Review by Booklist Review
Gr. 3^-5. "Don't tell anyone your name and don't tell anyone you're Jewish," four-year-old Lore Baer's parents tell her when they leave her with a Gentile family in Holland in 1943. Like Adler and Ritz's Hilde and Eli (1994), this picture book for older readers humanizes the Holocaust statistics by focusing on a child's personal traumatic experience. Lore feels abandoned by her parents, but the loving Dutch family cares for her and keeps her safe, even at risk to themselves. At the end of the war, she finds it hard to return to her parents, and it takes her a long time to trust them again. Adler includes a lot of factual information about the history of the time and about the people in the story, before and after the war. Ritz's realistic watercolors in warm shades of brown focus on the small girl whose childhood games of hide-and-seek become a terrifying reality. Readers could go on from here to the collective survivor stories in Maxine Rosenberg's Hiding to Survive (1994) and Howard Greenfield's Hidden Children (1994). --Hazel Rochman
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In their fourth book about the Holocaust, Adler and Ritz (Child of the Warsaw Ghetto) again funnel a vast, horrific subject through the true experiences of one Jewish child. This story belongs to Lore Baer, whose German parents fled to Holland just prior to WWII. After the invasion of Holland, four-year-old Lore was sent by herself into hiding, living for two years on a Christian family's farm. She and her protectors grew to love one another, so much so that when the war ended Lore had difficulty reuniting with her own family. Although the perspective lurches from historical to personal, and the text lacks the sensitivity of Shulamith Levey Oppenheim's similarly themed The Lily Cupboard, readers will gain an understanding of both the events and their impact on children. Ritz's murky, sometimes clunky watercolors have noticeably less inspiration this time around. Her factual, newsreel-style depictions, while recording the story's events, unfortunately do not capture the emotional fallout. Ages 6-9. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
Gr 2-4The young daughter of German-Jewish refugees must be given into hiding when the Nazis invade Holland and persecution of the Jews escalates. The child forms deep attachments to her hosts, a Christian farm family, especially to their eldest daughter. When her parents come for her after the war, she refuses to leave and a difficult adjustment period ensues that has emotional ramifications for the family into the future. Adler has effectively related a story often recounted in adult memoirs and other nonfiction accounts about rescuers in the resistance movements during World War II. The necessity of using brief sentences and the limitation on the number of pages makes it difficult to impart a true sense of the trauma suffered by parents and children, although Adler does try and several, although not all, of Ritz's painterly watercolors add to the emotional impact. This is an important book to introduce the Holocaust in Holland and the heroic role of the Dutch Resistance in rescuing Jews and others in danger through hiding. Shulamith Oppenheim's The Lily Cupboard (HarperCollins, 1995) is a fictional treatment of a similar story, but it is much simpler.Marcia W. Posner, Holocaust Memorial and Educational Center of Nassau County, Glen Cove, NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Horn Book Review
In a straightforward, if somewhat dry, narrative, Adler recounts the story of Lore Baer, who, as a four-year-old Jewish child, was separated from her parents and sent to live with a Christian farming family in the Netherlands to escape capture by the Nazis. Ritz's watercolors, with their predominance of browns, grays, and blues, evoke an appropriately somber feeling. From HORN BOOK 1997, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Adler (Child of the Warsaw Ghetto, not reviewed, 1995, etc.) continues a series of picture books set during WW II with this true account of a young Jewish child's concealment by a family of Dutch farmers. In Ritz's potently somber watercolors, the fears of Lore Baer, only four, come through clearly, first as she sees soldiers arrest her grandfather, then when she is left with a half-Christian couple by her worried parents, and finally during her days as the ``niece'' of the Schoutens, fleeing to the next town or hiding in the barn with other fugitives whenever searchers come. So ingrained does her fear of discovery become that when her parents track her down two years later at war's end, she shyly ducks out of sight and only slowly comes to trust them again. In precise but not brutal terms, Adler briefly describes events leading up to the occupation of the Netherlands and the experiences of those who went into hiding, then brings their stories up to the present in an afterword. So real and clearly explained is Lore's anxiety that to younger readers the events that compelled it will not seem remote at all. (Picture book/nonfiction. 8-10)
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
