Hide and Seek by Robin Scott-Elliot

 2021

Amélie’s parents and older brother are taken by the Gestapo form their Paris apartment as she hides in the wardrobe with her mother’s fur coat.  She survives for a while by eating all the food that is left in the apartment.  She spends her days in the museum.  She has removed her Star of David from her coat but Cécile who works there realises this. Cécile takes Amélie in.  Cécile works for the Resistance and soon Amélie is doing the same.  However, there is a traitor in the network.  Amélie and Cécile wrongly accuse Alain. It is in fact Raymond, whom Amélie pushes form a train when she realises this.  Amélie lies about her age and is eventually recruited for the SOE (Special Operations Executive) after she has accompanied a British airman back to England. There she goes first to a boarding school and then to a government establishment where she is trained for SOE.  That she is a native speaker of French is very useful. This enables her to return to Paris where she also becomes involved in rescuing Jewish children.  Some are hidden amongst families in Paris and the others are smuggled into Switzerland. One little boy, Lou, doesn’t make it through the fence and returns to Paris with Amélie where they both wait for the end of the war and for their older brothers to return. The final scene is of Amélie meeting her brother Paulie at the station. We do not learn whether her parents or Lou’s brother return.    

This is a fiction but some real characters are mentioned in the text.  An afterword by Robin  Scott-Elliot explains this.         

The book is 325 pages long in blocked text which uses an adult font. 

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What We're Scared Of by Keren David

 

 

 2021

Evie and Lottie are non-identical twins.  They are completely different from each other.  Evie is funny, small, “zaftig” (Yiddish word for chubby) and goes to the local comp. She has quite a following as a stand-up comic. Lottie, is tall, slim, asthmatic, and possibly has an eating disorder but this is understated in the text.  She is clever and goes to a fee-paying school. Their mother is Jewish but is not a practising Jew nor is at all religious.

They start to confront their Jewishness when their mother brings back an old school friend and her son Noah.   Sarah an d Noah have moved from Paris because Noah and his father were attacked for being Jewish, Noah stays with the twins and the family for a while.

Meanwhile, Lottie befriends another Jewish girl at her school.  Hannah introduces Lottie to more formal aspects of the Jewish way of life.  

Their mother mentions what has happened to Sarah and Noah on her radio show.  She is immediately trolled and starts to receive hate mail.

Both girls ae put in danger because they are Jewish.  

They meet a Holocaust survivor who encourages them to “Seize opportunities” and “celebrate the good times” p300.

The text is blocked and in adult font.  It is 300 pages long. The acknowledgments at the end of the book tell us a little about David’s research. There is also a short biography of the author at the end.            

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Secrets by Jacqueline Wilson

2014

In Secrets we have the stories of Treasure and India via their diary entries.

Secrets opens violently with Terry, Treasure’s step-father, taking off his belt to her and thrashing her. Just before he starts hitting her, he has torn pages from her diary; she had invented all sorts of elaborate torture methods for him. Terry’s violence has been ongoing for some time and not just towards Treasure.

Even before Terry came on to the scene life with just Mum had not been good. Treasure’s mother had no time for her when she was little. Treasure generally has low self-esteem.        

India’s father is different form Terry. He isn’t violent but is constantly under stress because of his work. He has little time for India. He also has affairs with the string of au pairs that come to look after India. He is plagued by constant money worries. Eventually he embezzles the company he works for. Her mum isn’t all that much of a mother, either. She is obsessed with dieting and puts pressure on India to lose weight. Perhaps the ultimate problem in the relationship between India and her children’s clothes designer mother is that she hates the clothes her mother designs. They are too small, bright and sparkly. Similarly, a friend of her mother’s has written a book about diets for intelligent children.  Her own intelligent son remains fat and refuses to go on the diet described in the book. It is likely also that India’s mum is anorexic.

India is desperately lonely and has difficulty making friends. She envies Anne Frank who had a lot of friends before she went into hiding. India hides within the house for two hours and no one notices.       

Wilson takes a risk in being explicit about the Holocaust. In an outburst when other class members are not taking a reading of “Anne Frank’s Diary” seriously India gives us a graphic description of what the concentration camps were like.

The two girls live on separate estates. Treasure is on the very bleak and tough Latimer estate. India lives on the luxury complex of Parkfield Manor. The two groups of residents gaze at each other xenophobically. We have the beginnings of a dystopia. The girls’ first meeting is tentative.                

There is some mitigation in that Treasure’s grandmother cares for her and even step-sister Bethany is kind when Treasure has to leave; she gives her a designer T-shirt that she had previously guarded jealously. Treasure finds a good family situation with her grandmother, child-aunt Patsy and her cousin Loretta’s baby, Britney. Life is comfortable with Nan, but she cannot quite forget the horrors of her life with Terry. However, her mother is adamant she should return; she needs help with the younger children. Eventually her mother and stepfather threaten them with social services; Nan’s partner Pete will be coming out of prison soon. However, Treasure eventually gets her wish and is allowed to live with her grandmother. But she is torn; she still loves her mother and will miss her.        

When India and Treasure first meet, they are initially wary of each other but they have the courage to talk it out. They speak and listen to each other. Wilson thus gives her readers some hope that conflict can be resolved. In the end, India manages to stand up to her mother.   

There is an ironic twist in this story that makes it even darker. “Mumbly Michael”, Nan’s neighbour with special needs is accused of murdering Treasure.

As ever, Wilson skillfully gets rid of the grown-ups. 

The Children of Willesden Lane by Mona Golabek and Lee Cohen

2017

There are so many different ways in which people survived the Holocaust.   This one at first resembles my own book written for a similar audience: a young girl leaves on the Kindertransport, she and her companions have to take care of a baby, someone is seasick , someone is determined to keep up with their music and the mentor is called Mrs Cohen.  It too is based on a true story.  

  

Then it is different. The protagonist, Lisa Jura, opts to remain amongst other Jews though she is treated well by her English employers.   

Lisa does well with her music. She is reconciled with both of her sisters but her parents are never found.   

Many stories about the Holocaust span several years so it can be difficult to identify the target reader. This one is about right; it will be readable to teens in the lower half of secondary school and this is precisely when the Holocaust comes on to the curriculum. The text would be very readable by slightly younger children but perhaps the inclusion of a love interest and the Holocaust may prevent this.

Even though the text covers a long period of time it remains engaging with plenty of dialogue and action. We do get to know Lisa quite well. 

This is published by a long established publisher, W Franklin Watts, so its ragged right formatting and rather large indents at the beginning of each paragraph may surprise us. It is double-spaced but uses an adult font.        

The Boy at the Top of the Mountain by John Boyne

The Boy at the Top of the Mountain by John Boyne 

2015  

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Pierrot Fischer, later Pieter, is half French and half German and spends the first part of his childhood in Paris.  He has a best friend who is Jewish, but doesn’t realise this and the significance of it.  His father, a great War veteran, commits suicide and his mother dies of TB. The Jewish family will not take him in – partly because they can’t afford to and partly because they think it will be dangerous for him. He goes first to an orphanage in Orleans and then his German aunt finds out about him. She happens to work at Hitler’s retreat, the Berghof in the Obersalzberg of the Bavarian Alps near Berchtesgaden.  Pieter becomes a Nazi and is quite nasty with it. His Aunt Beatrix and her lover, Ernst, the chauffeur are executed when they try to poison Hitler. Pieter begins to see that what he has become is wrong but only when the Germans are losing World War II and Hitler and the others with him in the bunker in Berlin kill themselves and when he himself is taken prisoner by the liberating soldiers. He eventually finds his old school friend from Paris, Anshel Bronstein, who has become a writer. Bizarrely at this point John Boyne switches from a close third person narrative to first person.   

 

As with The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, (the BBC film of which was first broadcast after the watershed) it is difficult to really pinpoint a reader. Pierrot is seven at the beginning of the story and at the end we see Pierrot / Pieter as a grown man.  Before the epilogue he is eighteen and wears a soldier’s uniform but isn’t ever involved in active combat. There is a scene near the end of the story where he almost rapes the girl he would like to have as a girlfriend.  Yet this would not be too startling for the younger reader as the scene is quite subtle. Clearer is his sense of entitlement that his Nazi upbringing has created. 

 

It’s quite hard also to assess the impact on a reader, again as is the case with The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas;   adults reading the text know what is happening. Boyne writes very much form Pierrot’s / Pieter’s point of view and we see everything through an innocent boy’s eyes. When he is transcribing for Hitler what some important Nazi figures discuss in a meeting, he queries why the showers in the new camps will not have water. However, once we get to the end of the story Pieter refers to Buchenwald, Dachau, Auschwitz and the Geneva Convention as though the readers would perfectly understand this.            

     

Pierrot changes rather too quickly perhaps into a Nazi and then rather too quickly away from these dangerous ideals. 

Nevertheless, the book is well written, engaging and gives the opportunity for some meaningful discussion of many important issues.