The Baudelaire kids have nothing on these real-life orphans

My good friend Michael, who writes children's fiction, tells me he learned long ago that the first rule of storytelling is to get rid of the parents. Clearly, getting rid of those loving adults has proved a bonanza to children's storytellers like E. Nesbit and J. K. Rowling. But in real life, what could be more nightmarish? To live at the mercy of strangers, with no love, control, or power, is the stuff of horror stories, not grand adventures.

And that's where nonfiction comes in. Writer Andrea Warren specializes in telling the true stories of orphans who survive all sorts of adversity and ultimately triumph over their sorrowful beginnings. Her compelling Escape from Saigon: How a Vietnam War Orphan Became an American Boy (Farrar, 2004) is the fantastic true story of how a Vietnamese boy named Long became an American named Matt Steiner.

Imagine being a little boy in a country ravaged by war. You are extremely poor and often hungry. Your mother lives with a man who beats her. When you are still young, your mother dies; you hear later that she took poison. Your grandmother takes you to the big city of Saigon. Living conditions here are even worse, and you have even less food. At least, you think, your grandmother loves you—so much, in fact, that she gives you away.

That's because you are the son of an American soldier, the object of teasing and discrimination. Your grandmother takes you to an orphanage that helps such children. The social workers find new parents who want to adopt you, but they are across the ocean in America. The terrible war in your country is coming to a tragic climax. Strangers make a frantic, last-minute attempt to get you and many other orphans out of the country before the arrival of the Viet Cong. Will you escape? Will you reach America? This fantastic true story will hold your attention to the last word.

Jack Mandelbaum, whose story is told in Warren's Surviving Hitler: A Boy in the Nazi Death Camps (HarperCollins, 2001), does not even know when he became an orphan. In 1939, the summer Jack turned 12, the Nazis invaded Poland and everything in Jack's life changed. His family was Jewish, and Jack's father decided it would be best if his wife and children went to stay with their grandfather, 300 miles away. Jack never saw his father again. He was later sent to filthy camps, where he lived on water flavored with dirt and rotten vegetables. "You never saw grass in a concentration camp," he observes, "because the prisoners ate it." When the horror finally ended, Jack learned that he was the only member of his family to survive.

In We Rode the Orphan Trains (Houghton, 2001), also by Warren, we learn about the Children's Aid Society, which tried to find good homes for homeless, abandoned, and abused children, or children whose parents could simply no longer afford to keep them.

The Society had the best intentions, but what they actually did seems heartless to us today. From about 1854 to 1929, children were placed on trains headed west from New York City, and then ushered into unfamiliar towns where strangers picked out the child they wanted to take home. Many families treated the orphans as their own children, but others did not, neglecting or abusing them, or using them as free labor. A worker from the Society came to check on the children every year, and sometimes took them back. Then the process started all over again.

Can you imagine the loneliness and fear of such a life? One orphan says it was like being sold at a slave market. People would check their teeth and feel their muscles. One little girl was locked in a basement all night because she was scared and cried the entire first night in her new home.

Show students the picture on page 81 of Howard and Fred Engert, two brothers who rode the train to Nebraska in 1925. Then show the one on page 94 of the two of them, adopted by different families, and now with different last names, together at the same tree nearly 75 years later!

Warren introduces us to seven kids who were taken in by strangers. In many cases, the care they received was wonderful. In others, it was awful. But these tales are riveting, and for students in grades four through eight, the real American children depicted can certainly rival the Baudelaire kids for resourcefulness, courage, and love.