The nurses often brought their SS boyfriends home for the night, making Stefania feel like she was not only secretly and illegally hiding Jewish people but also “running a Nazi boarding house.”Ĭameron’s wide-ranging research and deft storytelling abilities combine to create an astoundingly authentic first-person narration. What’s more, an SS officer lived in an adjacent apartment for months, and by the end of the war, two German nurses had moved into Stefania’s apartment. Cameron saw for herself the minuscule, cramped space where 13 people cowered for more than two years with no electricity, water or toilet, and which Stefania and her sister could only access via a ladder to bring them food and water and carry out their waste in buckets. There, they visited the places in which this incredible tale unfolded. In order to tell Stefania’s story, Cameron ( The Dark Unwinding, The Knowing) did extensive research, which included interviewing several of the attic’s survivors, gaining access to Stefania’s unpublished memoir and traveling with Stefania’s son to Poland. Sharon Cameron’s The Light in Hidden Places is based on the true story of Holocaust heroine Stefania Podgórska, a 16-year-old Catholic girl in Poland who not only took care of her younger sister but also hid 13 Jewish people in the attic of her tiny apartment.
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