In Over de grens (Enl: "Across the border"), relations are the result of fate: the fateful event of the holocaust. The survivors are burdened by the guilt and the question whether they really love their partners or whether their bond is the result of circumstance. As a result, they cannot truly come together. There remains a barrier, a boundary.

Over de grens (2001), the fifth novel by Chaja Polak consists of seven short stories, set in 1961, 1965, 1968, 1973, 1979, 1990 and 1992. Rosa van Esso appears in each of these stories, although she is not always the main character.

In the first story, Rosa is 13 years old, traveling in northern France with her mother. There, in the family of Levensky, maried to Maria Pia, in whose home he survived the war, she meets Manuel, their adopted son. Years later, Rosa lives with Manuel in Rome. Marriages are often unfulfilled, such as in the case of Mees Visser and Bregje Hoppe. Mees meets Rosa in the home of a friend, and she reminds him of the girl he loved in his youth, Judith. Judith did not survive the camps. In his heart, Mees has always remained young. This young Mees is still longing, looking for Judith. He thinks Judith has come back in the form of Rosa. When Rosa is 45, towards the end of the novel, she visits Berlin. There she discovers that, although her parents survived the war, they carried a big secret.

The difficulty in reading Over de grens is that the stories are so fragmented. Over de grens is a novel: the seven stories add up to more than seven. However, the seven stories form diachronic slices of Rosa's life history. Each episode reveals nuances in the relations of people, but there is no overarching plot which drives a story. Besides, the characters are all fairly "flat". There is no development in most of the characters other than aging, and there is no development of relationships, even in the case of Rosa, the main character. However, fragmentation and disorientation are parts of the life experience of holocaust survivors.

The stories in Over de grens are more descriptive than reflective. They describe the characters lives at various moments. The past is a factual part of their lives, but whatever happened in the past is buried in the past, both to the reader and to the characters. The horror of the holocaust is not experienced by most of the characters in the novel. Their experience with the horror is only indirect. Over de grens documents the life experience of Jewish people who live with the memory, but not the burden. ( )