Our Narrow Hiding Places

Eighty-year-old Mieke Geborn agrees to help a friend translate a book from Dutch (Mieke’s native language), having learned that its author was a prisoner at the same concentration camp where Mieke’s father-in-law is presumed to have died. Soon, Mieke is recalling her childhood in Nazi-occupied Holland, with memories sparked by the book and a visit from her grandson Will. After the bombing of Rotterdam in 1940, Mieke’s father’s professor friend and his large family came to stay with Mieke’s. Then the Nazis came for the professor, and he fled, never to be seen again by his family. Circumstances and restrictions worsened, and Mieke and her family struggled to survive, especially once the Hunger Winter set in in 1944. Chapters from the book Mieke is translating are interspersed between interludes set in the present and Mieke’s memories of the Nazi occupation. The chapters from the Dutch book are narrated by eels, whose long lives make them uniquely suited to comment on humanity.