The American Spectator

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p> strong> em>In the Shadow of the Cathedral: br> Growing Up in Holland During World War II /em> br> By Titia Bozuwa br> (Triple Tulip Press, 203 pages, $22.95) /strong> /p>

Titia Bozuwa's recent memoir of her childhood experiences in Holland during World War II begins not with the German invasion of her country in May 1940, but with a hectic flight into a Frankfurt airport in 1984. Rushing back to Europe from her adopted New Hampshire home to see her ailing mother, Bozuwa is making her way to a rental car desk when she sees a German police officer and involuntarily panics, frantically trying to remember where her papers are.

"In an instant, for an instant, I am again a child living in German occupied Holland, more afraid than I knew to be then," Bozuwa writes. "Afraid I will not get to my mother's side because a man in uniform can stop me."

Some experiences are so traumatic they can never be erased. In many ways, the rest of Bozuwa's book, In the Shadow of the Cathedral, is an elegant recounting of how childhood and family life play out in the face of such peril. Bozuwa has a unique perspective having had both a cousin in the underground resistance, as well a grandfather who was a supporter of National Socialism's march because he believed it would bring about national healthcare and better conditions for the working class. Later in life he regretted misjudging Hitler's true intent.

The book proper begins with Bozuwa's father running down the stairs of their comfortable Breda home crying, "Oorlog!" ("War!"). In an instant, everything that once was for Bozuwa becomes part of a distant former life. Instead of going to school that day, as the seven year-old woke up that morning expecting to, Bozuwa is sent to hoard food as her parents pack and prepare to flee the Nazi onslaught.

In the streets of her once quiet town, the young Bozuwa gets a sense that things will never be the same.

"The anxious looks on the faces of the hurrying pedestrians mirrored a frightening world," she writes. "The one I'd felt happy and secure in seemed to have vanished. I'd never given it a thought that the world might harbor a people who were hostile to us and who wanted to devour our country."

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