Hiding in Plain Sight

An extraordinary Holocaust survival story about an Orthodox Jewish woman who managed to survive in wartime Poland by pretending to be a Catholic. Polish Catholics believed she was one of them.

A devoted Nazi family took her in as if she was their own daughter. She fell in love with a German engineer who built aeroplanes for the Luftwaffe. What none of these people knew was that Mala Rivka Kizel had been born into a large Orthodox Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland, in 1926. She was the only one in her family who survived the war.

When Dutch journalist Pieter van Os stumbled upon Mala’s story, he set out to revive the world through which she had made her way from war-ravaged middle Europe, to Israel, before finally settling in the Netherlands. With her memoir and their interviews as guide, van Os physically retraced Mala’s steps, stopping in at local archives and remote villages, searching for anyone who might have known or helped her seventy-five years before.