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Farrar, Straus, Giroux
Annotation: After recounting her experience as a Jewish girl living in Amsterdam during the Holocaust, Esther embarks on a search to discover what happened to her parents before they died in a concentration camp.
 
Reviews: 3
Catalog Number: #4611094
Format: Paperback
Special Formats: Graphic Novel Graphic Novel
Copyright Date: 2009
Edition Date: 2009 Release Date: 10/13/09
Pages: 61 pages
ISBN: 0-374-46455-3
ISBN 13: 978-0-374-46455-4
Dewey: Fic
LCCN: 2009013603
Dimensions: 28 cm.
Language: English
Reviews:
Horn Book

In these graphic novel picture books for middle-grade readers, Helena and Esther recount their experiences of World War II and the Holocaust to their grandsons, linking family history to the Dutch Resistance and the death camps, respectively. The narratives sometimes strain, reducing characters to mouthpieces delivering historical summaries, but the accessible format and intergenerational plot arcs make these books involving and informative.

Kirkus Reviews

Evocatively written and deftly illustrated, this graphic novel about the Holocaust might be one of the best since Maus. Esther, an adult Jewish woman who grew up in Germany, embarks on a pilgrimage to the farm where she was hidden during her girlhood in World War II. Sharing her story with her young grandson on the way, she takes him and readers through the egregious injustices and unthinkable acts of violence perpetrated by the Nazis and their sympathizers. Esther recounts a brief stay with her best friend, Dutch (and non-Jewish) Helena, who harbored her family after they were run out of their home. Helena's accounts of the war are collected in the comparably excellent and equally stellar companion volume, also published in cooperation with the Anne Frank House, A Family Secret (ISBN: 978-0-374-32271-7). Clear and concise explanations depict the struggles and the horrors of the time. Heuvel holds little back from his audience, presenting his facts starkly through Tintin-like illustrations that depict the atrocities without artifice. Gripping and visceral, these two volumes together are must-haves. (Graphic historical fiction. 10 & up)

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Horn Book
Kirkus Reviews
Word Count: 6,518
Reading Level: 2.7
Interest Level: 5-9
Accelerated Reader: reading level: 2.7 / points: 1.0 / quiz: 132855 / grade: Middle Grades
Reading Counts!: reading level:3.1 / points:4.0 / quiz:Q47693
Lexile: GN320L
Guided Reading Level: Y
Fountas & Pinnell: Y

Esther remembers her own experience of the Holocaust as a Jewish girl living in Amsterdam, and recounts to her grandson Daniel and his friend Jeroen how she escaped from the Nazis and survived by going into hiding in the countryside. Her parents were not so lucky. Esther knows they were sent to a concentration camp and died there, and with Daniel's help she embarks on a search to discover what happened to them during the last months of their lives. After tracking down an old friend who now lives in Israel, Esther finally learns the shocking story of how her parents met their fates at Auschwitz.


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