GRAMERCY — Johanna Reiss has much in common with Anne Frank.
Like Frank, Reiss is a published author. Reiss is also Jewish and spent three years of her childhood hiding from Nazis in the home of sympathetic gentiles in Holland.
But while Anne Frank became a casualty of Nazi genocide, Reiss lived.
Nearly 70 years after World War II broke out, Reiss is living in a high-rise apartment near Gramercy Park. She raised two daughters there — an art historian and a school psychologist who now both live in Park Slope. And she wrote four books there, beginning with a memoir called "The Upstairs Room."
The book, which received much critical acclaim when it came out in 1972, centered on her nearly three years in hiding during the war.
Stowed away in the top floor of a farmhouse with her older sister, she shied away from windows and sunlight, and her muscles atrophied from months of limited movement. When she was finally freed in 1945, it took Reiss almost 18 months to learn to walk again.
That book spawned her career as an author and educator, speaking at schools around the country about the Holocaust and her experiences during it.
Now, a fifth book is on its way, one that Reiss expects to finish this year. It will tell the story of Reiss and her three sisters in their adult lives after the war.
Reiss said she never considered herself a writer. In fact, she "had never written anything longer than a shopping list" until her husband encouraged her to write the story of her wartime hiding.
Reiss said she didn’t keep a diary like Anne Frank did, but her memories from those two years and seven months are strikingly vivid.
"My life actually, at some level, began when war broke out,” said Reiss, who was 10 years old at the time.
Reiss’ family splintered at the start of World War II. Her mother was in a hospital, where she would later die from causes unrelated to the conflict. Her father and oldest sister were in hiding, separately, and Reiss and her middle sister, Sini, found salvation with a family of farmers.
"I was lucky," said Reiss. "We were taken in."
Not everyone in her hometown was so fortunate. The village was home to 350 Jews before the war. After it ended, only 35 returned.
The two years and seven months she hid in the farmhouse whittled away at her leg muscles and, when she got out, Reiss said she was "totally bowlegged."
After the war, it took a year and a half of physical therapy before she could walk again.
"Now, I can’t stop walking," she added.
Just twice in all that time, the girls were allowed to leave the house, Reiss said. Once, they traveled to a neighboring farm. Another time, the day was so beautiful that Reiss and her sister begged to go outside. So the family carted the girls out the door in a wheelbarrow and into a tall wheat field.
The girls spent the entire day in that field, forbidden from returning to the house because company had unexpectedly dropped by. Reiss became so ill from the sun exposure, the farmers had to call a doctor, she recalled.
"I was incarcerated, if you will, except I hadn’t done anything to earn that," Reiss said.
It was a dangerous game of hide-and-seek. German soldiers commandeered the bottom floor of the farmhouse for six weeks at one point, with Reiss and her sister upstairs the whole time. But the family of farmers never wavered in their commitment to the girls, Reiss said, and to this day, she doesn’t know — or care — why.
"It doesn’t matter what the reason is," said Reiss, who now speaks frequently at schools around the country about her experience. "These people really became extremely fond of us, and after the war, it was hard for them to let us go.”
Reiss was 13 years old when the war ended, and she wouldn’t write a book about her experience for another three decades. But when she did, and "The Upstairs Room," hit the shelves, it was a success. The New York Times honored it as an outstanding book of 1972, and it was named a Newbery Honor Book in 1973.
Reiss went on to write a novella about a flood in Holland. And she crafted two more memoirs, one about the years just after the war when she reunited with the rest of her family and another about her husband’s suicide in 1969.
Her current work-in-progress will look beyond specific tragedies and at the broader lives of her and her two sisters, both now in their 90s and still living in Holland.
Reiss said the war has left her with a few scars. She tends to startle at loud, spontaneous noises, and when a vagrant broke into her apartment years ago, her first thought was one of shock: “So far away and they still found me?”
But Reiss said those lingering ticks have faded. She rarely talks about the war nowadays, unless she is speaking at schools or about her books.
"Believe me, I’m a lot more than a Holocaust survivor," she said. "I’m not a downer. I’m not a depressed soul."
She’s happy, she said, not negative — in part because that's what she was taught by the family that harbored her.
"[Johan, the farmer] said, ‘Don’t go into the world with hate. That is not what I saved you for,’" she said.
"He was very wise."
