My strongest book memory from young adulthood is reading The Diary of Anne Frank. She was my introduction to the Holocaust and since I've read many powerful young adult novels about Holocaust heros and heroines. There's even a new book, Anne Frank: Beyond the Diary, full of photographs that expanded my picture of Anne's life and her times.
April seventh is Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. A day that stands in tribute for the six million Jewish dead.
My children are still young and I struggle with how to explain horrors I've never understood. I want them to feel secure in the world, but my children are the future and my hope is that knowledge and remembering will help them change the world.
I wouldn't introduce the Holocaust to children younger than ten and picture books make a good beginning. I've talked and shared books with several friends who struggle with the same dilemas I do. We agreed that none of the books were complete within themselves and all of them required lots of discussion. We also agreed that we found the most comforting books were those that held some kind of hope.
If story is where you want to begin, there are several good books. The Lily Cupboard tells of a young Jewish girl who is hidden by a caring Dutch farm family. Eve Bunting's The Terrible Things is an allegory of the holocaust, where a small questioning rabbit witnesses one animal after another being taken from his peaceful forest. Robert Innocenti's Rose Blanche remembers the young members of French White Rose organization who died fighting the Nazis. In the story, a small girl discovers a prision camp near her occupied town and struggles to feed the starving people behind the barbed wire fence. She, herself, is killed in the end by an allied bullet.
For a non-fiction look at the holocaust, there's Norman Finkelstein's Remember Not to Forget, a blend of fact and feelings about Jewish history, the Holocaust, and remembrance. Chana Abells' The Children We Remember is a powerful telling of how children suffered and died in the Holocaust. There are few words and the powerful photographs demand discussion.
For longer fiction, a very good place to begin is with Lois Lowry's Newbery-award winning, Number the Stars, the story of a ten year old Danish girl who courageously helps to save the family of her Jewish friend. Lowry was inspired by the letter of a young Dane, written on the eve of his execution, reminding young and old to remember and from that remembering "to create an ideal of human decency."
April seventh is Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. For as long as I can remember, I've had a love-hate relationship with books about the Holocaust. I love them for their power, I hate what I learn. Recently two new books added to these feelings.
One of the most amazing books I read this year is Vera Propp's When the Soldiers Were Gone. Based on a true story, Propp's novella has an intensity I don't usually see in middle grade novels. It also introduces the holocaust in a way that children as young as eight can understand without being horrified. Its power and shortness also means success with older, more reluctant readers. The hero of the book is Henk, a young boy who has lived most of his life with his farming family in Holland. Or so he thinks. It turns out that his name is really Benjamin, he's Jewish, and the family he knows so well has only been hiding him during the war. In the first chapter he learns that his real parents have come to take him home again. From then on, the book records Henk's tangled path of discoveries and memories. Henk's awareness comes in stages. At first he struggles with his new name and realizing what it meant when he was hidden from soldiers who visited the farm. As time passes, Henk still misses his rural family, and has a hard time facing school, and learning to live in a city with his real parents, and adopted brother. Finally, painful memories glimmer from his past and he begins to remember, understand, and adjust.
For decades, Anita Lobel has drawn bright, richly detailed children's book illustrations. In her first novel, No Pretty Pictures , she writes about surviving the Holocaust . When the Nazis invaded Poland, changes began in Lobel's life. Her Hasidic father fled after "kissing her in the night" when she didn't even know it. Her mother existed in Krakow with false identity papers, selling belongings on the black market. Anita and her brother were sent into the country with their strange Catholic nurse. Lobel was suddenly turned into a practicing Catholic, her brother was disguised as a girl, she saw her mother only infrequently, and was plunged into a world of instability. She was moved from a city to a rural town to a Benedictine convent. There she finally made a friend. All too soon, however, this new friend was laid out in a coffin, dead from tuberculosis. Soon after came the insanity of the camps and finally, reuniting with her parents in Sweden. While reading, I couldn't help thinking of the decades of fanciful Lobel illustrations I've admired and how she's spent a good part of her life pleasing fans with her pretty pictures. The raw power of her writing will please fans in a different way. It's a tribute to her courage in the past and in the present.
Both No Pretty Pictures and When the Soldiers Were Gone honor the human spirit, endurance, and the importance of remembering a painful past.
Vera Propp's fiction based on truth When the Soldiers Were Gone (Putnam, $14.99; ages 9-12)
Anita Lobel, No Pretty Pictures:a child of war (Greenwillow, $16.00; ages 11 and up).