Rose Under Fire, Elizabeth Wein

Title: Rose Under Fire
Author: Elizabeth Wein
Publisher: Disney Hyperion
Year: 2013
Pages: 368
Genre: Historical Fiction
Themes: World War II, the Holocaust, Survival
Age Range: 7th through 10th Grade

Summary: 
Rose Justice is a pilot and poet. She is responsible for flying planes from France to England as part of the British army during World War II. During one of her missions, she is captured by German soldiers and taken to Ravensbruck, the notorious women's concentration camp. While there, she must find a way to survive, relying on the kindness of her fellow prisoners. Can she find the strength to withstand the terrible, terrifying conditions in the camp with her humanity and love of beauty intact?

Review:
This book is written at a fairly low reading level for the subject matter, but it is definitely a book that is best used in a setting where the students have some level of maturity, and enough background knowledge of World War II and the Holocaust to give them the ability to understand the underlying themes of the book. That said, I loved this book! There have been many, many books written about the Holocaust, as there should be. It is such a defining period in the 20th century, and only by revisiting it can we hope to prevent it from happening again. Sadly, there have been too many examples of similar atrocities being perpetrated around the world (the Rwandan genocide; the killings in Darfur, Sudan; the Srebrenica massacre, etc...etc...), but Hitler's concentration camps seem to have made a special impression on the minds and souls of much of the world, especially in Europe and the United States. This book stands out for me for two reasons. One, it deals with a female pilot. I suspect that there are many young people who don't realize that women were involved in the war effort in that way, and any time we can lift up the contributions of women I am all for it. Second, it specifically focuses on a women's concentration camp, which is something else that I think if fairly unique in literature for children and youth about the Holocaust.

What Rose and her fellow prisoners endured in Ravensbruck can be hard to read. But it should be. I hope we as a society never get to a place where we can feel comfortable reading about the deprivation, terror, and torture that took place in the camps. But that discomfort can lead to some great discussions with students about the nature of evil, the strength of the human spirit, the meaning of perseverance, and the value of art in human society. I'd recommend this book for use in guided reading, literature circles, or book clubs for middle school or early high-school youth.

Teacher Resources: 
Disney Hyperion Study Guide
Review and Author Interview
Elizabeth Wein's Blog

Barbed Wire Baseball, Marissa Moss

Title:  Barbed Wire Baseball
Author: Marissa Moss
Publisher:  Harry N. Abrams
Year:  2013
Pages:  48
Genre:  Non-Fiction, Historical
Themes:  World War II, Japanese Internment, Sports, Perseverance
Age Range: 2nd-6th Grade

Summary:  from Goodreads

As a boy, Kenichi “Zeni” Zenimura dreams of playing professional baseball, but everyone tells him he is too small. Yet he grows up to be a successful player, playing with Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig! When the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor in 1941, Zeni and his family are sent to one of ten internment camps where more than 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry are imprisoned without trials. Zeni brings the game of baseball to the camp, along with a sense of hope.

Review;
There are quite a few children's and young adult books out there that describe the experience of Japanese Americans sent to internment camps during World War II.  Books like The Bracelet and  Farewell to Manzanar have become staples of English classes in schools that strive to teach the complete truth about America in regards to its treatment of immigrants generally, and the Japanese Americans specifically.  There is even another book about baseball and the internment camps, called Baseball Saved Us.  Moss' contribution, Barbed Wire Baseball, tells the true story of a famous Japanese American baseball player named Zenichi Zenimura, sent to internment camps in the desert along with tens of thousands of other Japanese.  The story begins when Zeni was a small boy who became determined to become a great baseball player.  Unlike many young boys with the same dream, Zeni actually had the talent to make it a possibility, and the perseverance to make it happen.

Rather than focusing on the day to day life in the camp,  Barbed Wire Baseball details the extraordinary optimism, hard work, and ingenuity displayed by Zeni and the other prisoners at his camp.  Determined to play baseball, no matter the challenges, Zeni has a vision, a dream of a "real" baseball field in the middle of the stony desert.  He plants grass, chalks lines, steals wood to make bleachers for fans, and takes up a collection to buy equipment and uniforms for the players.  Zeni's quest proves the strength of the human spirit when faced with adversity, while highlighting the inherent injustices in this painful period of American history.

The illustrations pair beautifully with the story, done in a quasi-traditional Japanese style, but with American images included.  This picture book would make a good read aloud as a stand alone title, but would be a marvelous addition to a unit about World War II.

Teacher Resources:
Abrams Discussion Guide
Marissa Moss' Website

The Green Glass Sea, Ellen Klages

Title:  The Green Glass Sea
Author:  Ellen Klages
Publisher:  Puffin
Year:  2008
Pages:  368
Genre:  Historical Fiction
Themes:  World War II, Death of a Loved One
Age Range:  4th through 8th Grade


Summary: (from Goodreads):
It is 1943, and eleven-year-old Dewey Kerrigan is en route to New Mexico, to live with her mathematician father. Soon she arrives at a town that, officially, doesn't exist. It is called Los Alamos, and it is abuzz with activity, as scientists and mathematicians from all over America and Europe work on the biggest secret of all-the gadget. None of them, not J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project; not the mathematicians and scientists; and least of all, Dewey, know how much the gadget is about to change their lives.


Review:
World War II, aside from being one of the largest wars ever fought, gave the world two powerful lessons.  Our lesson from Europe was the dangers of racism, xenophobia, and genocide.  The one from Japan was the dangers of nuclear war.  Oppenheimer and his army of scientists gathered in Los Alamos to create a weapon that was so powerful that just the threat of it would be enough to force the Japanese to surrender.  Unfortunately, once it was finished the government couldn't resist its use.  The Green Glass Sea details the months leading up to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  


Dewey Kerrigan is an interesting, quirky little girl.  Interested in science, used to being alone, she enjoys tinkering with bits and pieces of old machines and creating new inventions.  She's unique, and so lonely.  The other main character, Suze, is also lonely, but where Dewey seems to have come to terms with her loneliness, Suze is desperate to get the approval of the other girls on "the Hill".  It really isn't a surprise when they find comfort in each other.


This is a rather quiet novel-much of the "action" takes place in the character's thoughts, and in the interactions between Dewey, Suze, and the other children.  But what it lacks in excitement it makes up for in mood-I could feel the dry desert winds and imagine the dust.  I could visualize the small, identical army housing and the "dump" where Dewey went to look for her spare parts.


My only complaint, and it is a small one, is the age level at which this book is written.  The story of the girls would appeal to girls age ten to twelve, but I felt like I relied a lot on my background knowledge of the Manhattan Project and the origin of Los Alamos to figure out what was going on.  I suppose that it may read as mysterious to someone without such background knowledge, but given the fact that most children won't have any clue about the context it seems like they might miss the import of the "gadget".  Of course, it also made me slightly less in awe of the wonder of the sea of glass created by the extreme heat of the bomb.  And when the girls actually walked out on it and collected pieces of it all I could think of was their future reproductive health and cancer risk.  I suppose there is something to be said for the innocence (ignorance) of childhood.


Teacher Resources:
Scholastic Discussion Guide
Web English Teacher

The Book Thief, Markus Zusak

Title:  The Book Thief
Author:  Markus Zukas
Publisher:  Alfred A Knopf
Year:  2007
Genre:  Historical Fiction
Themes:  War, Racism, The Holocaust
Age Levels:  9th Grade and Up


Summary:
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak takes place during World War II, and tells the story of 10 year old Liesel.  Her mother is forced to place her children into foster care.  Liesel's brother dies on the train taking her to Munich, where she is given into the care of a couple on Himmler Street.  Through the tough love of her foster mother, and the sweet compassion of her foster father, she finds a way to cope with not only her brothers death but the quickly declining standard of living in Germany.  Things go along OK, until the dark night that a Jew shows up at their door looking for sanctuary.


Review:
Despite the tragedy and the devastation contained within the story, when I think of a word to describe this book I can only say beautiful.  This book is so heartbreakingly beautiful, I could almost weep just from the use of language.  But the story is so compelling that even if it weren't written so beautifully I would have had a hard time putting it down.  So often books about World War II focus solely on the fate of the Jews-and rightfully so.  There is nothing so important as ensuring that the world never experiences that level of genocide-or any genocide-again.  But the fact is that most of the German people were suffering as well, and this book shows so clearly how the poison of hatred and fear spreads, and how it takes an incredible strength not to give in to the despair.  Despite the constant threat of being found out, of starvation, of being killed by bombs, Liesel and her parents held on to their humanity and compassion.

Teacher Resources:
Lesson Index
Web English Teacher
Bookrags

The Boy Who Dared, Susan Campbell Bartoletti

Title:  The Boy Who Dared: A Novel Based on a True Story of the Hitler Youth
Author:  Susan Campbell Bartoletti
Publisher:  Scholastic
Pages:  174 plus about 10 pages of photos and a timeline
Genre:  literary non-fiction
Age Range:  6th Grade and Up

Summary:
The year is 1933, and the world is in the grip of the Great Depression.  Germany is especially hard hit, after paying reparations to the rest of Europe after World War I.  Helmuth Hubener is a German schoolboy, playing with toy soldiers on the floor of his small Hamburg apartment, while outside brown shirted men in jackboots have parades in support of their new chancellor, Adolf Hitler.  At first Helmuth is taken in by the shiny uniforms and nationalist pride-until his Jeweish neighbors' shops are burned, and more and more freedoms are curtailed for everyone.  Forced to join the Hitler Youth, he grows more and more angry, until one fateful decision leads to his imprisonment and execution.

Review:   
Even though this is billed as a novel, I am going to call it literary non-fiction.  It reads more like a biography than a novel, and while I'm sure some of the events are completely made-up, there is enough non-fiction here that I am not comfortable calling it fiction.

This book is sparsely written, at times almost too sparsely.  Yet Bartoletti does a good job of setting the mood of Germany during the 1930s and early 1940s.  Without going into too much technical detail, Bartoletti lays out some of the reasons that the Germans turned to Hitler in the first place.  She also shows how the media can be used to incite fear and manipulate people into doing things that go against their nature. The characters are portrayed thoughtfully, with care given not to stereotype.  When Helmuth rejects the Nazis at first, it is just as much because of his dislike of his stepfather as it is about being uncomfortable with the Nazi's restrictive laws.  So often in Holocaust literature the German people are shown to be either indifferent to or in favor of the racism and hatred spread by the Nazi's.  This book shows that some people did try to stand up, and that not every German was in love with Hitler.  Helmuth's character is influenced strongly by his brother Gerhard, who is a voice of reason during Helmuth's teenage years.  Gerhard, however, counsels following Hitler's laws in order to be a patriot (and good Mormon).  In the end Helmuth cannot.

This book would make a good companion book to Number the Stars by Lois Lowry or The Devil's Arithmetic by Jane Yolen.  While most Holocaust fiction focuses on the events around the Jewish internment in concentration camps (and rightly so), there is a place in young adult literature for stories of the ordinary Germans who tried to stand up to the Nazi's.  

Teacher Resources:

Scholastic Discussion Guide 

E-Notes Study Guide