Dancing with the Enemy

When Paul Glaser discovered his Aunt Rosie’s remarkable wartime diaries, photographs and letters he was shocked: he had been raised as a Catholic, and had no knowledge of his Jewish heritage. But the story he was to uncover and reconstruct was one far larger and more dramatic than he could have ever imagined. Rosie Glaser was a magnetic force – hopeful, exuberant and cunning. An emancipated woman who defied convention, she toured Western Europe teaching ballroom dancing to high acclaim, falling in love hard and often. By the age of twenty-five, she had lost the great love of her life, married the wrong man, and sought consolation in the arms of another. Then the Nazis seized power. After operating an illegal dance school in her parents’ attic, she was betrayed by both her ex-husband and her lover, taken prisoner by the SS and sent to a series of concentration camps. Of the twelve-hundred people who arrived with her at Auschwitz, only eight survived.