Between Memory and Geography: Julie Brill’s Hidden in Plain Sight

A few words by the author: Brill’s Hidden in Plain Sight is not a conventional Holocaust memoir; rather, it is an act of literary cartography – mapping the landscapes of exile, inherited trauma, and historical erasure. She takes readers on a journey through Belgrade, where her family’s history is embedded in its streets and architecture, and where memory itself is both visible and hidden in the spaces between past and present.

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In an age where Holocaust literature has become its own firmly established genre, Julie Brill’s Hidden in Plain Sight: A Family Memoir and the Untold Story of the Holocaust in Serbia (Amsterdam Publishers, 4/23/25) stands apart by masterfully blending historical documentation with a profound exploration of geographical and generational displacement. This memoir transcends categorization, functioning simultaneously as historical excavation, family detective story, and a meditation on how physical spaces hold the echoes of both atrocity and survival.

Brill’s narrative begins with a black-and-white photograph that adorns the book’s cover – her father and aunt as children standing on a Belgrade street during the German occupation, two Jewish children existing in a perilous visibility. This image serves as both literal artifact and powerful metaphor for the memoir’s central tension: how something can be simultaneously visible and invisible, present yet forgotten, documented yet untold.

What distinguishes Brill’s work is her focus on Belgrade’s Jewish community, a story that exists in the margins of mainstream Holocaust narratives. While most accounts focus on the gradual dispossession of rights in Western Europe followed by deportations to distant camps, Belgrade’s tragedy unfolded with horrifying speed. From a community of approximately 10,000 Jews, 90% were murdered within a year, making it one of the earliest cities declared “Judenfrei”. As Brill notes, this rapid extermination left few survivors to tell the story – creating what historian Timothy Snyder calls the “Auschwitz paradox”, where atrocities that produced more witnesses remain more prominent in historical memory simply because they were better-documented. 

The book’s geographical dimensions extend beyond physical locations to encompass the terrain of memory. Brill moves seamlessly between her childhood in America, where she first absorbed her father’s fragmented recollections, to the streets of Belgrade, where those memories were formed. With each shift, she maps the distances – both literal and metaphorical – between homeland and exile, between shared trauma and individual experience, between the act of remembering and the reality of what happened.

Particularly striking is Brill’s reconstruction of her grandfather’s experience through both oral history and documentary evidence. Unlike the familiar narratives of deportation to distant camps, Jews performed slave labour while still living at home, walking back and forth to work daily with a special permit that allowed him on the streets beyond curfew. This hyper-local nature of genocide in Belgrade – where victims “died where they lived” – offers a different dimension to our understanding of how the Holocaust manifested across Europe.

Brill occupies a unique generational position that enriches the narrative. Born to a father who survived the Holocaust as a young child, she describes herself as both second-generation (through direct parentage) and third-generation (by age cohort). This liminality gives her perspective a distinctive quality, allowing her to examine how trauma transforms as it passes through generations: from her father’s unprocessed “flashbulb memories” to her own childhood fears about “who might hide me when the Germans came”, to her protective impulse to shield her own daughters from this history before eventually bringing them to Serbia to witness their heritage firsthand.

The memoir reaches its emotional peak when Brill returns to Serbia with her father and daughters, creating a multigenerational circuit that closes historical wounds while acknowledging their permanence. This journey becomes the book’s most powerful statement about displacement and return – suggesting that “home” exists not merely in geographical coordinates but in the connections between generations and the reclamation of previously silenced stories.

What makes Hidden in Plain Sight remarkable is how Brill transforms meticulous historical research into deeply felt narrative. She weaves together archival discoveries – like her grandfather’s street pass, written in Serbian and bearing the names of neighbours – with intimate family memories, creating a textured understanding of how large-scale historical forces intersected with individual lives. The result is a work that feels simultaneously expansive and intimate, historical and immediate.

Brill’s prose shines when describing her childhood encounters with her father’s memories, which came to her “almost as if my father’s little boy he had been was talking to me… very pure and unprocessed and almost like watching a short movie.” This child-to-child transmission creates a poignant immediacy that conventional historical accounts cannot achieve.

By its conclusion, Hidden in Plain Sight reveals itself as not merely a Holocaust memoir but a profound meditation on how we inhabit multiple geographies simultaneously – the physical spaces we travel through, the emotional landscapes we navigate, and the inherited territories of memory that shape our identities. Brill’s achievement lies in showing how these realms intersect and inform one another, creating a narrative that feels both deeply personal and universally resonant.

For readers interested in how history, memory, and identity intersect, Brill offers a powerful reminder that the most profound journeys often take us between places rather than merely to them – through the spaces between memory and forgetting, between generations, between the documented and the untold. In mapping these complex terrains with sensitivity and insight, she has created a memoir that transforms our understanding of what it means to find our way home.