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YA Nonfiction: Two Holocaust Memoirs

Oct15

The Boy on the Wooden Box: How the impossible became possible . . . on Schindler’s list by Leon Leyson with Marilyn J. Harran and Elisabeth Leyson.

Helga’s Diary: A Young Girl’s Account of Life in a Concentration Camp by Helga Weiss, translated by Neil Bermel.

Both of these accounts, written by Jewish Holocaust survivors about their teen years in Nazi-occupied territory, were quite absorbing and harrowing, each in its own way. Mr. Leyson’s book has a two-fold purpose as evidenced by the dedication: “To my brothers, Tsalig and Herschel, and to all the sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, parents and grandparents who perished in the Holocaust. And to Oskar Schindler, whose noble actions did indeed save a ‘world entire.'” There has been some controversy over whether the hero of the movie Schindler’s List was really a an unequivocal hero since he was something of a contradiction, a womanizing Nazi businessman who nevertheless saved the lives of perhaps more than one thousand Jewish workers who were slated for extermination by the Germans. Leon Leyson has no doubts about the heroism of Oskar Schlindler since Leon was one of those workers who was on Schlindler’s famous “list”. The memoir begins with Leib Lejzon, now known as Leon Leyson, living in the rural village of Narewka in northeastern Poland. Leon says that when he was a boy “[l]ife seemed an endless, carefree journey.” First, Leon’s father moved to the city of Krakow to work, and then in 1938 when Leon was eight years old, his father sent for the family to join him in Krakow. In 1939 the Leysons’ idyllic and upwardly mobile life came to an abrupt halt when the Germans invaded Poland.

The Boy on the Wooden Box is an excellent story for young adult readers about the Holocaust and about the survivors, particularly the work of Oskar Schlindler in saving many of the Jews who worked for him. Leon Leyson’s mantra for survival could be useful to anyone who is going through suffering and hard times, even if they never have to survive something as horrendous as the Holocaust:

“a new phrase surfaced: ‘If this is the worst that happens.’ My father and mother also adopted this saying as a tool of survival, perhaps as a way of keeping darker thoughts at bay. . . . Whenever a German was near, we whispered to ourselves, ‘If this is the worst . . .'”

Helga’s Diary is the story of the Czech/Jewish Helga Weiss’s childhood spent in the concentration camp of Terezin, and then later at Auschwitz. The Terezin portion of the diary was written at the time of the events and edited later for clarity by the author. Helga’s uncle hid the diary for her at Terezin when Helga and her mother were sent on a transport to Auschwitz. Then, after the war, Helga retrieved the diary and added the details of events that happened to her and her mother at Auschwitz and on their final journey through Poland and Czechoslovakia on a “death train” as the war was drawing to a close.

Helga’s childlike confusion over what was happening to her family and to the rest of the Jews in Czechoslovakia, and then her growing understanding and horror, lend her story an immediacy that pulls the reader into the story in a way that Mr. Leyson’s story is unable to do, written as it was long after the events took place. At the same time there are questions left unanswered in Helga’s account, as there must be in any child’s view of the war. An interview with Helga Weiss in the back of the book brings her story up to date and answered a few of those questions. Other uncertainties in the story simply must be left open since we are reading the story from young Helga’s point of view.

Finally I leave you with Helga Weiss’s words on why her book (and by extension Leon Leyson’s book, too) is important and should be read:

Why should we read another account of the Holocaust?

Mostly because it is truthful. I’ve put my own sentiments into it as well, but those sentiments themselves are emotional, moving, and most of all, truthful. And maybe because it’s narrated in that half-childish way, it’s accessible and expressive, and I think it will help people to understand those times.

The Boy on the Wooden Box has been nominated for the Cybils Award in the category of Young Adult Nonfiction. Helga’s Diary, although eligible in the same category, has not yet been nominated. The thoughts in this review are my own and do not reflect the thoughts or evaluations of the Cybils panel or of any other Cybils judge.

Navigating Early by Clare Vanderpool

Oct7

What a delight! Navigating Early is just the kind of novel that the Newbery award-givers, who have already awarded Ms. Vanderpool’s first book, Moon Over Manifest, a Newbery Award, would love. And I loved it, too. Kids I’m not so sure about, but it might very well find its own audience.

As I was reading the book, I was first reminded of the movie Dead Poet’s Society. Navigating Early takes place in Maine in a boy’s prep school and in the woods nearby. Thirteen year old Jack Baker, having recently experienced the death of his mother, is a new student at the school since his father doesn’t know what else to do with him. There’s a quirky (math) teacher who tells the boys that math is a quest, just like the Arthurian knights’ quest for the Holy Grail.

Then, the focus changes to a boy that our narrator meets, “Early Auden, that strangest of boys.” Early is quite strange:

“He listened to Louis Armstrong on Mondays, Frank Sinatra on Wednesdays, Glenn Miller of Fridays, and Mozart on Sundays. Unless it was raining.
If it’s raining, it’s always Billie Holiday.
I had heard of Billie Holiday, the jazz and blues singer, but I’d never really listened to her sing. Her voice mixed with the music like molasses with warm butter.”

Even stranger, Early Auden is obsessed with the number pi, a number whose “decimal representation never ends and never settles into a permanent repeating pattern.” In Early’s odd and complicated mind, pi’s numerals embody shapes and textures and colors, and ultimately the numbers of pi tell a story, the story of a boy named Pi. The story of the boy Pi intertwines and meshes with the story of Jack Baker and of Early Auden, and somehow it all has to do with a Great Bear, a boat, pirates, an ancient woman, and a lost boy.

The theme of lostness and lost and found-ness is repeated throughout the story. Jack is lost without his mother. Early is lost without his brother who died in France in World War II. His brother, according to Early, is the one who is lost. Jack’s father is lost without his wife. The number pi is, according to a famous mathematician, losing digits.

“I really was adrift. No tether. No anchor. I saw a sudden burst of lightning, and my pulse quickened. There was something intoxicating about being completely alone and unaccounted for. I could travel to California or Kentucky or Kansas, and no one would even know I was gone until the following Sunday, when everyone would return to school. Of course, I didn’t really know how to go to those places. That was the nature of being lost. You had freedom to go anywhere, but you really didn’t know where anywhere was.”

Isn’t that true? We all have more freedom than ever before in history. We can go anywhere, do anything, but quite a few of us don’t know where anywhere is.

The book began to remind me of Don Quixote as I continued to read about these two lost boys and their quest in the woods of Maine. Early Auden is Don Quixote, tilting at windmills, following his quest, and sure of the righteousness of his cause. Jack is Sancho Panza, disbelieving but willing to come along and wanting to believe that Early has some special insight into finding the object of their quest. There’s even a girl (Dulcinea?), whom Early renames Pauline instead of her given name Ethel.

Then, I realized that Early and his alter-ego Pi were reliving the story of Odysseus. The boys encounter pirates, are rescued by a Great White Whale, are captured by an ancient enchantress, listen to a siren-song, journey through the catacombs, and eventually return home, after their long quest is ended.

I’m sure all of these echoes of famous stories, and probably some others that I didn’t pick up on, were intentional, and they made the story richer and more fun for me. I don’t know how many children would see the parallels, but they might enjoy the story for its surface meaning and its curious strangeness. Readers who have read and enjoyed the story of Odyseuss or those who like Gary Schmidt’s richly layered middle grade novels about boys and imagination, or perhaps fans of Alice in Wonderland or Don Quixote or of N.D. Wilson’s Leepike Ridge should definitely give Navigating Early a try. Navigating Early is also somewhat reminiscent of the adult novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safron Foer. Lots of echoes, and a credible entry into the Great Conversation. (Yes, I believe the best children’s literature is worth adult reading, too, and adds to the the Great Conversation just as much as or better than most “adult” books do.)

Winston’s War: Churchill, 1940-1945 by Max Hastings

Jan8

Winston Churchill was an amazing man, full of contradictions, as larger-than-life heroes usually are. He was a Tory (Conservtive Party), and yet he campaigned for and won huge changes in the way war was waged. He lauded freedom and democracy as the highest goals of mankind, and he governed as a one-man show, a near dictator during the years of World War II. He was Britain’s beloved and greatest war leader of the twentieth century, and yet as soon as the war was won, the British people threw him out of office.

Mr. Hastings, a British journalist and author, shows Churchill with all his warts and also with all the endearing and audacious qualities that make him a fascination to historians and readers and students of World War II. I can’t rewrite the book here, so I’ll just give you a few sample quotations from the book:

“His supreme achievement in 1940 was to mobilise Britain’s warriors, to shame into silence its doubters, and to stir the passions of the nation, so that for a season the British people faced the world united and exalted. The ‘Dunkirk spirit’ was not spontaneous. It was created by the rhetoric and bearing of one man, displaying powers that will define political leadership for the rest of time. Under a different prime minister, the British people in their shock and bewilderment could as readily have been led in another direction.”

Churchill on Pearl Harbor and the entrance of the United States into the war:

“it was a blessing . . . Greater good fortune has never happened to the British Empire. . . . Saturated and satiated with emotion and sensation, I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful. One hopes that eternal sleep will be like that.”

Churchill on the Russians:

“Experience has taught me that it is not worthwhile arguing with the Soviet people. One simply has to confront them with the new facts and await their reactions.”

(I have learned this same fact recently about a certain teenage family member. Arguing is a waste of time and breath.)

Alan Brooke, senior commander in the British Army describing a scene in Churchill’s bedroom (of which there were apparently many):

“The red and gold dressing gown in itself was worth going miles to see, and only Winston could have thought of wearing it! He looked rather like some Chinese mandarin! The few hairs were usually ruffled on his bald head. A large cigar stuck sideways out of his face. The bed was littered with papers and dispatches. Sometimes the tray with his finished breakfast was still on the bed table. The bell was continually being rung for secretaries, typists, stenographer, or his faithful valet Sawyers.”

Marian Holmes, one of Churchill’s private secretaries:

“In all his moods—totally absorbed in the serious matter of the moment, agonized over some piece of wartime bad news, suffused with compassion, sentimental and in tears, truculent, bitingly sarcastic, mischievous or hilariously funny—he was splendidly entertaining, humane and lovable.”

The author’s summation:

“Churchill had wielded more power than any other British prime minister had known, or would know again. . . Himself believing Britain great, for one last brief season he was able to make her so. To an extraordinary degree, what he did between 1940 and 1945 defines the nation’s self-image even into the twenty-first century.
His achievement was to exercise the privileges of a dictator without casting off the mantle of a democrat. Ismay once found him bemoaning the bother of preparing a speech for the House of Commons, and obviously apprehensive about its reception. The soldier said emolliently: ‘Why don’t you tell them to go to h—?” Churchill turned in a flash: ‘You should not say those things: I am the servant of the House.'”

Hastings catalogues all of Churchill’s mistakes and disasters, and there were many throughout the war. But the author’s admiration and appreciation for Winston Churchill’s leadership during World War II shines through. Churchill comes across in this slice of his biography as The Indispensable Man without whom Hitler and his Nazis could not have been defeated. I’m sure a counter-argument could be mounted, but Churchill himself would have brushed all argument aside, a demagogue in the most admirable and heroic sense of the word.

Lost in Shangri-La by Mitchell Zuckoff

Jun10

World War II, in addition to being The Good War fought by the Greatest Generation, continues to provide a wealth of lessons, images, illustrations, and just good stories for authors to mine and for readers to appreciate. Lost in Shangri-La, subtitled “A True Story of Survival, Adventure, and the Most Incredible Rescue Mission of World War II,” is one of those many stories that can inspire and educate us today, some sixty odd years later.

The episode took place in Dutch New Guinea (later called Irian Jaya and West Papua, a part of Indonesia) in the waning years of the war, 1945-1946. Twenty-four AMerican servicemen and WAC’s boraded a transport plane for a sight-seeing trip over the Baliem Valley, also called by the service personnel that discovered, Shangri-La Valley because it reminded them from the air of James Hilton’s novel, Lost Horizon. The plane crashed, and three of the twenty-four miraculously survived the crash. However, the three were trapped inside a valley that was inaccessible to airplanes, and between them and the coast where Allied base were, was miles and miles of jungle, home to possibly hostile tribesmen and also possibly filled with Japanese soldiers who had yet to surrender. And to compound the problem of getting back to their comrades, the three survivors were covered with serious burns from the crash that were in danger of turning gangrenous.

The mountains were too high for helicopters. The valley was too narrow for planes to land, and there was no suitable runway anyway. The jungle was too thick fro planes to even spot the survivors from the air. How were the three to be rescued? The story of how and who did it and what the crash survivors encountered in the valley of “Shangri-La” is quite fascinating.

I was reminded of the missionary story, Peace Child by Don Richardson. Mr. Richardson worked with the Sawi people of Papua somewhere in or near the Baliem Valley where the people in Lost in Shangri-La were marooned. He was also in contact with the Dani and Yali tribes, the same peoples with whom the survivors of the Shangri-la plane crash found refuge. After the war, many of these isolated Papuan tribespeople were introduced to Christianity and prepared by missionaries for their inevitable encounter with Western culture.

It was fascinating to get a glimpse of these tribes in their pre-Western-influenced and pre-Christian cultures. Obviously, the coming of Western influences to these tribes has been a mixed blessing. Before World War II the Baliem Valley was largely unexplored and isolated from the rest of the world. Now, although the valley is still somewhat isolated because of its inaccessibility, most of the native people claim to be Christians, and the wars between villages that took place with regularity before are no more the men’s favorite pastime.

At any rate, if you’re interested in these sorts of things—isolated people groups and cultures, World War II stories of adventure and bravery, historic encounters between modern and prehistoric groups of people— Lost in Shangri-La should be just the ticket.

Similar and related books:
The Airmen and the Headhunters: A True Story of Lost Soldiers, Heroic Tribesmen and the Unlikeliest Rescue of World War II by Judith Heimann.
Peace Child by Don RIchardson.
Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand.

What is your favorite (true) World War II story?

We Die Alone by David Howarth

May27

We Die Alone: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance by David Howarth. Recommended by The Ink Slinger.

This true adventure story was published in 1955, and it read like 1955. Maybe it’s that I expected a first person memoir, and I got a journalist’s view of the story, a bit detached and told from the point of view of several of the participants in the story. However, that journalist’s retelling didn’t feel strange to me when I read Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand. I’m not sure what it was about this book, but I never felt the same empathy for Jan Baalsrud, the hero of We Die Alone, that I did for Louis Zamperini, the hero of Unbroken. Maybe I felt more for Zamperini because I got more background on his life both before and after his World War II adventure. Or maybe Jan Baalsrud was too much of a Scandinavian stoic for me to be able to identify myself with him; I’m certainly no stoic.

That’s not to say I didn’t like the book, We Die Alone, because I did. If Jan Baalsrud remains a sort of distant and remote character in spite of his very real sufferings described in excruciating detail in the book, the adventure and survival story itself is riveting and amazing:

“In March 1943, a team of expatriate Norwegian commandos sailed from northern England for Nazi-occupied arctic Norway to organize and supply the Norwegian resistance. But they were betrayed and the Nazis ambushed them. Only one man survived–Jan Baalsrud. This is the incredible and gripping story of his escape.”

Incredible it is. Jan Baalsrud is frostbitten and snowblind. He becomes unable to walk and must be carried to freedom by some astonishingly brave Norwegians and Lapps, through the snow and the mountains and at the risk of Nazi capture and reprisal.

Wouldn’t a book of World War II survival stories for young people (YA) with a chapter for each survivor be a great idea? The book could condense adult books like this one and Unbroken and then refer young adult readers to the full length stories if they were so inclined. What other survival adventures would you recommend for such a compilation? Add your favorite WWII survival stories to my list in the comments.

The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom.
Night by Elie Wiesel.
The Boy Who Dared by Susan Campbell Bartoletti
The Zookeeper’s WIfe by Diane Ackerman.
Evidence Not Seen: A Woman’s Miraculous Faith in the Jungles of World War II by Darlene Deibler Rose.

The Small Rain by Madeleine L’Engle

Apr19

I’ve been working on several projects this year: my Newbery project, my TBR list, and my Madeleine L’Engle project. I want, over the course of the next year or two, to read or re-read all of Ms. L’Engle’s books —or as many of them as I can find. I started with A Winter’s Love, published in 1957, my birth year. Here’s what I wrote about that book. I then read Camilla, one of her first novels published in 1951 and then re-published in 1965 after A Wrinkle in Time won the Newbery and made Ms. L’Engle famous. I wrote about Camilla here.

During my blogging break in March, I re-read Ms. L’Engle’s first published novel, A Small Rain. It’s the story of Katherine Forrester, the daughter of two famous musicians. her mother is a celebrated concert pianist, and her father is an eccentric, but talented, composer. The novel follows Katherine through her lonely and difficult adolescence and ends with her plan to return to study with her beloved piano teacher, Justin, in Paris on the eve of what turns out to be World War II.

After reading A Small Rain, I had to skip ahead chronologically in Ms. L’Engle’s oeuvre and read A Severed Wasp, probably my second favorite of all Ms. L’Engle’s novels. She wrote A Severed Wasp (1982) as a sort of sequel to A Small Rain (1945) some thirty-seven years later. In this book, Madame Forrester Vigneras is an elderly woman beginning the task of looking back on her life and evaluating, forgiving, and coming to terms with the people and events that made her who she is. She has settled in New York City after a career as concert pianist travelling all over the world. The book contains multiple insights about love, marriage, forgiveness, aging gracefully, and simple grace, and it demonstrates maturity, wisdom, and craft gained by the author over many years of writing.

I highly recommend both books, read together if possible.

“. . . there was nothing Felix Bodeway couldn’t talk about, nothing he couldn’t put into words as facile as they were intense. And maybe that was good . . . maybe that was a way of exorcising things that worry you. For when you put something into words, it becomes an affair of the intellect as well as of the emotions, and therefore loses some of its fearsome power.” —A Small Rain

Words are useful for entrapping emotions and experiences and confining them to manageble proportions. It’s part of why I blog. I like using words and sentences to define my thoughts and feelings about a book or an issue or an everyday occurrence or even an episode of a TV show. Then, I can remember and re-examine and take out whatever is illogical or immoral or unreal, just leaving the true and the lovely essence of whatever it is I’m writing about.

At least, Truth is the goal. And truth, if one can get to it with words, even approximate it, does minimize, sometimes eliminate, fear.

Next L’Engle book to read: And Both Were Young, published in 1949.

What do you think about the covers of these 1980’s paperback editions? I’m not much of a design critic, but I think they’re odd with their pieces of face.

Resurrection Reading: Night by Elie Wiesel

Apr7

No, I’ve never read this account of Mr. Wiesel’s experiences during the final days of World War II as he is enslaved in first Birkenau, then Auschwitz, then Buna, and finally Buchenwald, not until this week. It’s not a long book, only a little over a hundred pages, but it’s about the most powerful indictment of the evil that lies deep inside every man that I’ve ever read. If you don’t believe in “original sin,” Night will change your mind. It’s a very, very dark story, and the fact that it’s true and told in a quite factual manner makes it even more disturbing. The Nazi persecution and near-extermination of the Jews happened; it’s depressing, but unavoidable. And as Mr. Wiesel shows in his book, even those who were enslaved and murdered were not able to remain pure; he tells over and over again of how son turned against father, how friends fought each other for a scrap of bread, and of how he found himself doing and thinking things that would have been unthinkable before his captivity.

So why is this “Resurrection Reading”? Well, despite the “night” that pervades this book and despite the death that is its constant theme, the book points me, as a Christian, to resurrection. Jesus said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.” By extension, only the dead need a resurrection, and only he who is aquainted with both the depravity of man and the evil that is within his own being is aware of his need of a saviour.

As the book ends, Mr. Wiesel has been liberated from Buchenwald, but he looks into the mirror and sees a corpse. Only a resurrection can help this particular patient.

Night is definitely appropriate and powerful reading for a Holy Saturday of darkness.

Yellow Star by Jennifer Roy

Dec5

This afternoon Brown Bear Daughter inhaled this story of a little Jewish girl who survived life during World War II in the Lodz ghetto, and I read it myself in one sitting a few days ago. It’s not a long read, 227 pages, and the prose text is arranged in an almost poetic form such that each page only has about a hundred words. So it doesn’t take long to read, but it does pack an emotional punch.

Ms. Roy wrote the book based on the true story of her Aunt Sylvia Perlmutter, who was one of only twelve children who survived the Lodz ghetto in Poland. If you read the introduction or know anything about the Holocaust, you know from the beginning that there are difficult things coming in this book. I hesitated to give it to my eleven year old daughter because I didn’t know how it would affect her emotionally. However, she read it, said it was a good book, and didn’t seem too disturbed. I was the one who mourned as I read for all those children who didn’t survive —and even for those who did.

The Jewish refrain in relation to the Holocaust is, “Never forget!” However, we’re always only one generation away from forgetting what horrors man can perpetrate upon other men. I don’t know what at what age a child is old enough to learn about the horrors of the Holocaust, but I agree that we must not forget that “civilized” man is only one step away from barbarous acts of cruelty. And at some point even our children need to know that sin and evil are real.

They also need hope, and Jennifer Roy manages to tell a story that is filled with tragedy and yet leaves the reader with hope. As the story begins in the fall of 1939, little Sylvia is four and a half years old. On January 20, 1945, the day after she and her family are liberated from the ghetto, Sylvia celebrates her tenth birthday. By the time she is ten, Sylvia has seen and experienced things that most of us have, thankfully, only read about. She goes on to live a full life, marriage, a son, grandchildren. For over fifty years she doesn’t talk about her experiences during World War II. Finally, she tells her niece in a series of telephone interviews what she remembers of what happened to her and her family during the Holocaust.

It’s a story worth reading and remembering.

Again, this book is one of the many good books nominated for the Cybil Award for Middle Grade Fiction.