Get the Book
Heart Has Reasons is available at most places where books are sold, including Amazon
Remember that you can request The Heart Has Reasons at your local library. If you are a student, you can ask that your school library get a copy. Give your librarian the ISBN number: 0829816992.
If you would like to buy a signed copy directly from the author for $20 USD, please click on the box below. This option is available in more than 100 countries and includes free shipping.
Outside the U.S., The Heart Has Reasons may be purchased from merchants in Australia, Canada, China, Costa Rica, England, Estonia, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Norway, and Sweden. To order the book from other countries, please contact the author.
News
January 2008: The Heart Has Reasons Gets Reviewed in JES
A review of The Heart Has Reasons recently appeared in the Journal of Ecumenical Studies. The following is an excerpt:
“This is another book about the Holocaust, but it is also a book about heroism that transcends rationality and testifies to the spirituality of the human species, despite the brutality of which we are capable. Mark Klempner tells the stories of ten young Dutch men and women who were confronted with the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands and with the sight of homeless Jewish children wandering in the streets. These people banded together to find safe havens for the children, outwitting both the Nazi occupiers and their Dutch fascist collaborators.
“On the margins of his heroes’ stories, Klempner tells his own: having recurrent nightmares at age twelve, after seeing concentration camp footage; being raised “Jewish-lite,” as he puts it; finding himself surrounded by a culture materially rich but spiritually empty. Running from meaninglessness, he found help in a suicide prevention and crisis center and later, in college, obtained a grant that allowed him to interview Dutch rescuers of Jews. Those conversations introduced him to the deep wells of his heritage, where he discovered Judaism’s interweaving of social justice with spirituality. The experience changed his life and gave birth to The Heart Has Reasons....
“This book belongs alongside the multitude of other works of Holocaust research and scholarship. Besides information, it presents real human faces and inspiration for our better natures. Well-written and highly accessible to average readers, it is a book for sharing and giving that would make an excellent choice for book clubs, as well as synagogues and churches interested in interreligious dialogue.”
September 2007: New opinion pieces
Since completing The Heart Has Reasons, Mark has turned his attention to contemporary issues and culture. One result is a string of opinion pieces that have appeared in mainstream newspapers such as the Baltimore Sun and Christian Science Monitor, as well as online at the Huffington Post and elsewhere. If you'd like to know more about Mark’s current thinking, you can find links to most of these pieces on the articles page.
August 2007: Mark Klempner shares another response from a “hidden child”
My correspondence with the Cohen family continued this month when I heard from Shimon Cohen's younger sister:
“I too was one of the ‘hidden children.’ Last summer Shimon and Fien gave me your book for my 70th birthday. I put it aside assuming it was another dry history lesson from those terrible years. I just couldn't get myself to read it, until Shimon called me last month and asked me if I had read it. After I confessed to him that I hadn’t, he assured me that this was a totally different book than he had [first] expected, and he urged me to read it too. Which I did, and I couldn't put it down . . . It is masterfully crafted, articulate, but, above all, so sensitively and perceptively written, and still a scholarly work!!!”
Thanks for all those exclamation points, Sophia, and for your lovely message. As I told Shimron, such emails really keep me going. And, as I've said many times, I am honored and blessed to have had the opportunity to convey the stories and wisdom of the rescuers.
June 2007: Mark Klempner shares some responses to The Heart Has Reasons
Though my book has been out for over a year, it continues to get reviews, and I continue to get letters from readers.
Fr. Kurt Messick's recent Amazon review 
Then yesterday I received this wonderful email from a survivor named Shimon Cohen:
“I read your book The Heart has Reasons, and hasten me to compliment you on a solid piece of research. Both my wife and I are so-called child survivors of the Holocaust in Holland and we can vouch for the accuracy of your stories. At least two of the rescuers you interviewed, Hetty Voute and Rut Matthijsen, were actively involved in the rescue of us and our siblings, and thanks to them, their comrades (some of whom were executed or perished in concentration camps) and the people who risked their lives to house us, we are here today.”
He goes on to call the book a “masterpiece,” and a “pearl,” and then his wife Fien chimes in with “Yes, research, accuracy, depth is important, but the sensitivity of your approach is what makes your book so special.”
Well, you can imagine how this letter made my day.
I want to thank everyone who has written; your letters keep me going as I strive to make daily progress on my next book.
More about that another time.
February 2007: Meet the author this spring!
I will be touring in NYC and DC this April, and I invite you to attend one of the many events at which I’ll be speaking and/or signing books. These include appearances at the Riverside Church in Manhattan (April 15, 1-3 pm), the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Battery Park (April 16, 1-3 pm), and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. (April 22, 1-4 pm). For further details, view my complete tour schedule. See you then!
January 2007: The Heart Has Reasons chapter reprinted in The Friends Journal.
The Friends Journal, the main publication read by Quakers in the United States, has serialized a chapter from The Heart Has Reasons in its January 2007 issue.
December 2006: The Heart Has Reasons is praised in the Guardian.
The Guardian, one of Great Britain’s leading newspapers, included The Heart Has Reasons in its year-end wrap up of recommended titles: “For those of us addicted to Holocaust memoirs, 2006 was a banner year, with the release, among others, of Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost (HarperCollins) and Mark Klempner’s The Heart Has Reasons (Pilgrim Press). The two books complement each other in that, to use Elie Wiesel’s nomenclature, The Lost is ‘night’ while The Heart Has Reasons is ‘dawn.’ Mendelsohn dives headfirst into the dark tale of what the Nazis did to his forebears in Poland, while Klempner presents the stories and wisdom of those few Dutch people who risked their lives to try to save their Jewish neighbours.”
November 2006: the Oral History Review praises The Heart Has Reasons as “a remarkable contribution.”
The current issue of the journal of the American Oral History Association published by the University of California Press contains a three page review of The Heart Has Reasons that concludes: “Klempner strikes a masterful balance between self-revelation and scholarly restraint. He tells his narrators as well as his readers why his own history makes him so intensely engaged in this subject, and later he reflects on the ways the interviews have changed him. Through the oral histories he presents here, the Netherlands during this most terrible of times becomes known on a personal level and on a societal level, as well. The narrators reflect not only on the wartime experience but also on its effects on their lives ever after. Resistance work presented in the entire context of these lives is a remarkable contribution to the literature of the social history of this war. This is a book that will haunt any reader; needless to say, it can profitably be used in courses in modern European history.”
Read also the wonderful review in the November issue of the Catholic New Times, a Canadian monthly based in Toronto.
September 2006: The rescuers give The Heart Has Reasons two thumbs up.
Mark Klempner writes: “My most important readers are the rescuers themselves. They entrusted me with their stories, as well as their deepest insights and convictions, and were counting on me to “get it right.” I’m therefore pleased—and relieved!—to report that they have had a very positive response to the book. Piet Meerburg could hardly contain his enthusiasm over the phone, calling it “a masterpiece,” and Kees Veentra described it as “first-rate.” Considering that Piet has a whole book shelf of Holocaust literature, and that Kees was a bookseller for forty years, I was especially touched by their assessments. Rut Matthijsen and Gisela Söhnlein also wrote with positive comments, and have ordered multiple copies for their children. The only rescuer I have not heard from is Clara Dijkstra, whose command of English is not sufficient to enable her to read it. A publisher in Amsterdam is currently considering a Dutch edition, so perhaps I will eventually be able to send her a copy in her native language.”
“Enhanced with an informative foreword by Christopher R. Browning, The Heart Has Reasons: Holocaust Rescuers And Their Stories Of Courage by folklorist and oral historian Mark Klempner is the account of how many valiant people worked at great personal peril through the Holocaust and Hitler’s reign to save Jewish children and others from being murdered in the Nazi death camps. Guiding readers through the epic and heroic tales of these Dutch rescuers, The Heart Has Reasons vividly recounts the deeply terrifying efforts of ten gallant individuals. Superbly presented and an important addition to the growing library of Holocaust literature, The Heart Has Reasons is very highly recommended reading, especially for all historians and students of the Dutch involvement in World War II.” © 2006 Midwest Book Review
Christian Century Magazine has named The Heart Has Reasons a bestseller among books published by religious presses. They also indicate that it is currently the Pilgrim Press' #1 book. Pilgrim, by the way, is the oldest press in the United States, and has a fascinating history, i.e. they were the first to publish Martin Luther King, Jr.
