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From Booklist , August 19, 1998 |
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| Grades
6-12: The truth of the child's viewpoint is the strength of
this Holocaust survivor story, told with physical immediacy and no
"pride of victimhood." Lobel's ebullient, gorgeously colored
illustrated books--from the Caldecott Honor Book On Market Street
(1982) to Toads and Diamonds (1996)--give no hint of her dark,
terrifying childhood. Barely five years old when the Nazis came to her
comfortable home in Poland, she spent the next five years in hiding and on
the run; then she was captured and transported to concentration camps.
Through the marches, hunger, mud, stench, and corpses, her younger brother was nearly always with her, disguised as a girl to hide his circumcision. Matter-of-factly, she tells how she protected him ("Once I found a raw potato in the mud. My brother and I took turns taking bites out of it"); in the Ravensbruck selections, she dragged him to the left, away from the chimneys. With the same quiet truth, she describes her childhood shame at being an "ugly, obvious Jew girl," a stigma she still felt in the two years she spent recovering from tuberculosis, nursed by kind caregivers in a Swedish sanatorium after the war. Looking back, she avoids sermonizing and analysis. There's a visceral physicalness to her memories of the terror ("the whispers of the trapped grown-ups sounded like the noise of insects rubbing their legs together") and in the elementals she celebrated when she was safe: the luxury of privacy, of hair, no lice, a flushing toilet, sheets white and clean, and the flat, slithering, sweet taste of butter. She always felt distant from her cold parents; it's the loss of Niania, the nanny who raised and sheltered her, that still breaks her heart. Older readers who remember her picture books will be stirred by her story of starting school at age 12 for the first time, the only dark kid with all the blonde Swedes, clumsy at gym and sports, an outsider, until she discovered she could draw. Hazel
Rochman |
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