Girl in the Blue Coat

Content warning: The guide contains discussions of antisemitism, the Holocaust, starvation, and violence that appear in the source text.

Hanneke is a blonde-haired, green-eyed, pretty girl: an “Aryan poster girl” who publicly works as the receptionist for an undertaker, but privately works procuring and delivering black market goods to Dutch buyers in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. She is still mourning her first boyfriend, Bas, who died after enlisting in the navy to fight the Nazis and blames herself for his death. Plagued by guilt at her past idealism, she is, at the start of the novel, focused only on her own survival. However, when Mrs. Janssen asks her to help locate a young girl, Mirjam, she begins to reflect on her past and decide who she will be in the present and future.

As she learns about Mirjam’s schoolgirl crush and relationship with her best friend, she allows herself to mourn not only Bas but also her lost friend, Elsbeth, who has married a German soldier. As she befriends Ollie, Mina, and their group, she is slowly inspired by their bravery, and the more she opens up about her own feelings of guilt over Bas’s death, the more she allows herself to be the idealist she was in the past.