Pieter van Os ©

Pieter van Os [Netherlands]

Pieter van Os, born on 8 February 1971, is a Dutch writer and journalist. His published works include nonfiction books on a wide variety of subjects, including religion, war, political journalism, art, and football. Van Os grew up in Groningen and studied the history of political thought in Minneapolis, Leiden, and Barcelona. In the nineties, he was a contributing editor for the weekly De Groene Amsterdammer, also serving a few years as its US correspondent, based in Washington, DC. In 2008, he became a contributing editor for the leading Dutch daily newspaper NRC. His experiences as a political reporter led him to write a book on the complicated love-hate relationship between press and politics, Wij begrijpen elkaar uitstekend (tr: We Understand Each Other Perfectly).

 Along the way, he and his father, the art historian and museum director Henk van Os, published a volume of letters on the longing for religion. In 2014, Pieter van Os followed his wife, the diplomat Guusje Korthals Altes, to Warsaw, Poland, where he wrote the book Liever dier dan mens (2019; Eng: Hiding in Plain Sight, 2022.)

This book is not only an extraordinary Holocaust survival story about a Jewish girl from a large Orthodox family in Warsaw who managed to survive the war by, first, pretending to be a Catholic and, later, successfully passing as a ‘Volksdeutsche’, who was taken in by a devoted Nazi family in Germany that treaded her as if she was their own daughter; it is also a meditation on current and recurring obsessions with identity, national character, and even race. Or, as a critic pointedly put it: “Hiding in Plain Sight is more than a survival narrative. It is a history of Eastern European mentality.”

The book went on to win the Brusse Prize, for best journalistic book in the Dutch language, and the prestigious Dutch Libris History Prize. Liever dier dan mens is the only book ever to have been awarded both prizes.

Van Os lives in Amsterdam, where he is currently working on a book on Albania in the nineties.