Dancing with the Enemy: The Gripping Story of the Jewish Dance Instructor Who Survived Auschwitz by Teaching Dance to the Nazis

“An extraordinary story of an unconventional, nervy woman and her determination to survive.” —The New York Post

Raised in a devout Roman Catholic family in the Netherlands, Paul Glaser was shocked to learn of his father’s Jewish heritage as an adult. Grappling with his newfound identity and stunned by his father’s secrecy, Paul set out to discover what had happened to his family during World War II and what had caused the long-standing rift between his father and his estranged aunt, Rosie, who moved to Sweden after the war. Piecing together his aunt’s wartime diaries, photographs, and letters, Paul reconstructed the dramatic story of a woman who was caught up in the tragic sweep of World War II.

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. Then the Nazis seized power. For Rosie, a nonpracticing Jew, this marked the beginning of an extremely dangerous ordeal. She was eventually taken to prison by the SS and sent to a series of concentration camps.

But her enemies were unable to destroy her and, remarkably, she survived, in part by giving dance and etiquette lessons to her captors. Rosie was an entertainer at heart, and her incredible resourcefulness kept her alive in the midst of horrendous tragedy. Of the twelve hundred people who arrived with her in Auschwitz, only eight survived.

Illustrated with more than ninety photographs, Dancing with the Enemy recalls an extraordinary life marked by love, betrayal, and fierce determination.