OPEN TURNS

From Dutch Girl to New Australian - A Memoir

A new memoir by award winning author Hendrika de Vries

Available at the following booksellers

“Intentions are like prayers; you send them out into the universe and if you pay attention they return as destiny.”

Meet the Author

Hendrika de Vries is the author of When a Toy Dog Became a Wolf and the Moon Broke Curfew, an award-winning memoir about her childhood in Nazi-occupied WWII Amsterdam, where she lived just a few blocks from Anne Frank’s Hiding Place. Her book was written up by the US Review of Books as “a welcome addition” to such powerful personal WWII narratives as The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank and Night by Elie Wiesel.

Her recently published second memoir: OPEN TURNS: From Dutch Girl to New Australian, is set in 1950s Australia. It tells her coming-of-age story as a strong-willed immigrant girl and champion swimmer, who has definite opinions on the woman she intends to be as she fights to belong and find her identity in a new country.

When a Toy Dog Became a Wolf and the Moon Broke Curfew…
by Hendrika de Vries

Born in the Netherlands at a time when girls are to be housewives and mothers and nothing else, Hendrika de Vries is a “daddy’s girl” until her father is deported from Nazi-occupied Amsterdam to a POW camp in Germany and her mother joins the Resistance. In the aftermath of her father’s departure, Hendrika watches as freedoms formerly taken for granted are eroded with escalating brutality by men with swastika armbands who aim to exterminate those they deem “inferior” and those who do not obey.

As time goes on, Hendrika absorbs her mother’s strength and faith, and learns about moral choice and forced silence. She sees her hidden Jewish “stepsister” betrayed, and her mother interrogated at gunpoint. She and her mother suffer near starvation, and they narrowly escape death on the day of liberation. But they survive it all—and through these harrowing experiences, Hendrika discovers the woman she wants to become.