Kirkus Reviews

A powerful account focusing on the fates of Jewish children during the Holocaust.The narrative opens in 1930 Germany, setting the stage for the rise of the Nazis and noting Europe's history of antisemitism in the preceding centuries. Heartbreaking pages are devoted to the Kindertransport's separation of kids and parents. For those remaining, ghettos, camps, and mass murder awaited. Many more pages emphasize the children who survived, their endurance, and the dangerously heroic work of resourceful adults, Jews and non-Jews alike, who protected them. Kids were saved by the thousands, but still, over 1,000,000 perished. Using quotations from survivors and many personal vignettes, Brown successfully animates masses of historical material and individualizes the suffering. Some elements would have benefited from more context: Jews' crime is said to be "their religion," but the book does not explain why even secular Jews were targeted. The text notes political machinations and the origins of the Nazi Party's name, but the party's misappropriation of the term socialism goes unexplained. The work closes with a historical note recounting post–World War II tragedies from the Partition to the reign of Pol Pot, the Rwandan genocide, and more, along with mention of rising hate crimes, including antisemitism, in the U.S. The devastating impact of the Holocaust on children is only too real in both the text and the dynamic illustrations, which recall the expressive lines and subdued washes of Brown's The Unwanted (2018).Vivid, devastating, and impressively documented. (source notes, bibliography) (Graphic nonfiction. 13-18)

School Library Journal (Sun Oct 01 00:00:00 CDT 2023)

Gr 8 Up— Devastating. With illustrations that are at times tender and other times gruesome, Brown has found a way to convey the destruction of the Holocaust to younger readers. Survival is a key theme along with courage and kindness. However, the reality of the violent atrocities committed by Nazi soldiers is not ignored. For students with an interest in World War II, this graphic novel will provide history lessons in a way that few others can. The vocabulary in the first few pages is a bit daunting for elementary and even middle school students but offers an opportunity to stretch reading comprehension skills. The painful family separations and ordeals faced by frightened children are portrayed with sensitive, realistic imagery. The history of World War II is presented accurately. VERDICT Add this graphic novel to your list of resources for teaching and learning about the Holocaust.— Darby Wallace

ALA Booklist (Wed Dec 06 00:00:00 CST 2023)

Focusing on the fates of more than a million children during the Holocaust, this stark graphic novel from multiple-award-winning Brown is another unflinching recounting of a horrific time in world history. The unvarnished narrative of the war's evolution as a murderous crusade against Jewish people is punctuated by poignant first-person accounts of evasion, escape, and survival wildered partings with agonized parents during the Kindertransport, harrowing escapes from relentless Gestapo, and courageous, ingenious, sometimes sacrificial rescue efforts by ordinary people. A scratchy line loosely contains muted watercolor washes in grays and blues, with saturated reds reserved for the Nazi flag or the flames of exploding bombs. Brown's people present sloping, asymmetrical faces; with mouths often mere slashes, sometimes stitched tight, and eyes squinted into slanting ovals, their simply drawn, spiky features transmit a chaos of human emotions: callousness, malevolence, panic, horror, pathos. With extensive source notes, back matter includes "Uninterrupted," a statement listing genocidal events continuing in the post-WWII world. This indelible graphic perspective grimly etches a crucial acknowledgment of the Holocaust's harrowing toll on humanity's youngest and most vulnerable.

Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)

Brown (83 Days in Mariupol) chronicles standout stories of children who managed to escape harrowing circumstances during the Holocaust in this hard-hitting graphic novel. In spare, piercing text and kinetic, thin-lined illustrations, Brown employs meticulously documented firsthand survivor accounts to portray myriad individual experiences. Muted washes of color convey a brief history of the beginnings of the Holocaust, focusing on the sinister, oppressive atmosphere of the period and offering insight into the violence and manipulation that Hitler levied in his rise into power. A judicious use of accent hues, including bold, violent reds and soothing mellow yellows, heightens the drama. Most prominent are recollections of the historic Kindertransport, a program through which families who could afford to sent nearly 10,000 children from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Free City of Danzig to the United Kingdom. Lesser-known stories feature throughout, such as brothers Jack and Joe evading a roundup by hiding in their family’s barn, and blond-haired, blue-eyed 13-year-old Rose’s mother persuading her to pretend to be a Polish citizen while she herself is deported to a concentration camp. Though Brown does not shy away from the reality that more than a million children died, through these true and deftly told experiences, he offers hope amid the devastation. Historical and source notes and a bibliography conclude. Ages 13–up. (Oct.)