No pretty pictures A child of war

Review by Booklist Review

Gr. 6^-12. The truth of the child's viewpoint is the strength of this Holocaust survivor story, told with physical immediacy and no "pride of victimhood." Lobel's ebullient, gorgeously colored illustrated books--from the Caldecott Honor Book On Market Street (1982) to Toads and Diamonds (1996)--give no hint of her dark, terrifying childhood. Barely five years old when the Nazis came to her comfortable home in Poland, she spent the next five years in hiding and on the run; then she was captured and transported to concentration camps. Through the marches, hunger, mud, stench, and corpses, her younger brother was nearly always with her, disguised as a girl to hide his circumcision. Matter-of-factly, she tells how she protected him ("Once I found a raw potato in the mud. My brother and I took turns taking bites out of it"); in the Ravensbruck selections, she dragged him to the left, away from the chimneys. With the same quiet truth, she describes her childhood shame at being an "ugly, obvious Jew girl," a stigma she still felt in the two years she spent recovering from tuberculosis, nursed by kind caregivers in a Swedish sanatorium after the war. Looking back, she avoids sermonizing and analysis. There's a visceral physicalness to her memories of the terror ("the whispers of the trapped grown-ups sounded like the noise of insects rubbing their legs together") and in the elementals she celebrated when she was safe: the luxury of privacy, of hair, no lice, a flushing toilet, sheets white and clean, and the flat, slithering, sweet taste of butter. She always felt distant from her cold parents; it's the loss of Niania, the nanny who raised and sheltered her, that still breaks her heart. Older readers who remember her picture books will be stirred by her story of starting school at age 12 for the first time, the only dark kid with all the blonde Swedes, clumsy at gym and sports, an outsider, until she discovered she could draw. --Hazel Rochman

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Few admirers of Lobel's sunny picture book art (On Market Street) would guess at the terrors of Lobel's own childhood. Here, in beautifully measured prose, she offers a memoir that begins in 1939, when the author was five, as German soldiers march into her native Krakow; Lobel's adored father, the owner of a chocolate factory and a religious Jew, flees soon after, in the middle of the night ("He had kissed me in the night, and I did not know it"). Deportations begin, and before long the author and her younger brother (who is dressed as a girl) are sent to the country, in the care of their Niania (nanny). Thus the two children embark on years of flight, on a turbulent course involving assumed identities, blackmailers, a dangerous stay in the Krakow ghetto, concealment in a convent, capture and concentration camps. In 1945 the children are liberated, in Ravensbruck, and brought to Sweden to recuperate from what turns out to be tuberculosis, and they are eventually reunited with both parents. Lobel brings to these dramatic experiences an artist's sensibility for the telling detail, a seemingly unvarnished memory and heartstopping candor. Focused on survival, the child narrator does not pity herself or express her terror: she observes everyone keenly and cannily sizes them up. This piercing and graceful account is rewarding for readers of all ages. It may prove especially valuable for children who have graduated from Lobel's picture books and who may therefore feel they "know" her; this memoir would help such readers build a personal connection to WWII and its tragic lessons. A 12-page inset of family photos is included. Ages 10-up. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by School Library Journal Review

Gr 6 Up-Lobel has written a haunting, honest, and ultimately life-affirming account of her childhood years in Nazi-occupied Poland. Born in Krakow to an affluent Jewish family, she and her younger brother were cared for by their nanny ("Niania"), a devout Catholic. Lobel was five when the Nazis arrived in Poland and her father left in the middle of the night. As the situation worsened, Niania took the children into hiding in the countryside while their mother remained in the city with fake identification papers. As the war continued, the siblings were hidden in various places, relying mostly on Niania to care for them, at great risk to herself. When Lobel and her brother were captured, Niania arranged to have the children delivered into the care of relatives inside the concentration camp at Plaszów. At the end of the war, Lobel, then 11, and her brother were sent to Sweden as refugees, where she thrived at a convalescent home while recovering from tuberculosis and was reunited with her parents. She ends the story with her family's emigration to the United States. The author's words are simple and straightforward, even when she describes the horror of life in the camp or the fear and loneliness of being separated from her family and nanny. This is a worthy addition to memoirs of war such as Esther Hautzig's The Endless Steppe (Hall, 1968) and Yoko Kawashima Watkins's So Far from the Bamboo Grove (Lothrop, 1986).-Carol Fazioli, The Brearley School, New York City, 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.

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Review by Horn Book Review

(Older) Illustrator Anita Lobel's memoir of her traumatic years in Poland spent under the threat of annihilation by the Nazis is notable both as an account of survival and as a revelation of a remarkable human being. But what makes the book truly haunting is the perspective from which it is told-that of a child who does not fully comprehend what she is witnessing. The prologue, clearly distinguishing between child and adult emotions, augments this effect. As the author notes: ""I was barely five years old when the war began. Only when I was much older did the horrors and terrible losses of fully conscious people during all those years of terror dawn on me."" In the beginning, war is a bloodstain on the pavement, the removal of valuables from one's apartment, and unfamiliar words such as concentration camp and liquidation. Then, as the years pass, war means separation from parents and hiding-in the country with her brother and their devoted nanny Niania, in the Krakow ghetto, and finally in a Benedictine convent-before Anita and her brother are discovered by the Nazis and sent to the first of a series of camps. Conditions on the transports and in the camps, designed for destroying health and self-respect, become a way of life to be endured until the German defeat. Sent by the Red Cross to Sweden to recuperate from tuberculosis, and joined eventually by her parents, Anita gradually rednters the ordinary world of school and friends, and the tense, clenched tone of the book becomes noticeably more relaxed. True, there are no pretty pictures, but there are moments of description that are intensely visual and vivid, and will not be easily forgotten. m.m.b. (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.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A haunting look back by Lobel, a Polish Jew who ``was born far, far away, on a bloody continent at a terrible time.'' Lobel writes of her life as a young girl, who ``was barely five years old when the war began.'' She and her three-year-old brother did not understand when her father disappeared in 1939 (to Russia, she later learned), but very soon they understood the words ``transported, deported, concentration camp and liquidation.'' Taken from a Benedictine convent that sheltered Jewish children, Lobel and her brother (by then, ten and eight) were first in Montelupi Prison, then in Ravensbrück, where they were sick with lice, diarrhea, and tuberculosis. They were rescued and sent to Sweden to regain their health and eventually to be united with their parents. This is an inexpressibly sad book about a young girl who missed her childhood, yet survived to say that her life ``has been good. I want more.'' (b&w photos, not seen) (Memoir. 10-14)

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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No Pretty Pictures A Child of War Chapter One From our balcony on a September day a long time ago, I watched the Germans march into the city where we lived. They stepped in unison, in shiny boots, with sunlight glinting on helmets and bouncing off bayonets. They sang a marching song. I did not understand the words that echoed between the buildings. Pushing my head through the bars of our crowded balcony to see the soldiers better, I held on tightly to my niania's (nanny's) hand. "Niemcy, Niemcy" ("Germans, Germans"), she muttered and sighed. My mother and father were there, and many other people. "No! No! They are French!" I heard people say. "Surely they must be French." It was a warm, and beautiful day. There was music and promise in the air. The back of the large apartment building where we lived faced a square courtyard. Here balconies were long walkways that extended the whole length of the building. We sometimes saw our neighbor, a Hasid, in his long black coat and round saucerlike hat edged in fur, rushing by our back windows on his way to the elevator. He turned comers, his beard flying in the wind. "Jews!" I would hear Niania mutter. My father was the owner of a chocolate factory. He was not a Hasid. But every morning he wrapped his head in thin black leather straps that ended in a small square box that rested on his forehead. The ends of the straps were tied around his wrists. He put a white shawl with black stripes around his shoulders and faced a window that led to the back balcony.. He mumbled and rocked back and forth. Under the leather straps on his head he wore a tight hairnet clasped on the side with a buckle. After he finished his mumblings, he unwrapped the straps, kissed them, and wound them back into the box he had taken off his head. He went to another room and came out elegantly dressed in a fine gray suit with a white shirt, a tie, and a boutonniere in his lapel. His hair was beautifully slicked down. He wore shiny black shoes and often spats. He smelled nice when he kissed me good-bye. Then, one morning, he was gone and did not come back. He had kissed me in the night, and I did not know it. I looked for his shoes. I could not find his smell, and I cried. One afternoon that October I was standing by the window that looked out on the courtyard. Something happened. I don't know how it happened. I did not see the beginning of it. Niania cried: "Don't look! Don't look!" She tried to pull me away from the window. "Come away from there!" Six floors below an open window facing our part of the building, several people were surrounding something on the ground. I could see a dark liquid slowly appear on the cement courtyard. Without really knowing, I knew what all this was. Whenever I ran and fell, banging my head, a black smell curled around in my head. No, even before, before the pain really began. Before I had had time to burst into my childish wail, an oily pungency flushed the inside of my head and spread through my mouth and my nostrils. Once, before the German soldiers had even come, I had been walking with Niania in the middle of the city, near a place called the Rondel. Into this remaining part of a medieval tower surrounded by a waterless moat, two motorcyclists had crashed. The railing had been bent and broken in several places. I saw no bodies. But before Niania hurried me away, I had seen the dark, dark red pools of liquid in the moat. There had been the noise that sirens and policemen and droszki (horse-drawn carriages) and horses made. And in my head there had been the smell of it all. The shape on the ground of our courtyard had been covered. The edges of the blanket fanned out neatly. The puddle of blackish red liquid that slowly seeped out from under the blanketed mound was growing larger. A high-heeled shoe had fallen off one foot that could just barely be seen under the covering. And that smell was in my head again. A blue late-afternoon sky cradled the roofs of my Eastern European city when Niania closed the drapes. A little later I sneaked back to the window. It was dark now. I could no longer see a stain. There was no blanket on the ground. The shoe was gone. The courtyard was empty. There was nothing. No Pretty Pictures A Child of War . Copyright © by Anita Lobel. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from No Pretty Pictures: A Child of War by Anita Lobel All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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