What the night sings A novel

Review by Booklist Review

Before Nazis dragged Gerta Rausch and her father to the Theresienstadt ghetto and, ultimately, to Auschwitz, Gerta was different. Literally. According to her Ahnenpass, a certificate of Aryan lineage, she was Gerta Richter. She had no knowledge of her Jewish heritage; she also had a white-hot passion for all things music. Now, her familiarity with viola and enrollment in the Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz has saved her life, but Gerta has yet to salvage her greatest love from the rubble: her singing voice. But one boy may be dead set on helping her find it. Sifting through the war's aftermath, Stamper's debut spotlights a multitude of oft-overlooked topics, from postwar pogroms and the Bergen-Belsen displaced-persons camp where Gerta resides, to the budding Zionist movement. Stamper's ethereal sepia-toned illustrations, teetering between black-and-white and full color, beautifully convey Gerta's dilemma as a girl on the brink of both adolescence and adulthood, friendship and romance, silence and song. A well-researched, elegant, and fittingly melodic exploration of reclaiming one's voice and the many kinds of faith it can spark. Back matter not seen.--Shemroske, Briana Copyright 2017 Booklist

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

---

Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Stamper's exceptionally moving debut goes beyond recounting the suffering inflicted on Jews during the Holocaust to explore a young woman's conflict between love and artistic ambition. Fourteen-year-old Gerta Richter, a talented singer and daughter of a violist in the Würzburg Orchestra, learned that she is actually Gerta Rausch, a Jew, when she and her father were forcibly removed from Würzburg by the Nazis one night in June 1944. The novel opens with the British liberation of German concentration camps in 1945 and moves smoothly among Gerta's prewar life, her stay in concentration camps and the Bergen-Belsen Displaced Persons camp, and her postwar flight to Palestine. Focusing on Gerta's transitional time as a displaced person, Stamper delves into her fight to regain her musical gift, her deepening relationship with a fellow survivor, her growing identity as a Jew, and her struggle to make decisions about her future. Generously illustrated with Stamper's haunting spot images and larger scenes, all in deep brown hues that evoke profound emotion, the book is a strong addition to the bookshelf of Holocaust fiction. Ages 12-up. Agent: Lori Kilkelly, Rodeen Literary Management. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

---

Review by School Library Journal Review

Gr 7 Up-Fifteen-year-old Gerta Rausch did not know she was Jewish until the day she was picked up by the Nazis and taken to a concentration camp. She lived in Germany with her musician father and was sheltered from the reality outside her home, spending all of her time training in viola and opera. Gerta's father reveals the truth as they are crammed into a train car. Gerta struggles to accept this news; she knows nothing of Jewish traditions and her only experience with her religion is tied up with hatred, abuse, and slaughter. Being allowed to play in orchestras keeps her alive in both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Although the narrative describes life before liberation, much of it focuses on the postwar experience: life in concentration camps-turned-"displaced persons camps," lingering hostility toward Jews, as well as the grueling journey many Jews made from Europe to Palestine. The illustration style and muted color palette work beautifully with the text, managing to communicate both despair and hope. The narrative is spare but powerful as it depicts the daily horrors of the camps and the struggle to survive, hold on to humanity and, once freed, understand how to live again. -VERDICT This powerful story is an excellent choice for any library.-Carla Riemer, Claremont Middle School, Oakland © Copyright 2018. 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

This moving, beautifully illustrated novel begins with the 1945 liberation of Bergen-Belsen, when adolescent survivor Gerta is relocated to a displaced persons camp. The time Stamper spends on Gertas postwar story, a somewhat unusual focus for a Holocaust novel, allows for thoughtful exploration of the particular challenges of rebuilding a life after the Holocausts devastation. Gerta, still healing emotionally and physically, finds herself making decisions about her romantic, religious, and artistic future that seem startling in their speed. A long flashback gives context for the peculiar assortment of memories influencing her now: she grew up a promising musician and learned of her Jewish background and real last name (Rausch, not Richter) only when her father revealed the truth on the train to Theresienstadt. The flashback traces Gertas experiences from the fear and starvation of the ghetto to the even more horrific conditions of Auschwitz-Birkenau (her father is immediately sent to his death; Gerta survives largely because her musical ability places her in the Womens Orchestra, where she is forced to serenade women and children on their walk to the gas chamber). Dreamlike prose and digitally toned black-and-white illustrations in ink wash, white gouache, and graphite, ranging from spot art to spacious full-bleed wordless spreads, combine with thick, creamy paper to create a volume with the feel of an art object. Back matter includes an authors note about Stampers inspiration and her research visits to concentration camps, a glossary, a map, and resources. shoshana flax (c) Copyright 2018. 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

Gerta didn't know she was Jewish until she and her father were taken for transport by the Nazis.When Bergen-Belsen is liberated, Gerta and the other survivors are ill, skeletal, dying, or sunk in madness, and they have no homes to which they can return. Relating the events that led her there, she tells of a seemingly carefree life in Wrzburg with her musician father and German gentile stepmother, an opera singer who is also Gerta's voice teacher. But they were living with false identification papers, and their lives become ever more withdrawn. She has fleeting visions of her early childhood in Kln, of her mother, and of Kristallnacht. The cattle-car journey to Theresienstadt is only the beginning of days, weeks, months, years filled with unspeakable horrors in the "intricacies of the Nazi webthe animalization of human souls." Then comes Auschwitz, where her father is gassed, then Bergen-Belsen, typhus, and, finally, a kind of awakening to her own humanity. Later she covertly enters British-occupied Palestine, Eratz Yisrael, and builds a life there. Stamper spares readers nothing. Everything that Gerta witnesses or experiences really happened in the hell that was the Holocaust, including the further humiliations in its aftermath, a rarely told part of the story. The text is on pale, sepia-toned paper with dark, eerie illustrations in the same tones, reminiscent of real drawings produced by camp inmates.Evil that is impossibly difficult to comprehend and filled with word-images that will leave readers gasping. The author's dedication says it all, in both Hebrew and English: "Remember." (author's note, map, glossary, resources, acknowledgments; not seen) (Historical fiction. 14-adult) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

---

I am lying next to Rivkah in the bunk when the announcement comes. She is burning; she is freezing. I hold her, and I sing to her:   Az ir vet, kinderlekh, elter vern, vet ir aleyn farshteyn-- When, dear children, you grow older, you will understand for yourselves--   I learned this Yiddish song from another musician on my transport here. I only spoke German before, though I sang in many other languages. When they came for me, I was rehearsing Bach's St. Matthew Passion, but even in German I understood nothing except the language of music. But now what do I care? I may as well die singing. Typhus is sweeping everyone away anyway. Die this way, die that way; pass out at hard labor, or get shot shuffling from one mysterious mound to the next―what's the difference? So I hold Rivkah, and I mutter the song. I am nearly sixteen years old. At least I think so.   Rivkah is my fourth bunkmate in Bergen-Belsen. Somehow I've survived four these last few wretched months. The first was a sick old woman from one of the death marches. She had diabetes and died from a seizure. We were packed so tightly that she shook against me for twenty minutes. I felt my brain shake in my skull; I felt my stomach shake behind my ribs. We pushed her body to the floor and folded her arms. Someone muttered a prayer over her and we fell back to sleep. It was the most dignity we could give her. There was no time to learn her name. The next two girls were pretty, even younger than me. This was obviously their first camp--hard to believe after so much war. It was a crowded week of transports, and the three of us shared one blanket. They kept to themselves and had managed to smuggle in a tube of lipstick. The girls were always whispering and putting on the lipstick, pinching their cheeks and ringing my ears with their acidic giggling. I didn't understand their language, but I understood the tone: a stupid survival plot, as if they actually had a say in their fate. They starved a little more slowly than the rest of us, but one day they disappeared, one in the morning, the other that night. Rivkah came two days later from the Buna factory. She is also from Köln, the city where I was born, and she knew my parents. She's a laboratory scientist, the mother of two boys, Michah and Chaim, fond of boxing. She said she usually scolded them for fighting, but she was secretly proud of her strong sons. They'd buy her little trinkets with the winnings from their after-school fights―flowers, chocolates―and kiss and flatter her to keep her from fussing too much. Big, sweet boys. She lost them to a transport last year but believes with her whole heart that they will all be reunited. Meanwhile, I'm a temporary substitute, a foster child. Somehow she is always smiling, even in fever. I think she's in shock―or maybe she's the kind of person who smiles so much, her face is fixed with a permanent grin, in her eyes as much as on her lips. Rivkah had met my parents a few times at the club in Köln. My mother died in the raid on the club, I told her. She was sorry, she said. Her voice got raspy and she used her little, growing cough as an excuse not to finish her thought. A couple of weeks after Rivkah came here to Bergen-Belsen, the typhus took root. Now she is dying in my arms.   The soldiers burst into the barracks, and I keep singing. I'm dazed. I am catching fever and I don't recognize their uniforms. Soldiers are soldiers. Guns are guns. Language is language. They shout to us in English, with British accents, I think, muffled through the rags they hold over their noses and mouths. I'm so used to the smell of filth and death that only when I see those handkerchiefs am I reawakened to the true state of things. I'm inexplicably ashamed. I have nothing left to be ashamed about―but I pull my uniform shirt lower over my bare thighs anyway. The soldiers begin removing the dead. There are so many. How could I not have noticed them lying right next to me? And suddenly―Rivkah, too, is gone. I feel her final breath wisp across my lips. They pull her from me, but I can't let her go. She is my last connection to the living world. I clutch her arm, her hand, her fingers. I sing the lullaby after her, my foster mother. I know no one else in all of Bergen-Belsen, either from Auschwitz or Theresienstadt. Everyone has come and gone, piles of shells pulled in and out of waves, and I'm still here, a skeleton of a sea creature, dropped in this tide pool, living, watching, still living. Excerpted from What the Night Sings by Vesper Stamper 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.

---