Students will be riveted by these compelling accounts of the Holocaust

Children are naturally adventurous, imaginative, and boisterous. It would take a fearful force to throw a dark shadow over their exuberance. That’s what happened in Europe during World War II. Young victims during the Holocaust faced capture, imprisonment, illness, and starvation. Most of them died. Some of them hid.

Children may hide, but they don’t stay hidden. Isaac Millman’s Hidden Child (Farrar, 2005) shows the photograph of a seven-year-old boy set inside a six-pointed gold star. The boy is Isaac, who lived in Paris with his parents until the Nazis invaded. Isaac’s father was arrested and sent to prison camp in France and Auschwitz. Isaac’s mother didn’t make it. Isaac was alone and faced an uncertain life on the streets. Then he met a wonderful woman, also Jewish, who helped him hide and survive the war. Isaac grew up to be an artist—he also married the granddaughter of his rescuer—and the beautiful paintings in his book illustrate this amazing story.

Esther Nisenthal Krinitz was 12 when the Nazis invaded her tiny Polish village. As soldiers entered, they stopped in front of her grandparents’ house, roughed up her grandfather, and cut off his beard. The Gestapo then ordered all Jews to leave their homes and walk to the railroad station. Esther fled with her younger sister, and they managed to evade their enemies, often by living in the woods. Esther came to America in 1949, and years later she embroidered a series of pictures that showed what her life was like before and during the war. Her daughter Bernice has assembled these beautiful, horrible, and fascinating pictures into Memories of Survival (Hyperion, 2005).

A countryman of Esther’s, a boy named Lonek, was 11 when the Nazis invaded. Lonek went into hiding, too, in a hole under a barn. Then he escaped with his family to a busy Russian city. Lonek and his family, however, were soon captured, and Dorit Bader Whiteman’s Lonek’s Journey (Star Bright, 2005) describes this family’s fearful odyssey, first as prisoners jammed into a cattle car bound for Siberia, then as captives of the Soviet prison system. They were cold, near starvation—and then a miracle happened. They were allowed to go. But then began a journey of thousands of miles. At one point, Lonek’s mother left him at an orphanage because she could no longer feed him. Lonek and the thousands of Jewish orphans he traveled with eventually reached the shores of Palestine, and 10 years later, Lonek was reunited with his family!

We know the stories of the small number of Holocaust survivors much better than we know about the vast number of children who died. One name continues to shine as a beacon in that dark era. Josephine Poole’s Anne Frank (Knopf, 2005), illustrated by Angela Barrett, describes the ordinary, popular, pretty little Jewish girl. The Nazis invaded Anne’s country, the Netherlands, and blamed the Jews for everything. In 1942, Anne’s father moved his family into a secret place above his shop, where they lived with another family, afraid that their slightest noise would reveal their existence.

Anne kept a diary. She diligently recorded what life was like for a family afraid and in hiding, but determined to survive. Ever since Anne’s diary was published years later, everyone who has read it can’t help falling in love with this brave, lovely girl, who didn’t survive the war.

Anne is the best known young victim of the Holocaust. But she had countless brothers and sisters who hid and fought to survive. Older elementary students and many middle schoolers will be riveted by these compelling accounts of courage and resilience told by and about young people who, in another time, could have been their neighbors.