A Notes from the Windowsill annotated bibliography by Wendy E. Betts. Copyright 2005, 2006
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Last Updated 06/18/2006
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Jacob's Rescue by Malka Drucker and Michael Halperin. Bantam,
1993; Yearling, 1994 (0-4404-0965-9) $4.99 pb
Stories about Jewish children who were hidden during the Holocaust are generally triumphant, but the happy ending of this tale is distinctly bittersweet--perhaps because the story is true. Jacob, and later his brother David, are taken in by a Polish family, to become like their own sons. When the war is over, the reward for the family's bravery is to lose the children they've grown to love.
This story has so much inherent drama, it's a shame it isn't better
told. The narrative is simplistic, and the genuine tragedy of the
family division is ultimately glossed over. (10-12)
Number the Stars by Lois Lowry. Houghton Mifflin, 1989
(0-395-51060-0) $13.45; Laurel-Leaf, 1998 (0-440-22753-4) $4.99 pb
One of the best uses of children's literature is to make complex subjects and concepts more immediate and personal, "sizing them down," as it were, to their most basic level. For a subject as complex and staggering as the Holocaust, good children's books are vitally necessary--'books that don't try to tell the whole story, but make the situation come alive through one situation, one character. In Number the Stars, Lois Lowry found a story to tell that reveals a lesser known aspect of that evil period: the courage and humanity of ordinary, good people who fought against it. The result is a poignant, life-affirming novel that richly deserved its 1990 Newbery Medal.
It is 1943 in Denmark, but for ten-year-old Annemarie and her best friend Ellen Rosen, life is fairly ordinary, despite the privations of war and the often frightening presence of German soldiers. Then suddenly the danger becomes acute for the Danish Jews and Ellen's family must go into hiding, leaving her behind as Annemarie's "sister." That night the Nazis come and Annemarie just barely manages to break Ellen's Star of David off of her neck in time.
The next day, Annemarie's family goes to visit Uncle Henrik, a fisherman who lives right on the water. "You can stand on the edge of the meadow and look across to Sweden," she tells Ellen, not realizing then the significance of her own words. But when the time has come to say goodbye to her friend, Annemarie understands without being told where she is going--and when it's discovered that a vitally important package has been left behind by the refugees, Annemarie knows that somehow she must get it to the boat. Then she is stopped by German soldiers. She is only a timid little girl: can she possibly find the wits and courage to deceive them?
As told in the afterword of Number the Stars, "almost the
entire Jewish population of Denmark--nearly seven thousand
people--was smuggled across the sea to Sweden,"
right before their "relocation" was to begin. This is the kind of
story epics can be made of, but Lowry's simply-written book focuses on
the small, personal aspects of the drama--just good, caring
people doing what they can, sometimes at the cost of their
lives--and thereby gives even more meaning to the history.
Annemarie doesn't go looking to be a hero--at the beginning
of the book she is "glad to be an ordinary person who would
never be called upon for courage." But she is called upon,
and discovers that even the most frightened person can be brave when
she needs to be. Reading her fictional story gives a new
understanding to the facts that are told in the afterword: for every
Jewish family that made it to Sweden, there is an untold story of
goodness and sacrifice. (8 & up)
The Devil's Arithmetic by Jane Yolen. Viking, 1988
(0-670-81027-4); Puffin, 1990 (0-140-34535-3) $2.98 pb
Twelve-year-old Hannah hates the Passover Seder at Grandpa Will's. She hates his strange fits about the tattoo on his arm, and the long boring speeches, and everything she's expected to remember. "All Jewish holidays are about remembering," she tells her mother. "I'm tired of remembering."
Then she goes to open the door for Elijah--and suddenly finds herself being called Chaya. She has travelled through time and space to a Jewish village in Nazi-occupied Poland, the only one there who knows the fate that awaits them. At first Hannah urges people to fight, but her efforts are useless; her foreknowledge is too little and arrives too late, and she, along with everyone she has met, winds up in a concentration camp. There she is befriended by a girl named Rivka, who teaches her the tricks of survival in a place where every day of survival is a victory over evil; it is Rivka who tells her, when she rages against the passivity of the prisoners, that "it is much harder to live this way and to die this way than to go out shooting... We are all heroes here."
Reading it with a critical eye, The Devil's Arithmetic seems
awfully heavy on the lessons; practically every line of dialogue starts
to seem like a sound bite of profundity. Nonetheless, it is deeply moving
story of both staggering evil and goodness, and the vital importance of
remembering them. (10 & up)
If I Should Die Before I Wake by Han Nolan. Harcourt, Brace, 1994
(0-15-238040-X) $16,95; 2003 (0-15-204679-8) $6.95 pb
Hilary, a young member of the "Aryan Warriors," a Neo-Nazi organization, lies in a coma after a motorcycle accident. Seemingly lifeless, her mind still works furiously, ceaselessly spewing a torrent of hate for her mother and for Jews, whom she blames for her father's death. Then she finds her consciousness slipping away--into the body of a girl called Chana, a Jewish girl who lived during the Holocaust, 50 years before. At first Hilary thinks her visions are a meaningless dream and refuses to accept their significance, but they keep coming. Inside Chana, Hilary experiences the fear, pain, loss and despair of the Jews in the Nazi ghettos and concentrations camps, becoming one with her in her suffering until she can no longer tell where Chana's life ends and hers begins.
the inherent power of this story is somewhat marred by an ambitious narrative style that isn't completely successful. Hilary's torments inner voice, half watered-down expletives and half confused flashbacks, does not give a convincing explanation of her anti-semitism. Chana's narrative works better, especially as it becomes the focal point of the novel: the recreation of the physical and emotional horrors of the Holocaust is vivid and soul-wrenching. (At one point, Chana realizes that the smell of Auschwitz is that of "human flesh, human hair and bones burning. I was drenched in it, choking with it, but I knew that in order for me to live, I had to breath, I had to inhale this residue of someone else's life.")
Chana's story, describing in bitter detail her efforts to keep both
her body and spirits alive, builds in power until finally the war is
over and she has survived--in part, as her intuitive grandmother tells
her, because Hilary's spirit was with her. "She was the brave Chana,
the strong Chana, the Chana who could cry and mourn so many deaths, so
much destruction, so that you wouldn't have to... Your
shvester, your other self, kept your soul alive. In a deeply
moving ending, the separate spirits of the two girls talk to each
other for the first time--only now Chana is the old woman she is in
Hilary's time, another patient in the hospital. By sharing her
experiences with Hilary she has saved her life, just as Hilary's
spiritual presence saved hers in the past. And now, she tells
Hilary, it is her turn to share what she knows with others, to be a
witness: "I reached out to you. I touched you. I screamed, and you
heard. In hearing me, in understanding me, you have given my past new
meaning. It will change to meaning of your past as well, and someday
your life as an angry child who has turned her hate to love will
change still another life." (12 & up)
To Cross a Line by Karen Ray. Orchard, 1994; Puffin, 1995
(0-14-037587-2)
By keeping quiet and inconspicuous, and saying "Heil Hitler" when he
had to, seventeen-year-old Egon Katz managed to live safely though
most of 1938. Then one small moment of misjudgement brought him, a
Jewish boy, to the attention of the Gestapo, and Egon knew that
escaping Germany was the only way to survive. But in a world where
everyone seemed to be obedient to the Party, where could he go--and
who could he trust? Based on true events, this is a terse, gripping
story of survival that offers a sharply focused, intimate portrait of
one person's experience during the Holocaust. The narrative is short
and spare, but has enough vivid detail to bring Egon's story to life,
showing how his will and determination helped him to get through the
terrors and indignities of life on the run. (12 & up)
Mara's Stories by Gary Schmidt. Henry Holt, 2001
(0-8050-6794-9) $16.95
Using a framing device in which a woman in a concentration camp tells
stories to her fellow prisoners, this unusual collection retells
stories from Jewish folklore and history, giving them all a Holocaust
setting. Although the style is occasionly a bit maudlin, some of the
book is extremely powerful and moving. (10 & up)
Milkweed by Jerry Spinelli. Knopf, 2003; Laurel-Leaf, 2005
(0-440-42005-9) $6.50 pb
Like the tree that grows in Brooklyn, milkweed is a tenacious plant, the only hint of green managing to survive in the desert of the Warsaw Ghetto. The narrator of this story is also tenacious, even as he is buffeted by forces beyond his control, like a milkweed pod blown about by the wind. His first memory is of running; the only name he knows for himself is Stopthief. When he's adopted by another homeless orphan named Uri, his first name and background are bestowed up him: Misha Pilsudski, a Gypsy boy who once had seven brothers and five sisters.
For a time, Misha lives a comfortable underground life, thieving with Uri and a group of other boys, always sharing some of what he steals with the local orphanage. Then he befriends a girl named Janina Milgrom, a girl who lives in a nice home and wears beautiful shiny shoes... for a while. Janina and her family are marched to the Ghetto shortly before Misha himself is forced there--Uri, with red hair and a genuis for conformity, manages to escape--and when Misha, a skilled smuggler, supports them with stolen food he becomes part of their family and gains another identity: a Jewish boy named Misha Milgrom.
Even when Uri reappears with a message--"Do not be here when the trains come... Run. Don't stop running"; even when Janina's father begs them both to run away from the Ghetto--Misha clings to his new family and the life they know. But he can't control the forces that will once again blow them like the wind.
Even aside from the ugliness it depicts, Milkweed is a
challenging story. Although occasionally the narrator steps outside
of the events to comment as an adult, most of it is told in the voice
of the uncomprehending, gullible boy he was, who is reliving pieces of
story barely understood, sometimes barely understandable. But it well
repays the reader who commits to it, and comes away with a new sense
of what it means to live through such times. I was left in tears by
the book's end, in which the adult Misha embraces the final pieces of
his identity. (14 & up)
Children in the Holocaust and World War II: Their Secret Diaries
edited by Laurel Holliday. Pocket, 1995 (0-671-52054-7) $20.00;
(0-671-52055-5) $15 pb
Anne Frank's well-known diary has made her, for many, the face of childhood during the Holocaust. Yet Anne's experience in hiding was only one of many different kinds of experience--and her diary was also only one of many powerful records, most now highly obscure. This collection brings those forgotten diaries to light, capturing the diverse voices of the world's children during the war. Whether in concentration camps, the ghettos, or the London Blitz; whether actively fighting against the Nazis or merely struggling to survive one more day; whether most filled with rage, fear, hope or despair, these children all somehow found a way to tell their stories; hopefully this record will remain a prominent voice in Holocaust literature.
As should be expected, the actual literary qualities of these diaries varies greatly. Some (perhaps from having gone though numerous translations) are near-incoherent remembrances; others, like thirteen-year-old Eva Heyman's entries in her "dear diary" are as well-constructed as a novel, and all the more vivid and compelling on that account. In the relative safety of England, eighteen-year-old Colin Perry's account was written deliberately from the point of view of an "eyewitness to history" who wanted to be a writer, while sixteen-year-old Joan Wyndham was (at first) more caught up in her first sexual experiences than in the realities of war. Condemened prisoner Kim Malthe-Brun's dairy ends with two exquisitely thoughtful and heartfelt letters: one to his girlfriend, telling her to let herself be happy and love again after he is gone, the second to his mother, asking that she understand that "the ideas, the life, the inspiration which filled me will live on."
But whether furtively jotted or consciously written, all the diaries
bear witness to the strength of the human need for self-expression,
even at great risk--for as Holliday points out in her introduction, in
the Nazi-controlled countries, "these boys and girls were performing
private acts of heroism whenever they wrote." The reward for this
courage is implicit in the diaries themselves: writing them helped
the children to hold on to their sense of identity, to live through
terrible trauma with their values intact. Perhaps even the many that
did not survive took some comfort in the fact that their diaries could
speak out after them, to tell the world, as survivor Mary Berg vowed
to do, "about our sufferings and our struggles and the slaughter of
our dearest." * (12 & up)
Dance, Sing, Remember by Leslie Kimmelman. Illustrated by Ora
Eitan. HarperCollins, 2000 (0-06-027726-2) $14.00
The bouncy, slightly abstract look of cover of this book is enticing, seeming to promise a livelier, perhaps even hipper look at Jewish holidays than usual. The text is pretty standard though, describing eleven Jewish holidays, plus shabbat, with simplified versions of the complicated stories. The telling of Yom Hashoah, Holocaust remembrance day is shortest of all, tactfully leaving it for parents to decide how much to elaborate; in a nice touch, the text refers back to the story of Purim, saying "This time, there was no Queen Esther to change his [Hitler's] mind. There was no Queen Esther to help save the Jews."
Impressionistic pictures catch the tone of each holiday nicely: the
design of a dark bird on a grey background for Yom Hashoah and
a picture of a child tenderly planting a tree for Tu B'Shevat are
particularly lovely. A story or activity follows the description of each
holiday, generally pretty obvious ones like playing dreidel or making
groggers. (Purim noisemakers.) Parents or teachers looking for a very basic
introduction to the Jewish holiday year may find this useful. (4-8)
No Pretty Pictures: a Child of War by Anital Lobel. Greenwillow,
1998 (0-685-15935-4) $16.00; Avon Camelot, (0-380-73285-8) $5.99 pb
"I was born in Krakow, Poland. In a wrong place at a wrong time." These simple words begin illustrator Lobel's harrowing memoir of her childhood under Nazi rule, and I found myself remembering them throughout the book. They are accepting, unashamed words of an adult--a far cry from the child she once was, facing a world of fear and loss painfully accompanied by shame.
For young Lobel, the invasion of Poland meant the gradual destruction of a comfortable, cossested life. First her father disappeared, then the family good were taken by the Nazis. When she and her brother were sent to the country with their Niania, their nanny, it was the begging of years of being either a refugee or a prisoner, of years in which daily life was constantly being "reshaped" by external forces.
Using sometimes terribly vivid images, Lobel tells her story through the eyes of the child she once was, with memories of being disguised with a bandage so tight, it soon resulted in a genuine eye infection; of lying for hours in a hiding place so cramped and stifling, "we were like the contents of a boiling pot on the stove"; of waking up covered in diarrhea and having to desperately clean herself with her soiled clothes, knowing that the concentration camp hospital must be avoided at all costs. We see the anger and suspicion bred of her experiences, the sad distortion of her childhood--because how can a childhood really exist when there are no caregivers?--and the pitiful self-hatred that haunted her, instilled by the anti-Jew prejudices of her loving but fanatical Niania, and heightened by the belief that none of this would have happened if she were not a "verfluchte, schmutizige Juden," a dirty, filthy Jew. The main flaw in No Pretty Pictures is that this issue is left unresolved, leaving me to wonder if Lobel ever accepted being Jewish, or if she spent the rest of her life trying to put her ethnic heritage behind her. I would like to know more about how she grew from an angry, suspicious child into the positive, unselfpitying adult she is now.
Even with this gap, the story is by no means purely tragic. As the
prologue states, "I have spent many, many more years living well,
occupied with doing happy and interesting things, that I spent ducking
the Nazis or being a refugee." And despite the title, the book
manages to show at least one very pretty picture: a photograph of
Lobel and her brother, joyously smiling at each other after their
rescue from a concentration camp. It's a pertinent reminder that even
such terrible events don't have to destroy lives forever, a message
reinforced in the epilogue. "My life has been good," Lobel writes.
"I want more." (10 & up)
Learning About. . . The Holocaust by Elaine C. Stephens, Jean E. Brown and Janet E. Rubin. Library Professional Publications, 1995 (0-208-02398-4) OP
In a world still sadly burdened with hate crimes, "ethnic cleansings" and historical revisionism, the Holocaust is one of the most important subjects we can discuss with children--and also one of the hardest. Many terrific books are now available for all ages, but with a subject so complex and horrible, it can be very difficult to know which books to pick and the best ways to share them. That's where this book comes in. Primarily aimed at helping teachers plan Holocaust units, it's an invaluable resource for anyone interested in Holocaust literature for children.
Each chapter focuses on a different theme: factual books, personal narratives, historical fiction, plays and post-Holocaust literature. Chapters are divided by grade levels, but each entry for an individual book also mentions possible uses at other grade levels, as well as a summary, quotes and ideas to use in teaching the book. Additionally, there is a chapter of historical background and an exhaustive chapter on other resources such as organizations, curriculum guides and media resources.
It is rare and satisfying to see a resource list/bibliography so well
done. The authors obviously reviewed the books thoroughly and are
able to offer extensive comments on their age appropriateness and
appeal, as well as discussion topics, projects and companion books for
each title; consequently this title will be useful for years to come,
even though, like all subject bibliographies, it was technically out
of date as soon as it was published. But this resource does not--as
it should not--take the place of actually reading the books. This is
not a lifeless, pre-fab recipe for a Holocaust curriculum, but a
helpful and stimulating aid for teachers creating units for specific
needs--or for adults choosing books for one child. Every school
should have it.
Anne Frank: Beyond the Diary by Ruud van der Rol and Rian Verhoeven.
Viking, 1993; Puffin, 1995 (0-14-036926-0) $7.99 trade pb
One of the special qualities of Anne Frank's diary is how effective it is as a single document, how well it stands on its own as a portrait of a time and place--and person. Nevertheless, most admirers of the diary will be fascinated by this glimpse "beyond" it, which tells us parts of Anne's story that even she didn't know or couldn't write down, including the painful ending after she and her family were captured.
Much of the book is photographs. Photos of recreations of the rooms in "the Secret Annex" show us how vividly Anne described that cramped, claustrophobic space; photos of the people who helped the Franks give ordinary faces to those courageous figures. Pictures of the actual diary itself, "with all its teenage blemishes... pocked with pasted pictures, scribbled and haphazard" (Anna Quindlen, in her introduction), are an almost shocking reminder of how real Anne's diary was--not just a work of literature, but life as it happened.
Beyond the Diary shows us a different
kind of record of Anne's life, from a photo of her at one day old to
pictures of her as a happy toddler with ears that stuck out, to the
last photos of her as an adolescent. In those pictures we usually see
a lively and smiling Anne--not exactly pretty, but very likeable
looking, a girl you would want to have for a friend. "There is
something so humanizing in these photographs," Quindlen writes. "In
them Anna has not yet passed into historical legend." Seeing these
photos, we can once again care about Anne as a person in her own
right, not just a symbol of all the children who died too young. (8 & up)
My Secret Camera by Frank Dabba Smith. Photographed by Mendel
Grossman. Harcourt, 2001 (0-15-202306-2) $16.00
This remarkable book collects some of the photographs taken secretly
by a young man confined to the Lodz Ghetto in 1940. It's an
incredible documentation of the hardships and suffering of those
imprisoned in the Ghetto, where children were harnessed to carts like
animals and one loaf of bread has to last for an entire week--yet as
the pictures also show, love, neighborliness and even occasional joy
still somehow survived. The book is occasionally marred by an
overwrought accompanying narrative; the pictures themselves speak so
strongly that words shouldn't dissipate their impact. (12 & up)
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