Features
New book tells story of incredible courage shown by two Dutch Jewish sisters during World War II
Reviewed by BERNIE BELLAN In early August we received an email from a publicist for HarperCollins by the name of Rebecca Silver, who’s sent us interesting books to consider reviewing in the past.
Here’s how Rebecca’s email read:
Hi Bernie,
Roxane van Iperen did not know what she would eventually uncover in her home after she moved in, but later discovered it was once known as the High Nest and became enthralled with the inspiring story of its former occupants. As she unearthed the history behind her own walls, she learned it was a safehouse for Jews in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands. From then on, van Iperen was determined to explore its hidden corners and found she had unprecedented access to two sisters’ personal archives to create this remarkable work of narrative non-fiction.
The High Nest was one of Holland’s most daring rescue operations conducted by Jews for Jews. Through her excavation, she learned the story of two sisters, Janny and Lien Brilleslijper, who joined the Dutch Resistance, helped save dozens of lives, were captured by the Nazis, and ultimately survived the Holocaust. Through renovating her home, the sisters’ ingenuity and drive to survive was exposed by double walls, secret doors, and walled-off annexes that were so well concealed they were left undetected for decades.
Originally published in The Netherlands as The High Nest, the book was awarded the 2019 Opzij Literature Prize, an annual Dutch award given to female authors whose work has contributed to the emancipation, evolution, and awareness of women. Janny and Lien’s story is a remarkable story of resistance, strength, and determination — one you must read to believe.
All the best,
Rebecca
Included with Rebecca’s email was the following synopsis of the book: Eight months after Germany’s invasion of Poland, the Nazis roll into The Netherlands, expanding their reign of brutality to the Dutch. But by the Winter of 1943, resistance is growing. Among those fighting their brutal Nazi occupiers are two Jewish sisters, Janny and Lien Brilleslijper from Amsterdam. Risking arrest and death, the sisters help save others, sheltering them in a clandestine safehouse in the woods, they called “The High Nest.”
This secret refuge would become one of the most important Jewish safehouses in the country, serving as a hiding place and underground center for resistance partisans as well as artists condemned by Hitler. From The High Nest, an underground web of artists arises, giving hope and light to those living in terror in Holland as they begin to restore the dazzling pre-war life of Amsterdam and The Hague.
When the house and its occupants are eventually betrayed, the most terrifying time of the sisters’ lives begins. As Allied troops close in, the Brilleslijper family are rushed onto the last train to Auschwitz, along with Anne Frank and her family. The journey will bring Janny and Lien close to Anne and her older sister Margot. The days ahead will test the sisters beyond human imagination as they are stripped of everything but their courage, their resilience, and their love for each other.
Based on meticulous research and unprecedented access to the Brilleslijpers’ personal archives of memoirs and photos, The Sisters of Auschwitz is a long-overdue homage to two young women’s heroism and moral bravery—and a reminder of the power each of us has to change the world.
Author bio: Roxane van Iperen is a Dutch writer and lawyer who resides in the countryside east of Amsterdam, in a home known as “The High Nest” which was once the center for one of Holland’s most daring rescue operations conducted by Jews for Jews. She was shortlisted for the biggest public prize in Holland, NS Publieksprijs’ Book of the Year.
Now for my review of “The Sisters of Auschwitz”: The information I’ve quoted verbatim from Rebecca Silver’s email gives as complete an idea what the book is about as one might like. The question with which I want to deal is whether I would recommend this book.
It was a year ago precisely that I wrote about a book that was also based on documents that had been found hidden for years and which opened up an entirely different perspective on certain facets of the Second World War. That book was titled “The S.S. Officer’s Armchair – Uncovering the Hidden Life of a Nazi”. (You can read my review by entering the word “armchair” on our website when you click on “search archives”.)
Of course, there’s a world of difference in reading about a hitherto undisclosed account of what life was like for an S.S officer in contrast with the lives of two Jewish sisters (and their families), but the comparison is fair to make because, in both cases, through a combination of luck and great diligence, the authors of the two respective books were able to piece together their subjects’ lives.
As I made my way through “The Sisters of Auschwitz”, knowing that the two sisters who are at the heart of this book actually survived Auschwitz did not detract from the suspense that the author builds in telling the story. Every Holocaust survivor has their own unique story to tell, but it’s in the telling of the story that the great books separate themselves from the more mediocre ones. And, as is evidenced by author Roxanne van Iperen having been shortlisted for Holland’s most prestigious literary award, this book is not just a fine piece of reporting what the author discovered, it’s very wonderfully written.
Rebecca Silver’s email tells you about as much as you need to know about the story that was unearthed by van Iperen’s having had the good fortune to have lived in the house – the “High Nest”, which became the hiding place for Janny and Lien Brilleslijper, along with a great many other Jews, for a good part of World War II. What the author also does so well is describe the terrible fate that befell so many of Holland’s Jews during the Holocaust, when almost 75% of the Jewish population was exterminated, either by being murdered in Holland, sent to labour camps where they perished from exhaustion and hunger, or finally were gassed in death camps, particularly Auschwitz.
I’ve read before how so many Dutch citizens cooperated fully with the Nazis. It still comes as a shock to contemplate that fact because we’ve come to regard Holland as such a liberal state, which for the longest time was thought of as a mecca for those in pursuit of sex and drugs. But when you realize that 76,000 Dutch Jews were sent to their deaths, in no small part because so few Dutch gentiles were willing to come to their aid, it certainly leaves a different impression of the Dutch for Jews who might have thought of the Dutch as being active resisters to the Nazis. Sure, there were many brave souls in the Dutch resistance, but the Nazis were as comfortable in Holland as any Western European country, where they found many Dutch who were all too willing not only to work for the Nazi regime, but who were as cruel as many Nazis in carrying out their duties.
That’s not the major theme of “The Sisters of Auschwitz”, but as you read of Janny and Lien’s constant worry about being betrayed during the fairly long period in which they were able to avoid being detected by Nazi hunters, who were primarily Dutch citizens – zealous in their pursuit of Jews, it’s hard not to wonder whether there was a much deeper anti-Semitism engrained within the Dutch than perhaps we’ve thought.
While the first half of “The Sisters of Auschwitz” deals with Janny and Lien’s being able to hide from the Nazis, also their active involvement in the Dutch resistance, once the storyline moves from Holland to the sisters’ (along with their younger brother and both parents) being transported to Auschwitz, the book becomes nothing less than an outright horror story.
Before Janny was captured, by the way, she was in hiding in Amsterdam, along with her non-Jewish husband, Eberhard, where they were both quite active in the resistance. Once she is captured –and tortured, however, how she manages to endure the horrors that are subsequently thrust upon her is a testament to this woman’s utter resilience. While Lein is brave, nothing compares to Janny’s determination to carry on, no matter how many times you might think to yourself: “Why didn’t she just give up and let herself die?”
Whether it was being starved, beaten, or forced to spend hours naked outside in freezing temperatures, Janny not only managed to endure, her incredible willpower also enabled her to keep Lein alive at the same time – many times when Lein was ready to give up.
What might come as the greatest surprise to readers moreover, is the introduction of the Frank family into the story: father Otto, mother Edith, and sisters Margot and Anne. I was always under the impression that Anne Frank died in Auschwitz, but I was wrong; she died in Bergen Belsen, along with her sister Margot. If the details given in “The Sisters of Auschwitz” are accurate, the fact that Margot and Anne even made it as far as Bergen Belsen after having been in Auschwitz is largely due to the care that was given to both of them by Janny and Lein when both Frank sisters were suffering from typhus in Auschwitz.
As much as this book is a compelling read, I admit that I had a hard time with the many foreign names in the book. There are so many different characters introduced – and that is largely a reflection of just how many different Jews the two sisters were able to hide in the “High Nest” at one time or another, that it became quite confusing for me, as did the names of the sisters’ children. Still, I’m sure that if you concentrate on trying to remember who is who (and I’m terrible at that), it will all come together for you.
Just as reading “The S.S. Officer’s Armchair”, which was published in 2020, enabled an entirely new understanding of what life must have been like for an ordinary Nazi official – 75 years after that particular individual likely died, reading “The Sisters of Auschwitz” also opens up an insight into how some Jews were able to endure the tortures inflicted upon by them by the Nazis that, were it not for a quirk of fate, would also have remained undisclosed.
“The Sisters of Auschwitz”
By Roxane van Iperen
320 pages
Published by HarperCollins
Released for sale August 31, 2021
Available on Amazon
Features
What Is Next for Israel and Hezbollah?
By HENRY SREBRNIK During Operation Rising Lion in 2025, the Iranians discovered that the proxies they had built up for years failed to provide the assistance expected of them. Hezbollah, their most important ally, refrained from opening a front against Israel.
But in the current war, Hezbollah’s Secretary-General Naim Qassem responded to pressure from Tehran and carried out his threat to open fire on Israel. It sent tens of thousands of Israelis in the Galilee into shelters several times a day. This time Hezbollah proved effective. What now?
On June 26, after a series of five bilateral meetings hosted by the United States, representatives of the Israeli, Lebanese, and U.S. governments signed the Trilateral Framework Agreement, declaring their shared “ambition to end conflict between them, ensure the sovereignty and security of both countries, and establish peaceful neighborly relations between the two countries.”
Israel and Lebanon agreed to a framework which would include the disarming of Hezbollah, the phased withdrawal of Israel from areas conquered over the last three years of war, and the deployment of the Western supported Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) to the areas evacuated by Israel. So far, three “pilot zones” have been established, in the areas of Faroun, Srifa and Zawtar al-Gharbiya. “It’s the beginning of the beginning. There’s a lot of work ahead,” U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said after the signing ceremony. That’s an understatement!
Lebanon’s President Joseph Aoun, a Maronite Christian, made his first ever White House visit on July 21. The Washington meeting with President Donald Trump, the first for a Lebanese president since 2009, was meant to move forward on the project to sever Lebanon from Iran’s orbit, disarm Tehran’s proxy Hezbollah, and pave a way toward Lebanon-Israel peace.
Aoun recalled that the army’s collapse in 1975 led to the emergence of militia groups, a civil war and the Palestinian takeover of the country’s south, which was used to launch attacks on Israel.
But there remain legitimate doubts about Beirut’s willingness to follow through on promises to disarm and dismantle Hezbollah. The last round of such efforts in late 2025 failed. Lebanese leaders have promised to disarm Hezbollah multiple times over the past thirty-five years, without success. The United States has sent the LAF more than $3 billion in aid since 2006. And yet two decades later, Hezbollah is still armed and still on Israel’s northern border.
“America needs to support the LAF,” Aoun told Trump. “Without the LAF,” he continued, “everything will collapse.” And as he told a group after his meeting with Trump, the aid must be “immediate and unconditional.” Could the army plausibly disarm Hezbollah? Since 2022 Washington has been paying LAF salaries directly, yet there has been no change.
The LAF is generally thought to consist of about 50 per cent Shia Lebanese among its rank and file, and around 30 per cent in its officer corps. Such a force would split along sectarian lines were it to be deployed against Hezbollah. Until Hezbollah’s control over the Shiite community weakens, it remains unclear whether the army can perform the task.
Anyhow, eliminating Hezbollah is virtually impossible, because its very existence is just part of what makes Lebanon an ongoing failed state. Hezbollah is not merely a military organization. It is the product of a particular geopolitical environment, a particular historical experience, and a particular understanding of survival.
Over the past four decades, it has evolved into a political party, social welfare provider, military force and ideological movement deeply rooted in Lebanon’s Shia communities. While military action can weaken it, the social and political foundations that sustain Hezbollah are much harder to remove.
The people who demand Hezbollah’s disarmament often begin with an idealized image of Lebanon rather than the Lebanon that exists. They imagine a state capable of protecting all its citizens equally and defending its borders independently. That is very far from reality.
Modern Lebanon was constructed around a delicate sectarian formula that sought to balance competing communities rather than forge a single national project. Lebanon’s sectarian power-sharing arrangement was formed under the National Pact of 1943 and the Taif Agreement of 1989. Different factions cultivated different external patrons, be they France, Iran, Saudi Arabia, or Syria. Political identity often became intertwined with foreign sponsorship and external alliances. The result was a state that never succeeded in creating a unified national consciousness.
For much of the country’s history, the Shia Muslims were widely regarded as the country’s most politically and economically marginalized community. They were often viewed with suspicion by the authorities and lacked the institutional recognition enjoyed by other religious communities.
So, for the Shia population, Hezbollah is not merely a political party or an armed movement. It is an insurance policy against annihilation. The Shia community in Lebanon looks around the region today and sees opponents everywhere — not just Israel, but Sunni Muslim militants ruling Syria, Turkey, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia as well – states that consider Shia Islam a heresy to be extinguished. (Lebanon’s own Sunnis also fit that description.) Under such conditions, disarmament begins to look like suicide.
President Donald Trump’s suggestion that Syria might get involved in Lebanon again is ridiculous. Any Syrian intervention under its new Sunni rulers would allow Hezbollah to claim credibly that Lebanon faces a new external threat. Whereas many Lebanese question Hezbollah’s claims that it is protecting Lebanon from Israel, there would likely be greater agreement that a Syrian incursion merits resistance. Many Lebanese would view it through the lens of Syria’s 29-year occupation of Lebanon, fuelling concerns about a return of Syrian influence over the country.
Since the fall of the Assad regime, Hezbollah has portrayed the new government in Damascus as a jihadi organization that seeks to carry out sectarian massacres against the Shias. This has actually increased Hezbollah’s legitimacy within its own support base – those who already view Hezbollah as a resistance movement that seeks to fight against any external actor.
Nonetheless, in the recent conflict Israel has significantly weakened Hezbollah. The organization since the Gaza war began has lost most of its long-range and heavy missiles, and about 8,000 of its fighters and commanders have been killed, out of roughly 30,000.
But Hezbollah has not been decisively defeated, nor will it be. The problem is that when a state is faced with an armed force on its soil that doesn’t want to disarm, the usual recourse available to the state is coercion. The Lebanese state has neither the will nor capacity to do so and is no longer sovereign, in any meaningful sense.
As long as the conditions that created Hezbollah remain intact, the expectation that it will voluntarily surrender its weapons will remain a fantasy. It is up to Israel alone to keep Hezbollah north of the Litani River, where the group’s short-distance missiles and drones cannot reach Israel’s population centres.
Henry Srebrnik is a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
Features
WINNIPEG EMPLOYERS SHOULD USE AI TO TRAIN, NOT JUST TRIM
By Dr. GLEB TSIPURSKY Generative AI has already entered everyday Canadian work. Statistics Canada reported that 35.9% of workers used generative AI in the previous 12 months. For Winnipeg employers, the important question is no longer whether staff will use these tools. The more consequential question is what kind of workforce employers will build while they use them.
An updated Stanford University analysis found employment among workers ages 22 to 25 in AI-exposed occupations 19% below where it would be had it kept pace with less-exposed peers, with the gap widening over time. That trend should concern Winnipeg employers because the work most exposed to automation often overlaps with the work through which beginners develop professional judgment.
Entry-level employees do more than produce first drafts, conduct basic research, summarize information, prepare routine analyses, or handle standard customer questions. Those tasks are also training. Repetition teaches people what good work looks like, where common mistakes appear, when a situation is routine, and when something unusual requires escalation.
If employers simply remove that work, they may save time today while weakening the pipeline of people capable of handling harder work tomorrow. A firm can automate a junior task quickly. Rebuilding several years of missing experience later is much harder.
The better approach is to redesign entry-level work around AI-assisted apprenticeship. New employees can use AI to produce a first draft, but they should also verify the output against reliable sources. They can use AI to summarize a customer issue, but they should explain which facts matter and what remains uncertain. They can use AI to analyze routine information, but they should flag exceptions and bring consequential decisions to experienced colleagues.
That changes the role of junior employees without eliminating the learning built into the role. Instead of rewarding people for producing routine work manually, employers can reward them for checking AI output, spotting edge cases, asking better questions, and knowing when human judgment is required.
Managers also need to change how they supervise. If a junior employee submits an AI-assisted answer, the manager should ask how the employee verified it, what assumptions the system made, what could go wrong, and what would cause the employee to escalate the issue. Those questions turn AI use into a training process rather than a shortcut around learning.
Winnipeg’s small and mid-sized employers may be especially well positioned to take this approach. They often cannot afford to separate technology adoption, training, and talent development into different departments. The same manager who wants more productivity today also needs capable employees next year. That makes it practical to connect AI use directly to coaching and skill development.
Employers should also resist measuring AI adoption only by time saved or tasks completed. Those metrics matter, but they can hide whether the organization is developing stronger judgment. A more useful set of questions is whether employees are catching more errors, escalating the right exceptions, becoming more independent over time, and learning which decisions should remain human-led.
None of this requires employers to preserve every old task exactly as it was. Some routine work should disappear. The goal should be to preserve the learning function, not the old workflow. If AI removes one form of repetition, employers should deliberately replace it with another way for junior staff to practice, receive feedback, and encounter progressively harder decisions.
Winnipeg businesses can gain real productivity from AI without turning entry-level work into a dead end. The strongest employers will use AI to accelerate the development of beginners rather than treating beginners as the easiest cost to remove. That approach can improve productivity now while still producing the experienced professionals Winnipeg will need in the years ahead.
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Adapted from: The Psychology of AI Adoption at Work: From Resistance to Results (Georgetown University Press, 2026). https://disasteravoidanceexperts.com/aibook
Dr. Gleb Tsipursky, a behavioral scientist called the “Office Whisperer” by The New York Times, helps tech-forward leaders stop overpaying for AI while boosting engagement and innovation. He serves as the CEO of the AI consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts, and wrote eight books, including The Psychology of AI Adoption at Work: From Resistance to Results (Georgetown University Press, 2026).
Features
IPL 2026/27 Preview: Beer Sheva Defends Its Crown
Israeli football enters the 2026/27 season with a genuinely open title race for the first time in years. Hapoel Beer Sheva claimed a dramatic sixth championship last May, edging Beitar Jerusalem by just three points after a campaign interrupted by regional conflict and settled almost entirely on head-to-head form. That kind of finish leaves scores unsettled, and every major club has spent the summer either reinforcing a title push or plotting revenge. With four Israeli sides now competing in European qualifiers simultaneously, the new Ligat ha’Al campaign carries more weight than it has in years.
How Beer Sheva Won It
Ran Kozuk’s side did not simply outscore the league last season; they won the moments that mattered against the team chasing them hardest. Beitar Jerusalem lost twice to Beersheba across the regular campaign and could only draw both playoff meetings, a pattern one report summed up bluntly: if you want to be champions, you have to beat the champions, and Beitar never managed it. Kings Kangwa was named the league’s most valuable player, while captain Miguel Vitor and goalkeeper Ofir Marciano anchored a squad that closed out the title with a 4-2 win over Maccabi Tel Aviv. Owner Alona Barkat has kept that core together, giving Beersheba a real shot at back-to-back titles, assuming Champions League fixtures don’t wear the squad down.
Beitar’s Response and the Chase Pack
Losing a title race by three points after leading for large stretches tends to force change, and Beitar Jerusalem has responded accordingly. Almog Cohen, previously the club’s sporting director, has stepped into the head coach role, replacing Barak Itzhaki after the campaign ended in disappointment. Captain Yarden Shua, veteran forward Omer Atzili and Dor Hugi remain the attacking core, though the club opens the season without injured midfielder Adi Yona, a blow given how much Beitar leaned on midfield control last year. Maccabi Tel Aviv arrives with a different kind of statement: despite finishing outside the top two domestically, they won the Israel State Cup in a chaotic 2-1 final against Beersheba that produced six red cards, suggesting the squad has quality to challenge again even if consistency remains the question mark.
The Return of European Football on a Bigger Scale
What separates this season from recent ones is the sheer number of Israeli clubs competing for continental places at once. Beersheba enters Champions League qualifying as domestic champions, though for security reasons their ties have been relocated to Szombathely, Hungary rather than played at home. Maccabi Tel Aviv, seeded thanks to a healthy UEFA coefficient, goes into Europa League qualifying against the winner of Sheriff Tiraspol and Aluminij. Beitar Jerusalem and Hapoel Tel Aviv both enter Conference League qualifying, the latter having secured their spot via a fourth-place playoff finish. Playing qualifiers on neutral ground has become routine for Israeli clubs, and it hasn’t stopped them from competing credibly.
Mid-Table Ambition and the Promotion Effect
Beyond the four clubs chasing European nights, the middle of the table looks unusually competitive heading into August. Hapoel Petah Tikva and Hapoel Tel Aviv both returned to the top flight after a season away, and Hapoel Tel Aviv’s playoff run last term shows promoted clubs can climb quickly rather than simply survive. Maccabi Haifa and Ironi Kiryat Shmona, both capable of springing results against the traditional big three, will look to use a full pre-season to close the gap. That added depth tends to produce the unpredictable midweek results that make a 14-team division worth following from the opening whistle.
What to Watch as the Season Kicks Off
Beersheba’s fixture list is the one to track first, since balancing Champions League qualifying with league form in August and September will say a great deal about whether this squad has the depth to go back-to-back. Beitar’s response under a rookie head coach is the second storyline, particularly whether Cohen can get more out of a group that dominated possession last season but couldn’t finish off the champions when it counted. For fans following these storylines match by match, tracking how the market prices each side into the opening rounds is a useful gauge of who bookmakers actually rate, and anyone comparing options for the season ahead can check out the best betting sites in Canada for a sense of how odds and coverage are shaping up before a ball is kicked.
Between a defending champion carrying continental fixture congestion, a rival reshaping its coaching staff, and a deepening mid-table, Ligat ha’Al enters the new season with more storylines running in parallel than it has had in years. Whether Beer Sheva backs up their sixth title or Beitar finally converts near misses into silverware, the opening weeks should offer the first real clues.
