Hiding to survive

From the Publisher

Best Books for YA, YALSA/ALA

"The drama here is in the children's relationships with the righteous Gentiles who saved them. It's an inspiring story of ordinary people who risked death to rescue strangers. They hid children for all kinds of reasons, some of which they didn't know themselves. They created secret hideouts in convents, in homes, in chicken coops. These quiet accounts also make you imagine what it must have been like for the child who spent months crouching in a hayloft, who had to hide that he was circumcised, who was suddenly wrenched from his parents. . . . Remembering is hard." Booklist, ALA

null The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

"A brief summary of Hitler's rise and anti-Semitic policies followed by 14 first-person narratives based on interviews. . . Invaluable." Kirkus Reviews with Pointers

The ALAN Review - Richard F. Abrahamson

Imagine being part of a Jewish family in Europe during the Holocaust. Children, of course, wanted to stay with the parents, but parents knew that staying together increased the risk that all would be killed. Many made the gut-wrenching decision to hand their children to Gentiles, hoping these strangers would hide their children from the Nazis. Some of those children, now in their fifties and sixties, met in 1991 at an international conference to tell their stories. Rosenberg has collected fourteen first-person accounts of these survivors. What shines through is the children's will to survive and the courage it took to hide them. The survivor's tales of hiding in hen houses and above ceilings; of trying to keep two-year-old siblings from crying out; and of receiving messages telling them of dead mothers and fathers make the artificial horror in books by Pike and Stine seem tame. Seldom in one book do you find such graphic examples of the horrendous evil human beings are capable of juxtaposed against the incredible acts of goodness some of us can achieve.

School Library Journal

Gr 5 Up-This anthology tells the stories of 14 Jewish children who were hidden by non-Jews during the Holocaust. Despite the different settings-Poland, France, Belgium, Lithuania, Germany, and Holland-these first-person accounts show that the survivors share vivid memories and feelings that still haunt them. Rosenberg spoke with each of them, but unfortunately narrates their recollections in an understated, matter-of-fact style with a sameness that obscures the highly individualized nature of each experience. Still, the heroism of the people involved makes for compelling reading. Milton Meltzer's Rescue (1991) relates similar stories from the viewpoints of the youngsters' rescuers, while his Never to Forget (1976, both HarperCollins) includes some stories of children who were hidden along with many other first-person survivor accounts. Elaine Landau's We Survived the Holocaust (Watts, 1991), Ina Friedman's Escape or Die (Yellow Moon, 1991), and David Adler's We Remember the Holocaust (Holt, 1989) all deal with the subject from the perspectives of young people who were saved by hiding as well as those who escaped from camps; there are also many full-length memoirs that cover the same territory, sometimes with more dramatic impact than that found in Rosenberg's book. Despite its stylistic uniformity, this volume, illustrated with black-and-white photographs of the subjects, is an adequate addition for libraries without comparable titles in their collection.-Jack Forman, Mesa College Library, San Diego