Hiding in the Open

Hiding in the Open, ISBN: 0-87839-171-1, paperback, $14.95, is available in bookstores and at Amazon.com. For autographed copies, at $2.00 shipping charge, please contact:

Sabina Zimering:
E-mail: rszimering@msn.com

Dedication: To my mother and father and all the others brutally silenced. To our Catholic friends: Mrs. Justyna, my grade school teacher, and her daughters Danka and Mala, for giving my sister and me a chance to survive the Holocaust.

"Over the years I have seen, heard and read a lot about the Holocaust. Sabina Zimering's Hiding in the Open, published by North Star Press of St. Cloud, Inc. is a very powerful and moving piece of work. I couldn't put it down."
- Joel Coen, Director of Fargo and other movies

"Sabina Zimering's memoir will break your heart and renew your faith in the human spirit. You will weep for the young Sabina's tragic losses and cheer her on in her guts and wits: Surely no fiction could be as riveting, suspenseful and moving."
- Paulette Bates Alden, author of Feeding the Eagles and Crossing the Moon

"Reading Hiding in the Open was much like reading The Diary of Anne Frank. Told by the author as a grandmother recounting her life, Zimering's memoir is, in the end, about hope, faith, family and friendship. It's powerful, moving and revealing."
- Laura L Carstensen, Professor of Psychology, Director of Research on Women and Gender, Stanford University

"I heard Sabina Zimering tell her gripping story to eighth-graders at a Minneapolis Catholic school, and there was not a whisper, hardly a fidget. We were all captivated."
- Peg Meier, Star Tribune reporter

"Sabina Zimering's story is a compelling narrative of intelligence, compassion and indomitable spirit for all ages."
- Terence M. Keane Ph.D., Director of the National Center for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology, Boston University School of Medicine

Sabina Zimering, who grew up in Poland, was 16 when World War II broke out. In no time, the Germans confiscated her father's coal business, stopped her education and forced the family into the ghetto, where fear, hunger and typhus epidemic reigned. The Catholic friends, risking their own lives, hid Sabina and her sister in their attic and gave them Aryan papers. Saved from the deportation to the gas chambers of Treblinka, the two sisters passed as Catholic Poles in Germany. They worked in a hotel where the high ranking military arid the Gestapo men lived.

After the war Zimering tried to help her friends in Poland. Danka, ill with TB, recovered when Sabina sent her the proper medication, food and warm clothes. A year later, Mala, in jail for political reason, was set free. Sabina's letter stated that during the war she saved the two Jewish sisters. Yad Vashem in Jerusalem declared the Justyna sisters Righteous Gentiles after Zimering's testimony. Plaques with their names and two growing trees remain witnesses. Their names are also displayed in the Washington Holocaust Museum. The friendship of the Christians and Jews, which lasted three generations, is still alive and active.

In 1950 Zimering graduated from Munich Medical School, emigrated to Minneapolis, got married, raised a family and practiced medicine for 42 years. Hiding in the Open, in its second edition (after three months), received an honorary mention in the Jerome/SASE contest. The Minnesota Women's Press, Minneapolis Star Tribune, American Jewish World and the Bradenton Harold in Florida wrote about her. Minnesota Public Radio and KFAI interviewed Sabina. The History Theater in St. Paul is planning to put her story on stage.

Top. Sabina Zimmering and her husband Reuben at the opening of "Hiding in the Open" at The Great American History Theatre, Saint Paul, MN April, 2004

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Last modified on October 22, 2009