Awards: ALA Notable Children's Books (2012), Orbis Pictus Honor (2012).
Author's website: none
Annotation: During WWII, the Nazis took over a small town in the Czech Republic and turned it into a ghetto to imprison Jews. This narrative tells the tragic and horrific stories of those prisoners through their own words and artwork.
Personal Reaction: This short and painful account of what happened in the town of Terezin during WWII has been documented using words from Jewish prisoners and expressive artwork that displayed what life was really like in this ghetto. Basically a place to starve and store Jews before the Nazis transported them to concentration camps, life was unbearable and filled with sickness, pain, and misery. The Nazis slowed pushed the Czech residents out and brought Jews to this town which they renamed Theresienstadt. Anyone who was a professional artist was retained and worked for the Nazis to create brochures and illustrate official documents. In their spare time, these artists secretly created drawings and paintings of their reality.
This narrative tells the story of Terezin from the beginning of the war with the German invasions, deportations of thousands upon thousands of Jews, life in the ghetto, and the monthly transports from which no one returned. Husbands and wives were separated from each other and from their children. Children were housed separately and were treated a little better than adults and old people. Much of their artwork survives and is on display in one of the several museums that exists in Terezin today. It only survived because both children and adults hid suitcases filled with artwork before they were sent to their deaths. Shockingly, when a Red Cross visit to this ghetto was planned by a Danish King who heard rumours of mistreatment of the Jews, the Nazis staged what was called a "Beautification," cleaning up the town as well as the people in it and hiding the old and the ill. Transports were increased before this visit in order to rid the town of as many sick and starving people as possible. The Nazis presented Theresienstadt as a happy well-fed community which couldn't be further from the truth. Their facade worked and kept the true atrocities of this place a secret from the outside world.
Despite the hopelessness of the situation, the survivors whose words exist in this story tell of their struggles to retain their culture, something that the Nazis couldn't take away from them. In secret at first, and then with the permission of the Nazis, the many musicians, artists, and actors performed concerts and plays which helped them to escape from the horrors of their situation, only if for a short time. As the Germans became desperate to hide evidence of their crimes towards the end of the war, transports from Theresienstadt increased significantly. Finally, on May 8 1945, the Russian army liberated Theresienstadt. Ruth Thompson's use of the words and art of Holocaust survivors along with photographs have an enormous impact upon readers. The horrors and truth of the Holocaust are depicted in this narrative and the voices of the victims are heard.
Front/Back Matter: Table of Contents, Timeline, Glossary, Sources, Index, Acknowledgements.
*Bibliographical citation information, award information, as well as image retrieved from www.bwibooks.com (Titletales).
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