Child of the Warsaw Ghetto
Gr. 3^-6. As inHilde and Eli: Children of the Holocaust(1994), Adler and Ritz use a picture-book biography to personalize what happened to millions of Jews under the Nazis. This is the story of Froim Baum, a Holocaust survivor now living in the U.S., who was born to a poor Jewish family in Warsaw in 1926. With the boy's personal biography, Adler weaves together the history of Hitler's rise to power, the Nazi invasion of Poland, the raging anti-Semitism, the herding of more than 400,000 Jews into the walled Warsaw ghetto, and, finally, the death camps. Froim found shelter in the orphanage of the beloved Janusz Korczak and moved between there and home. The story is told with restraint, never exploitative, never sweet. Overwhelmingly, what we see is that this child survived by a mixture of cunning, courage, and sheer accident. The realistic pictures are grim, increasingly brown and gray as the genocide crowds out the light. Several illustrations evoke the photos of the time: the beggars in the street; the skeletal people piled on bunks. There's a lot of history compressed here--some of it may be too much for kids to understand on their own--but this one child's story is a compelling way to focus group discussion on how the unimaginable happened and why.Hazel Rochman