“DANCING WITH THE ENEMY,” BY PAUL GLASER.

You would think that after reading numerous books on the Holocaust that I would know a lot more than I do, but after reading each book I realize how little I still know. “Dancing with the Enemy,” is an extraordinary story about a unique, intelligent, talented woman (Rosie Glaser) who survives a number of Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, with her astonishing good looks, dancing ability, sleeping with the enemy, and her ability to speak four languages. 

Betrayed by her former husband and dance partner, then by her current lover, she and her parents are arrested by the Dutch authorities simply because she is Jewish. They are first placed in a number of holding camps, run by the SS, in the Netherlands. It is in these first camps that she makes her secretarial and organizational abilities known to an SS officer. 

Shortly thereafter, they start sleeping together, with the added benefits for Rosie of much more food, unlimited freedom to walk around the camp, and to be the highlight performer at a club where the officers gathered together to get drunk and where Rosie teaches them to dance.

If this seems like a betrayal and siding with the enemy it just might be, except for the fact that the extra food she gets she gives to starving prisoners and the information she gets from her lover keeps her abreast of the real motives of the SS. 

Rosie is a survivor and not only does her techniques help her survive Auschwitz but, in turn, she helps other prisoners survive and, like her, eventually find freedom.

I highly recommend this book. It not only highlights the different and creative methods survivors used to finally reach that place we call freedom, but in the real life character of Rosie Glaser the reader is introduced to a unique, captivating, highly unusual woman who this reader found to be truly heroic.