BookPikks

Based on her own experiences during WWII, Vos writes about hidden children both during and after the war.

Lily’s summer is not turning out the way she imagined. Her father is shipped overseas, her best friend has moved away, and she is left spending the summer with her grandmother, and the strange boy who just moved in next door. A sweet story for younger readers, set during WWII, about the importance of being truthful with those you love.

A fascinating memoir about the author’s five year banishment to Siberia. Esther and her family were Jews who lived in Vilna, Poland. At the outset of WWII, when Russia and Germany were still allied, Russian soldiers invaded her town, labeled her family as “capitalists” and shipped them off to be slave laborers in the gypsum mines of Siberia. Esther’s family faced slavery, starvation, frostbite, disease, persecution and the winters of Siberia with courage, resourcefulness and humor. Throughout five long years, their love for each other was the only thing that held them together.

On a slightly unrelated note, the jacket design for the first printing of The Endless Steppe was done by Nonny Hogrogian. She is the author and illustrator of the Caldecott Award winning book, One Fine Day. This retelling of an Armenian folktale is one of my favorite children’s books.

A memoir written by a Holocaust survivor. Nelly Toll and her mother survived the war by hiding in the bedroom of a Gentile family. They endured the hardships of the ghetto, betrayal by those close to them, and the loss of Nelly’s brother, father and most of her extended family.

Toll’s memoir is based on a diary that she kept while in hiding. While there are some periods about which she remembers little, her experiences are remarkably well documented. Her memoir is illustrated by watercolor pictures which she herself painted during the war as an escape from the terror she felt each day.

Joe Hanada’s family is forced into an internment camp during World War II. They are separated from Joe’s father and from their friends, home, town and most of their belongings. In spite of the hardships, Joe still loves America, and simply longs for the freedom to go home.

It was interesting to read this fictional account of a Japanese family, after reading In Defense of Internment, by Michelle Malkin last year. While this book ignores the valid war-time reasons for internment, Malkin didn’t address the human suffering of the thousands of innocents who were interred. Both books do, however, bring to light the failures of our government to protect the rights of citizens and the security of our country. Hindsight is 20-20.