The War within These Walls

Starred review from September 16, 2013
This fictionalized account of Mordechai Anielewicz and the 1942 Warsaw ghetto uprising will appall and unnerve its readers. The nameless Jewish narrator, an older boy, meets Anielewicz at the very moment his fury has given way to fear. His mother lies dying and his sister has already disappeared. Most of Warsaw’s Jewish population has been sent to the camps, and Nazi soldiers have butchered a Jewish mother and infant before his eyes. Now a stranger appears. “We have weapons,” Anielewicz tells the boy urgently. “But we need more people.” The narrator joins the resistance fighters and tastes their single, fleeting victory, a momentary triumph prefigured in the narrator’s glimpse of a gaily colored parakeet one miserable day. Strzelecki’s monochrome drawings use rich blue-gray lines on cream pages to portray faces furrowed with pain, then builds to nightmarish conflagrations, battles, and corpses. Sometimes a single sentence appears on a blue-gray page, the better to emphasize it: “I had never felt so Jewish before,” the narrator says. Sax’s achievement is to have made every reader feel this with him. Originally published in Belgium. Ages 14–up.

Starred review from October 1, 2013

Gr 8 Up-Told from the point of view of a Jewish teen, this short, illustrated novel begins with the invasion of Poland in 1939 and goes on to describe the limits placed on the Jewish population and their eventual incarceration in the Warsaw Ghetto. The narrator describes the daily humiliations, depravations, despair, and deaths at the hands of the Nazis. When his family runs out of food, the narrator descends into the sewer system to cross to the Polish side of the Ghetto walls, where he is able to buy or steal food. When the Nazis employ flame throwers to kill those in the sewers, he loses his nerve. Unfortunately, he isn't able to stop his younger sister from traveling the sewers, and one day she doesn't return. When it becomes clear that everyone in the Ghetto is going to be resettled in the East, the narrator is ready, when approached by Mordechai Anielewicz, one of the actual leaders of the uprising, to join the resistance. The last portion of the book describes the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising from the narrator's point of view. The pen, ink, and pencil artwork serves to extend and clarify the story. The combination of the illustrations and the author's spare prose make this a good choice for reluctant readers and an outstanding example of Holocaust fiction.-Nancy Silverrod, San Francisco Public Library

Copyright 2013 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from September 1, 2013
The sights, sounds and smells of the Warsaw ghetto assail readers' senses in a raw, brutal telling of the unimaginable horror of that time and that place. When the Nazis took Warsaw in 1939, they immediately initiated their separate war against the Jews in an ever-worsening web of destruction. Jews were prevented from using public transportation, doing business or attending schools. Then thousands were moved to the overcrowded ghetto, where they died of epidemics and starvation. Finally, relocations to the concentration camps emptied the ghetto. Sax gives voice to the fear and anger, hopelessness and terror through Misha, a fictional young teen who represents those who really lived and died there. In short staccato sentences, he bears witness to the madness, telling it all, from the struggle to stay alive to the corpses in the streets to the beatings and executions. Misha takes part in the doomed Warsaw Uprising and survives to tell the world of this last act of defiance. Strzelecki's pen, ink and black-and-white pencil illustrations graphically depict pain and despair as they accompany text printed on stark white or black backgrounds. With the events of the Holocaust growing ever more remote with the passage of time, Sax gives modern readers an unrelenting, heart-rending insight into the hell that the Nazis created. Gripping, powerful, shattering. (Historical fiction. 14 & up)

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October 1, 2013
Grades 9-12 Teenage Misha narrates the story of what happened during WWII when Nazi forces took over Poland and walled off a part of Warsaw in 1940 to hold all the Jews in that city. Misha rebels against the inhumane conditions of meager rations and the tremendous overcrowding in the Warsaw Ghetto by smuggling food until his younger sister disappears while on a run through the sewer system. Then, in 1943, when he learns that the Nazis plan to kill all the Jews by transporting them to concentration camps, he joins a rebel group determined to fight back no matter how hopeless their cause might be. Everything about the format of the bookits tall and narrow shape, the somber blue-and-white illustrations that work together with the spare prose, the alternating white and black pagesmakes the reader pause and take notice of what is happening. This very personal viewpoint of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising makes a powerful impact that will last long after reading.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

November 1, 2013
Accounts of two signal events of the Holocaustthe saving of the Schindler Jews and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprisingas experienced by two Jewish boys, one real and the other fictional. Leon Leyson (born Leib Lejzon in 1929) acknowledges that he was an unlikely survivor of the Holocaust, saved from extermination by his father's lucky place in Oskar Schindler's Krakw factory. Leyson's account of his childhood in pre-war Poland and under the Nazi occupation stands out for its brisk and unsentimental style and for its human scale. The Oskar Schindler Leon meets here is unromanticized by the silver screen: I was so small that I had to stand on an overturned wooden box to reach the controls of the machine. Schindler seemed to get a kick out of that. Depictions of Nazi atrocities are presented matter-of-factly, with Leyson demonstrating a journalistic objectivity toward even his own sufferings. With the prologue recounting the 1965 reunion of Schindler and Leyson (then thirty-five and living in L.A.), we know from the start that this memoir will end with at least some measure of happiness, and throughout, the tone is forthright and almost grandfatherly. The War Within These Walls is an illustrated novel, and, history being what it was, does not have the happy ending of Leyson's experience. The narrator (unnamed until the closing pages of the book) lives with his parents and sister in what becomes the Warsaw Ghetto, with walls built around their neighborhood and strangers moved into their apartment. The boy finds a secret escape from the ghetto and begins smuggling food, eventually joining with Mordechai Anielewicz's organized Resistance. While the history is tragic, the story doesn't feel so much developed as outlined, perhaps because of the spareness of the prose. The format, with text on black or white pages and plentiful ink and wash illustrations, is intentionally dramatic and will grab young readers, although the images are sometimes histrionic (raised hands behind barbed wire; corpses) and the paragraphing and text placement, overwrought ( We were going to die as a single sentence in white type on a black page). It is precisely this intensity that will speak to some readers, of course, but Leyson's is the truer story in more ways than one. roger sutton

(Copyright 2013 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)

January 1, 2014
The narrator lives with his parents and sister in what becomes the Warsaw Ghetto. He finds a secret escape from the ghetto and begins smuggling food, eventually joining with Mordechai Anielewicz's organized Resistance. The prose is spare; the book's format, with text on black or white pages and plentiful ink and wash illustrations, is dramatic and will grab young readers.

(Copyright 2014 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)