Bryna Hellmann-Gillson (1927) is an American author who has been living in The Netherlands since 1971. Between 1977 and 2007, she founded and managed a private Dutch high school and then a private college, the first in The Netherlands to offer an American-style humanities program.

When she retired at the age of 79, she started writing. She has written four rhymed picture books, three novels for early readers, a memoir of her Polish-Jewish ancestors and her husband’s Judenfrei German family, a history of England and the literature it inspired, and four novels.

Her first novel, The Time Between, was inspired by realizing that her Dutch students knew almost nothing about the physically and morally challenging part of Holland’s recent past.

“I wanted the book to be something young readers could identify with, girls could, I thought, and that it be easy to read. There’s lots of dialogue, but there’s also lots of information woven into the story. That sounds as if it’s more history than fiction, but I didn’t include most of what I learned: I just needed it to be sure that what I imagined could have happened that way. The best compliment I got came from one of the three Dutch women I talked to as part of my research. She asked me, ‘How did you know?’ “