Review by Booklist Review
Gr. 5^-10. Simply told, Warren's powerful story blends the personal testimony of Holocaust survivor Jack Mandelbaum with the history of his time, documented by stirring photos from the archives of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Mandelbaum was 12 when the Nazis came to Poland in 1939. At first the thought of war was "thrilling." Then he saw his prosperous, happy home torn apart, and he spent three years as a teenager in the death camps in Germany, where he survived by a combination of courage, friendship, and luck. Warren, who never knew any Jews when she was growing up in a small Nebraska town, brings both passion and the distance of the outsider to the story. True to Mandelbaum's youthful viewpoint, she lets the story unfold slowly so readers don't know until the end what happened to Jack's mother and brother after they were separated, or whether his friends survived. The combination of Mandelbaum's experience and Warren's reporting of the whole picture makes this an excellent introduction for readers who don't know much about the history. There's only one false note. Unlike Anita Lobel's No Pretty Pictures (1998) and many other personal accounts, there's a radiant innocence here: everything "before" was blissful ("It was a lovely life"), and, even in the camps, Jack never has an ugly thought. The design is open and inviting with clear type, many photos, and an excellent multimedia bibliography. --Hazel Rochman
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by School Library Journal Review
Gr 5-8-Through the words and memories of Jack Mandelbaum, Warren presents a harrowing account of a Jewish boy's experience in Nazi prison camps. Mandelbaum had lived a comfortable life with his family in Gdynia, Poland, until the German invasion forced them to flee to a relative's village in 1939. Later, when the Jews were sent to concentration camps, the 12-year-old became separated from the rest of his family and wound up in the Blechhammer camp. By describing events through the boy's voice, the author does an excellent job of letting his words carry the power of the story. She avoids historical analysis, sticking to Mandelbaum's experiences, and brings readers into the nightmarish world of the concentration camp with a strong feeling of immediacy. As with many stories of great suffering, some of the minor details, such as risking death to steal a jar of marmalade, deliver the most impact. Besides the physical hardship, Warren conveys how frustrating and confusing it was for a child in such an environment. Once liberated, the young man learned the sad fate of his family and as he ironically observed, had he known his parents and siblings would not survive, he might not have struggled so hard to live himself. Black-and-white contemporary photographs illustrate the book. This story works as an introduction to the Holocaust and will also interest readers of Lila Perl's Four Perfect Pebbles (Greenwillow, 1996), Anne Frank's diary, and other works on the period.-Steven Engelfried, Deschutes County Library, Bend, OR (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
(Intermediate, Middle School) When warnings of war come to Gdynia, twelve-year-old Jack first responds with frank excitement: ""Wow! Extra vacation, and a war coming. What could be better?"" But Jack quickly sobers and gains a necessary maturity when his father is taken to a concentration camp and Jack, his mother, and his brother and sister escape, for a while, to the countryside. Based on interviews with Holocaust survivor Jack Mandelbaum, Surviving Hitler stays close to its focus, gaining its impact through attention to the particulars of one boy's experience as he survives labor and starvation in several camps until the end of the war, when he discovers that his parents and siblings have been killed. Warren acknowledges that the dialogue in the book is reconstructed from Jack's memories; more distracting are the photographs, which are sometimes haphazardly placed or tangential: the account of Jack's initial ""selection"" for labor by the German occupiers of his small Polish town, for instance, is accompanied by a photo of Hungarian Jews arriving at Auschwitz. But Jack's story itself stays within its self-defined boundaries and is all the more powerful for it. The account is notably honest about the role luck played for survivors. In the camp soup line, for example, Jack notices that the prisoner before him gets thin broth from the top of the pot, while Jack himself gets a bit of potato: ""What was the secret of getting the potato?"" Told with journalistic immediacy and less ponderous than many similar accounts published for children, this book is not only compelling testimony to the Holocaust but an involving survival story as well. A recommended reading list is appended. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A moving memoir recounts an all-too-familiar chain of events. Jack Mandelbaum, the child of a loving, middle-class Jewish family in Poland, had his happy childhood and adoring parents snatched away from him and experienced the worst horrors of the Holocaust. In 1939, just before the Nazi invasion of Poland, Jack's family left their city for the countryside, hoping that the Nazis would leave them alone. But after two years of working as a laborer for the Nazis, Jack, then 15, was rounded up along with the other 900 Jews in the village. Separated from his mother and little brother, he was taken to Blechhammer concentration camp where he experienced the horrible initiation into camp lifeall his hair was shaved off, he was given a number (16013) that was to be his only identity to the Nazis, and the ill-fitting cotton uniform and wooden shoes that were to be his clothes. After three years of wretched deprivation and terror, he and the other prisoners woke up one morning to discover that the guards had abandoned the camp. For the first time, no one was controlling Jack's every movement and, amazingly, he just walked out the front gates. The date, he learned later, was May 7, 1945; 18-year-old Jack weighed 80 pounds. Eventually, he learned what had happened to his family and that only two of his relatives had survivedan aunt and an uncle. Chillingly, Jack says, "If I had known this when I was in the camps, why would I have struggled so hard to live?" Though told by another narrator, direct quotes of his remembrances make Jack's story immediate and personal. Telling details of moments of horror, desperation, misery, and the tricks of survival add to this richly involving biography. (introduction, afterword, recommended reading, films, software, and Web sites) (Biography. 10-15)
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