about Johanna beforehand, however, and so they did not start off on the best of footings.

At first, the office manager gave Johanna a job interviewing tenants who came into the office with complaints. Interested in their stories, she would take copious notes. Johanna was taking too long at this, the office manager said, and switched her to taking tenant complaints by phone.

In one call, an elderly woman complained that her oven door would not close, and the landlord would not repair it. Her brother, the woman said, had to sit with his back against the oven door so that she could bake custard. “What kind of custard?” Johanna wanted to know (she really did want to know). When the office manager heard her ask that, she moved Johanna to the filing room, and gave her instructions about how to file alphabetically. When Johanna got a book contract for The Upstairs Room and told the office manager she was leaving, the manager said to Johanna that it was too bad, because she was “beginning to do well.”

Johanna was not happy in her first, short, career teaching school, but she has found herself, to her surprise, teaching children in schools all over the U.S. and abroad, including in Germany and Taiwan, about her books. She has also taught prisoners.

For ten years, Johanna was a Board member of PEN (PEN American Center, or P.E.N., for poets/playwrights, essayists/editors, and novelists). Members are described on its web site as "professionals who represent the most distinguished writers, translators, and editors in the United States." She chaired their prison-writing program and taught a monthly writing class at Sing Sing. Around the same time she was singing in the West Village Chorale; she was a member of the Chorale for many years.

Johanna likes to stand when
giving readings from her work.

She likes to tell the story of what happened to her many years later, when she was waiting at a bus stop with her cat in her arms on the way to the vet. (Usually, Johanna walks in the city, over long distances.) A guy on a bike went by and shouted, for all to hear, “Johanna! Remember me? I’m [so and so] from Sing Sing!”

Johanna also taught inmates of the women’s prison in Bedford, New York, and was a tutor for the Fortune Society, for former prisoners who needed to be able to read better before they could hope to get work. Years ago she conducted an annual writing workshop at Skidmore College, in Saratoga Springs, New York, for the International Women’s Writing Guild.

Johanna lives in the apartment in Manhattan that she and Jim had rented. She was “laughed into buying it” when the building was converted. A friend of Jim’s who has helped her as a financial adviser had spent two days trying to convince her to buy the apartment, to no avail. Johanna didn’t want to own anything of the sort. Then he called her from his office and told her that his secretary was interested in buying it, and would make a good landlady. So was the receptionist, and she would make a good landlady too. On he went, until Johanna laughed, and agreed she would buy it. It took another friend, who lent her the down payment, to make it possible. Johanna is grateful for and to her friends.

Johanna autographing copies of her new book,
A Hidden Life, at the NYC Holocaust Museum.

In A Hidden Life, Johanna does not explicitly resolve the mystery of her husband’s suicide. But she describes Jim and his behavior in such scrupulous detail that the reader is able to come to his or her own conclusion.

A Hidden Life was published this past January by Melville House, and published in Holland, in translation, the previous September. It was an Editors’ Choice in The New York Times Book Review, where it received a full-page review in the February 22, 2009 issue. Johanna was recently interviewed and gave readings from the book at the Museum of Jewish Heritage (known as the Holocaust Museum) in lower Manhattan. Her next New York City appearance was scheduled for May 5 in New York City at the Barnes & Noble bookstore in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

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