The Light in Hidden Places

In her memoir about surviving the Holocaust as a child, No Pretty Pictures (1998), Anita Lobel notes, “There are documentaries and debates and memorials and countless heartbreaking accounts of what happened during the years of terror and hunger and humiliation” (188). Stefania’s story is part of a large canon of Holocaust content. Stefania appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s famous daytime talk show in the early 1990s. In 1996, her story became a TV movie, Hidden in Silence, with Kellie Martin playing the role of Stefania. There are countless movies about people who tried to save or hide Jews, including Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning Schindler’s List (1993). The amount of cultural material about the Holocaust leads some to wonder why the West doesn’t give as much attention to other atrocities. Scholars like Houria Bouteldja and Norman Finkelstein argue that race mainly determines why Western nations might emphasize or minimize systematic mass murder. However, the Holocaust also was the first genocide carried out with industrial precision using purpose-built extermination locations, namely the concentration camps that housed the Jews and other prisoners and then systematically killed them. This differentiates it from most other genocides in history.

The Light in Hidden Places has much in common with other well-known works of Holocaust literature. Like the 13 Jews, the teen Anne Frank hid from the Nazis in a hidden apartment—the secret annex—in Amsterdam with her family, and she documented her life in The Diary of Anne Frank (1947). Stefania and Anne are two sides of a similar story: Stefania was the protector while Anne was the protected. However, both young women displayed similar traits while coping with their trying situations. Like Stefania, Anne was brave, determined, and not afraid to stand up for herself. Like Anne, Stefania experienced romance amid bleak circumstances. While Frank acknowledged the stress upon the people hiding her, Stefania experienced the stress of feeding and sheltering the Jews in her care. Unlike the 13 Jews in Stefania’s care, Anne and those hidden with her were discovered and sent to concentration camps, where all died except for Mr. Frank.

Another Jewish teen, Renia Spiegel, also kept a diary, published as Renia’s Diary in 2019. She was in Przemyśl, and her boyfriend, Zygmunt Schwarzer, hid her and his parents. In the novel, Stefania sees Nazis kill a concealed Jewish family and their helpers, and Cameron based that family on Renia and the Schwarzers. Like Stefania, Renia was confident, plucky, and interested in boys. Anita Lobel also was in Poland. She didn’t hide but survived the concentration camps. While Stefania had to look after her little sister, Lobel had to care for her younger brother. Like Stefania, Lobel demonstrated courage and quick thinking.

The critical difference between Stefania, Renia, Anne, and Lobel is that Stefania is Catholic, not Jewish. She wasn’t an immediate target but put herself in a life-or-death situation to help Jews. Other books about non-Jews helping Jews include Kathy Kacer’s Masters of Silence (2019), Johanna Reiss’s The Upstairs Room (1972), and Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief (2005).