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All Aboard for Freedom! by Marie McSwigan

Aug11

The author of this book, Marie McSwigan, also wrote the popular World War 2 story, Snow Treasure, which is based on a true story of children outwitting the Nazis to rescue the country’s gold reserves. All Aboard for Freedom! is also based on a true story of a group of children outwitting oppressive authorities, this time in Czechoslovakia in 1951. And the oppressors are not Nazis but rather their own countrymen who have bought into the Communist regime aided by the Russians.

Ludmila Novak is foster mother to five children, orphaned by the war. The oldest, age thirteen, is Franta Kristufek. When the Communist authorities threaten to separate the children and their beloved foster mother from each other and send the children to state run institutions, Fran comes up with a plan to keep them all together. However, the plan involves a train, the help of adults, and a very dangerous, time-critical strategy for escape. Who can Fran trust to help him escape Czechoslovakia to freedom in Germany? How can he keep his plan a secret with four other children involved, the youngest only four years old? What if “they” (the Communists) come for the children before they can put their plan into action?

This book, published in 1954, is very 1950’s, very anti-communist and pro-American, and very exciting. The children, especially Fran, are believable but also intrepid and imaginative. The story reminds me of one of Helen MacInnes’ Cold War spy novels, but it’s written for children, not adults. And it pictures characters, a time, and a situation that we in the West are in danger of forgetting—the people of Czechoslovakia who suffered under communist rule and yearned for the freedom we now take for granted. One more plus to this book: Fran stops to pray for God’s guidance and protection several times during the story. And that resort to prayer seems quite believable and wise, too.

All Aboard for Freedom is a book for train lovers, patriots, and adventurers. Pair it with Snow Treasure for a double dose of good reading.

Antonin Dvorak: Composer From Bohemia by Claire Lee Purdy

Sep8

Antonin Dvorak, b.September 8, 1841, d.May 1, 1904.

This biography for young adults, one of the series published by Julian Messner in 1950’s, begins with a delightful picture of composer Antonin Dvorak’s childhood in rural Bohemia (Czech Republic). The author paints a word picture of the village where Dvorak grew up, the son of a poor butcher and innkeeper father, but in a family and culture that highly valued music and dance and music-making. The story manages to incorporate a great deal of Czech history and some lovely folktales, and all in all the first third or even half of the book is a wonderful introduction to not only the composer and his music but also nineteenth century musical trends, Bohemian folk tales, the city of Prague, and the political difficulties of Bohemia under the rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

At about the halfway point, when as a reader I was already hooked, the narrative slowly devolved into a list of the places Dvorak went and the musical pieces he composed. Maybe the travel and the compositions were his life after he became famous. Nevertheless, I was impelled to read on because the first part was so interesting, and I quickly looked up some of Dvorak’s music on YouTube and played it as I read. Some of the most interesting tidbits that I gleaned:

1. Dvorak was achingly poor as a youth, the very picture of the impoverished artist. He had to wait eight years and pull himself up out of poverty in order to finally marry his fiancé. Eight years is a long engagement. Dvorak was 32 years old when he married his 19 year old bride. (Whoops! I guess there was more than one reason they had to wait eight years to get married. He certainly couldn’t have married her when she was eleven.)

2. Antonin and Anna Dvorak were married in 1873; by 1876 they had three children. In the spring of 1876 their eldest daughter died after a brief illness. In September their son died, and their second daughter died in October. Now, that’s a tragic story.

3. Anna and Antonin went on to have six more children, all of whom survived childhood and thrived. The oldest daughter, Otilie, became a composer like her father.

4. Dvorak wrote his famous New World Symphony when he was in the New York under contract as Director of the National Academy of Music, a school that famously “enrolled poor students without charge and . . . welcomed members of the Negro race.” The New World Symphony is said to be greatly influenced by African American spirituals, work songs, and folk music that Dvorak was exposed to and admired while he was in the United States.

5. Dvorak loved birds. He composed many operas, symphonies, symphonic poems, and choral works. His favorite instrument was the viola.

6. Dvorak died in 1904. “In the dreadful years 1939-1945 Dvorak, along with Smetana and other native composers, was declared an outlaw by the Nazi conquerors. It was a crime to play his music in Bohemia. In 1941, the year of Dvorak’s centenary, his own Czech people were forbidden to play a bar of his music.”

I’m determined now to listen to more Dvorak. Any suggestions of specific pieces I should look for?

Philomena by Kate Seredy

Feb15

Philomena is sturdy young country girl who lives with her grandmother in a village in the Czech Republic sometime in the early twentieth century. After her Babushka’s death, Philomena goes to the city of Prague to learn to be a servant and to find her Aunt Liska who deserted the family many years ago.

The story is very Catholic, and Philomena receives messages via circumstances that she believes are from the sainted Babushka. This aspect of the story didn’t bother me even though I don’t believe in praying to or receiving guidance from the dead. Philomena does believe that her grandmother is guiding her and caring for her from beyond the grave, and the device creates a gentle logic and organization to Philomena’s journey to the city and her growth from an innocent little girl to a self-sufficient and mature young lady.

“Everybody else in the village went to church every Sunday. First they listened to Father Matthias. Father Matthias was a wise priest who knew all about the weather, the sheep, and the chickens. He told the men of the village when to plant potatoes and corn. He told them what to do when animals got sick. He knew about God and Heaven, of course, but he also knew that people must have enough to eat to be happy, and therefore good, so he taught them to be good farmers. Good farmers have so much to do that there simply isn’t enough time left over for them to do anything that would make God angry with them! The good priest told them about Heaven, to be sure, but he just took it for granted that all his people would go there. He didn’t have to bother to tell them about the other place. He was a very wise man.”

While Father Matthias’ teaching or lack thereof doesn’t exactly fit with my own reading of the Bible and its soteriology, it is refreshing to read about such a good and down-to-earth priest.

Kate Seredy (pronounced SHARE-edy) was born in 1899 in Budapest, Hungary, and she grew up as an only child in the home of her teacher father. After World War II, Ms. Seredy emigrated to the United States and became an illustrator, first of cards and book covers and other low-paying artistic endeavors, then textbooks and books by other authors. Eventually, Ms. Seredy began to write and illustrate her own stories, mostly set in Central Europe, Hungary and this one in Czechoslovakia. The White Stag, based on Hungarian mythology and folklore and not her best book in my opinion, won the Newbery Medal in 1937. Philomena was published in 1955 after several other books, either written or illustrated or both by the talented Ms. Seredy, had won Newbery awards or honors.

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.

The Twelve Little Cakes by Dominika Dery

Jul5

I have had this memoir on my TBR shelf for a long time, but I finally got the urge to go ahead and read it when Brown Bear Daughter left about a week ago to go back to Slovakia for her third summer mission trip there. Dominika Dery’s memoir of her childhood lived under Communist rule in a village on the outskirts of Prague, Czechoslovakia, obviously doesn’t take place in Slovakia, but rather in the Czech Republic. However, it’s as close as I can get right now. (Does anyone know a really good book, fiction or memoir, set in Slovakia?)

Dominika grew up in a loving home with her mother, a writer of technical reports, and her father, a former economist who is now a taxi-driver, and her much-older sister, who comes across mostly as a spoiled brat and a world-class flirt. Dominika herself seems to be somewhat spoiled, but not a brat. The parents are dissidents associated with the 1968 failed “revolution” called the Prague Spring, which ended when the Russians invaded to stop the reforms of Communism that were being instituted in Czechoslovakia. As a result of their complicity in the Prague Spring reforms, Dominika’s parents are consigned to low level jobs and constantly in danger of being denounced to the political authorities.

Dominika, born in 1975, slowly becomes aware over the course of her childhood of her parents’ political predicament, but she nevertheless remembers a mostly idyllic childhood enlivened by the resilient optimism of her father and the style and panache of her beautiful mother. Even when the family goes on vacation to Poland of all places and the car breaks down because some corrupt mechanic replaced the working engine with a defective one, Dominika and her parents manage to have a good and memorable holiday under ostensibly trying circumstances.

I think I’ll loan this book to Dancer Daughter(23) because of the Czech setting (she’s been to Slovakia a couple of times, too) and also because Dominika spends a lot of her childhood studying to become a dancer. The story of how she gets into a dance school that normally excludes the children of dissidents and only admits children whose parents have Communist Party connections is fascinating, and Dominika’s indomitable spirit is sure to charm the readers of her memoir.

The book ends in 1985 when Dominika was only ten years old. But it seems an appropriate place to stop. Dominika has been accepted to study at the State Conservatory in Prague. Her parents are still stuck in political limbo, but there is some stirring of hope for the future. Things are beginning to change, with the Solidarity movement in Poland and Mikhail Gorbachev‘s rise to power in the Soviet Union. In November-December 1989, The Velvet or Gentle Revolution restored democracy in Czechoslovakia. In 1993, Czechoslovakia became two separate nations, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

From an adult looking back at childhood point of view, Dominika Dery sees things this way:

“This was the country of little cakes and sausages. This is the memory of my childhood. Driving back home in our old, rusty Skoda; my father’s big hands steering us safely through the night; the soft touch of my mother’s hand on my head. This was the happiest time in my life. The time when we had no money, no choice and no chance.

It would take me another eighteen years to realize that what we had back then was as much as anyone on earth would ever need.

We had each other, and plenty of love in our hearts.”

Twelve Little Cakes by Dominika Dery was recommended by Kerry at Shelf Elf.