The Sydney Taylor Shmooze

The Girl Who Fought Back: Vladka Meed and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising by Joshua M. Greene Scholastic Focus, 2024 Category: Middle Grade Reviewer: Jeanette Brod Buy at Bookshop.org The Girl Who Fought Back is an insider's account of the historic Warsaw Ghetto uprising that ironically finds our heroine stranded outside the ghetto walls on the day the revolt begins. But Vladka Meed’s story does not start there. It begins, as do many Holocaust stories, with the shocking downward spiral that afflicts Jewish families who were citizens of European cities. What sets this story apart is the portrait of despair in the life of a young woman who loses first family members, then friends, and finally fellow Resistance fighters. Survivor guilt permeates Vladka’s choices and actions with the recurring refrain, “Why am I still alive?” This telling is not for the faint-hearted. The internal dialogue is as honest as it is brutal. What balances the storytelling is the humanity and courage of a young w...

The Greatest Treasure Hunt in History: The Story of the Monuments Men by Robert M. Edsel Scholastic Focus Category: Middle Grade Reviewer: Stacy Nockowitz Buy at Bookshop.org Edsel tells the story of eleven indefatigable heroes who risked (and sometimes lost) their lives on a quest to recover Europe’s greatest artistic and cultural treasures stolen by the Nazis during World War II. The Monuments Men – a misnomer, as some of them were women – were carefully selected to act as art detectives across Europe, identifying, locating, recovering, and safeguarding tens of thousands of paintings, sculptures, pieces of furniture, monuments, and other works both large and small. Edsel’s book has all the elements of a great adventure story baked in from page one: a race against time across war-torn lands, brave heroes and vile villains, high stakes, and nail-biting tension. Any reader who devotes the considerable time required to dig into The Greatest Treasure Hunt in History will be rewarded with...

We Must Not Forget: Holocaust Stories of Survival and Resistance by Deborah Hopkinson Scholastic FOCUS (imprint of Scholastic) Category: Middle Grade Reviewer: Stacy Nockowitz Buy at Bookshop.org On the heels of her 2020 release, We Had to Be Brave: Escaping the Nazis on the Kindertransport , Deborah Hopkinson gives us another impeccably researched collection of Holocaust survival stories in her new book, We Must Not Forget: Holocaust Stories of Survival and Resistance . Like We Had to Be Brave, We Must Not Forget draws on oral histories, unpublished manuscripts, memoirs, and archives to weave the survivors’ memories together into a cohesive and powerful record of this horrific time in history. But middle graders will gain even more from this reading experience because of the book’s narrative structure. We Must Not Forget is divided into three sections: stories from Germany and the Netherlands, from France, and from Poland. Within each section are chapters that recount the nail-biting ...

  We Had to be Brave: Escaping the Nazis on the Kindertransport by Deborah Hopkinson Category:Middle Grade Reviewer: Meg Wiviott The night of November 9, 1938 made clear the precariousness of life for Jews in Nazi Germany and Austria. World leaders were outraged by the events of Kristallnacht; there were protests and condemnations, but only one country took action. Refugee advocates and Jewish leaders in England convinced the British government to accept more immigrants—specifically children. Over the next nine months, the Kindertransport rescued roughly 10,000 children under the age of seventeen from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. Desperate parents put their children on trains and sent them first to Holland and then to England to be fostered by strangers speaking a foreign language in an unfamiliar land, without knowing if they would ever see them again. This is no bland recitation of facts. Using the voices of twenty-one Kindertransport survivors and five...