The Devil's Arithmetic

The Devil's Arithmetic, by Jane Yolen, is an historical fiction novel about the Holocaust, geared toward younger readers.  Thirteen-year-old Hannah is on her way to celebrate Passover with her family, but she'd much rather stay with her friend Rosemary, eating Easter candy.  She feels like every year, the Seder is the same - they do the Seder ritual with dinner and the adults talk about the past, and how important it is to remember.  Hannah doesn't want to talk about things that happened so long ago, and she gets bored of her family's stories.  

When her Grandpa Will declares that she will be the one to open the front door for the prophet Elijah this year, Hannah feels silly, but she goes along with the tradition.  Upon opening the door, however, she doesn't see the apartment building's hallway and the doors to the neighbors' apartments - instead, she finds herself transported to another time and place.  She has, in fact, been transported to Poland of the 1940s, where she will come to experience for herself the horror of the stories she used to dismiss.

Rescuing the Children: The Story of the Kindertransport

Rescuing the Children:  The Story of the Kindertransport by Deborah Hodge is a non-fiction book about the Kindertransport movement; this was an heroic effort made to evacuate as many Jewish children as possible out of Nazi-controlled Europe just before World War II really started.  This is a part of (pre)-Holocaust history that, sadly, not many people are aware of.  In 1938, nine months before war was declared, things were getting more and more dangerous for European Jews.  Hitler had what seems like almost everyone convinced that the Jews were to blame for their hard times, and these people reacted with hatred and violence.   Many tried to escape as refugees to other countries, fearing the worst for themselves and their families if they stayed any longer in their native countries - but many were refused entry.  The Great Depression gave governments an excuse to bar these people from seeking a safe haven, by being concerned that what precious few jobs they had available would go to these new immigrants rather than to their own citizens.

Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, was the real catalyst, though, for the birth of the Kindertransport movement.  Mobs of Hitler's followers destroyed Jewish-owned properties, including homes and places of worship.  Jews were killed, and many were arrested and sent to concentration camps.  Jewish parents were faced with what was probably the hardest decision they would ever have to make in their lives:  sending their children thousands of miles away to be taken in by strangers, not knowing when or if they would ever see them again.

We All Wore Stars

I won my copy of We All Wore Stars by Theo Coster through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program, and I was well beyond pleased when I received it from the publisher, Palgrave-MacMillan.  For a long time I've had a kind of morbid fascination with the Holocaust.  I love to read anything I can about this tragic event in history, and any time I see that a World War II documentary is on TV, I watch it if I can.  Discovering that I have relatives who were killed in the war was no surprise to me, since my dad's mother's family is Polish; discovering that one of those relatives (maybe I should say one that I know of so far) was not only an inmate in Auschwitz, but was killed there, makes me that much more interested to soak up anything I can get my hands on to learn more about it.

We All Wore Stars is a short book of, as the subtitle reads, "Memories of Anne Frank from Her Classmates."  But it isn't just memories about her - I would describe this book more as a brief collection of memories of the contributors' own wartime experiences.  Coster decided to create a film about his and some of his classmates' experiences from the war, to ensure that their stories would endure after they have passed on; this book seems to be almost a companion to the documentary, in a way, and having read this, I'm very interested in finding the film.  Not many of their classmates survived the war - indeed, a vast majority of Holland's Jewish population in general did not survive - but Coster was able to get in touch with a few individuals, who he met with both as a group and individually, to reminisce about their time together at the Jewish Lyceum in Amsterdam, and to talk about some of their individual experiences after either going into hiding or being arrested and sent to the camps.