The Occupied Garden: Recovering the Story of a Family in the War-Torn Netherlands - Hardcover

A moving, revealing memoir about a man and his young family during the Nazi occupation of Holland, as told by his granddaughters, one a beloved novelist.

At once a memoir and a social history of a time, The Occupied Garden is the story of a good but poor man, a market gardener, and his fiercely devout wife, raising their young family in Holland during the Nazi occupation. Pieced together by the couple’s granddaughters, who combed through historical research, family lore, and insights from a neighbour’s wartime diary, the story chronicles how the couple struggled to keep their children from starving, but could not keep them from harm, and reveals the strife and hardship endured not just by them, but by a nation. These experiences, kept from subsequent generations of the family, were almost lost until, long after their deaths, the path of the couple through the war and on to Canada was uncovered. A personal and intimate account within the larger context of a terrorized nation, this is also a story of the bonds and strains among family, told with the haunting, evocative prose for which Kristen den Hartog is known.

Kristen den Hartog is the critically acclaimed author of Water Wings, The Perpetual Ending, which was a finalist for the City of Toronto Book Award, and Origin of Haloes. She writes this book with Tracy Kasaboski, her sister, a “closet writer” who first inspired den Hartog years ago with her own dramatic childhood stories. Den Hartog lives in Toronto, while Kasaboski makes her home in Deep River, Ontario.