Doreen Rappaport (Martin's Big Words) dug deep into archives and museums, and conducted personal interviews for these stories of memorable individuals who prove Jews did not go "like lambs to the slaughter" during the Holocaust, as the author had been told growing up in a Jewish home. Bravery took many forms.
In the beginning, it meant spreading the truth and celebrating the Jewish holidays and Sabbath under the most dire of circumstances. Jewish and non-Jewish resistors risked their lives to smuggle children out of Amsterdam, France and Belgium, and to create shelters in the forests as they realized what was happening. They instigated ghetto uprisings and attempted daring camp escapes when the Nazis began to implement the Final Solution. One chapter tells of the teen founders of the magazine Vedem in the Theresienstadt ghetto (Czechoslovakia), whose creativity could have gotten them killed. Readers will be pulled in by Rappaport's focus on specific events and people, a large portion of them young people, a lot of whom are depicted in the many photographs. The author does not shy away from images of a family walking toward the gas chambers, executions by gunfire or a child dying of starvation on a ghetto sidewalk.
The back matter displays an exemplary depth of research combined with clarity of presentation. The emotional immediacy of the subject matter combined with Rappaport's clear prose and excellent design layout incorporating poetry, photography, maps, artifacts and songs, all combine to make this an extraordinary effort. --Angela Carstensen, school librarian and blogger