As Hanneke looked closer at the body, she realised one thing, this isn’t Mirjam. In Monica Hesse’s novel, Girl in the Blue Coat, Hanneke, a black market dealer during the Holocaust, is tasked with a near impossible job: find a Jewish girl, Mirjam, who goes missing without a trace. With only a description and an hour time frame of the disappearance, Hanneke takes the job. Throughout the novel, Hanneke defies all odds to safely find Mirjam, whether it was lying to her parents or kissing her dead boyfriend’s brother to escape Hitler’s troops. Even when every lead points toward Mirjam’s death, Hanneke manages to locate Mirjam and ensure her safe return. Girl in the Blue Coat clearly displays the power of resilience in the darkest times. According to Oxford Languages, resilience is defined as, “the…show more content… Hanneke leads Ollie onto the backroads to her house when a German soldier runs into them. According to the novel, “He’s responding in German, talking more loudly than I’ve ever heard him. His accent is still impeccable, but he’s slurring his words like he, too, has been out for a night of drinking.” Ollie, trying to protect Hanneke and himself from the raid, pretends to be a drunk German in order to deceive the intoxicated soldier. In paragraphs to follow, Hanneke and Ollie kiss, pretending to be a young German couple waiting until the end of the war to get married. This shows resilience because in the face of danger, Hanneke and Ollie were able to swallow their fear and come up with a way to deceive a German soldier to ensure their safe return home. Furthermore, resilience is also shown when Hanneke realises that Mirjam, the girl she was tasked with saving, wasn’t dead. Hanneke lost all hope in finding Mirjam when she watched a woman who looked just like her get shot. Upon bringing her to get buried, she was able to find differences and realise Mirjam was still
