As a kid, when I used to get sick, I was sent to my grandmother’s home to lie on a brown and orange velour couch. My parents were working in the orchard, and even if they weren’t, my grandmother was the best nurse around. She brought me stale ginger ale, dry toast and let me watch the Andy Griffith Show and Leave it to Beaver. After lunch there were only soap operas on television, so she turned to her bookshelves to find me something to read. Though I loved Anne of Green Gables, Little Women and Charlotte’s Web, none of those (WASP) classics touched me like Anne DeVries’ novel Journey Through the Night. This slim series of stories, commissioned to capture the war years, were popular in the Netherlands and in Canada in English translation. The story of one family’s heroism captured my imagination, but also perhaps coloured my imagination, and my self-perception. After devouring the harrowing survival tale of war, I concluded that I belonged to a salt-of-the earth tribe. My people were oppressed, resisted and survived to tell the story. If anyone (like say, Queen Wilhelmina) were looking to boost the self-esteem of a generation using the novel as a propaganda vehicle, it worked. I grew up believing that basically every Dutch citizen had tried to save Anne Frank. It wasn’t until I began interviewing my own family about the realities of the war that I realized life wasn’t, isn’t, so black and white.