Refugee by Alan Gratz

In Refugee, Alan Gratz has seamlessly woven together the stories of three refugee children and their families from different time periods and different places in the world and brought their harrowing experiences together as each flees their homeland in the hope of finding safety and freedom elsewhere.

On Kristallnacht in 1938 Berlin, Nazis enter and destroy contents of the home of the Landau family, terrorizing Josef, 12, his younger sister Ruth, his mother, and arresting his father, Arron. When his father finally returns home, he is a broken man after spending time in Dachau. Luckily, the Landau family has secured tickets and the needed visas to emigrate to Cuba. 

On board the MS St. Louis, a luxury passenger ocean liner, the Jews fleeing Nazi Germany are treated well all the way across the Atlantic, but for Josef, the trip also brings stress. His father refuses to leave their cabin, insisting it is all a Nazi trick to send them to a concentration camp. When Josef turns 13 on the trip, he is able to make his Bar Mitzvah with the help of other passengers and ship’s crew. It would have been wonderful for Josef, if only his father could be at his side. 

When the ship reaches Cuba, it is held offshore for what feels like endless days. Then comes the news that Cuba has cancelled all visas and ordered the St. Louis to leave Cuban waters. The ship sails to the US, where the passengers are also refused entry. But if no country will take this ship full of Jewish refugees, the only recourse is to return to Germany and certain death.

For Isabel, 11, living in Fidel Castro’s communist Cuba, immigrating to the United States, el norte, is only an impossible dream. That is, until 1994, when Castro announces that anyone who wishes to leave Cuba would not be stopped. Then, Isabel discovers that her best friend Iván’s father has been secretly building a boat to travel the 90 miles to the Florida coast with his family.

Isabel is determined to go with them when her Papi is threatened with imprisonment by the Cuban police. Discovering that there is no gasoline for the escape boat, Isabel sells her beloved trumpet for what they need. In the middle of the night, two families, 9 people in all, pile into the boat, including Isabel’s pregnant mother, and take off for el norte, and hopefully leaving their homes in Havana behind. 

Fleeing the the US isn’t as easy a just enough gasoline, there is also the “wet foot, dry foot” policy. If you make it to the beach, you can stay, but if they catch you still in water, you are sent back to Cuba. Everything goes well for a short time, but then the trip begins to run into all kinds of problems and el norte seems even further away than before. Will they all make it before their boat sinks or the US Coast Guard finds them?

For Mahmoud Bishara,12, life in Aleppo, Syria in 2015 means trying to make himself invisible and making sure his younger brother Waleed is safe. But when the building the Bishara’s live in is hit and destroyed by a missile attack, the family knows it is time to leave Syria with its violent civil war behind and try to find refuge in Germany. 

Starting out in a Mercedes, and heading to Turkey, the Bishara’s have food, money and cell phones, but are soon caught in the cross hairs of fighting between Sunni and Shia Muslims once again, losing most of what they are carrying, including the car. Luckily, they manage to keep a cell phone. They finally make it to the border town of Kilis, Turkey by walking, and where Mahmoud’s father finds a ride to Izmir, Turkey and the possibility of a ferry to Greece. But they also discover that there are people along the way who will do anything to take advantage of the plight of desperate Syrian refugees in a country where they are not welcomed.

After waiting days for a ferry to arrive, they finally board an overly crowded, not very sea worthy  boat. But when a storm hits, they are thrown overboard into an angry sea, where Mahmoud must make a heartrending decision in order to try to save at least one person in his family.

Each of these stories are heartbreaking and harrowing to read and really bring home what it is like to be a refugee in a world that just doesn’t want you. Gratz draws out the tension by telling the stories of Josef, Isabel, and Mahmoud in alternating chapters, each chapter ending in a bit of a cliff hanger, not for the sake of drama, but to emphasize the level and frequency of danger that is faced by refugees.

And though their stories are separated by time and place, Gratz manages to highlight the universal similarities refugees faced in the 20th and 21st centuries. Though each protagonist stands on the cusp of adulthood, they all must take responsibility and make hard decisions that impact their families and the outcome of their flight when the adults around them are incapable of doing it. 

Readers can trace the route Josef, Isabel, and Mahmoud traveled to their final destinations with the maps found at the back of the book (and I continuously referred to them while reading), and please read the Author’s Note for more information about these young heroes.

Facing hardship, trauma, loss, hunger, and invisibility, the stories of Josef, Isabel, and Mahmoud form a poignant look at life on the run. But ultimately, each one gives us reason to hope. 



A useful discussion guide from the publisher can be found HERE

This book is recommended for readers age 10+

This book was an ARC sent to me by the publisher, Scholastic Press

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Mr. Benjamin's Suitcase of Secrets written and illustrated by Pei-Yu Chang

When I was in grad school, getting ready to write my dissertation, I read a lot of Walter Benjamin’s literary criticism, particularly what he wrote about children’s literature and toys. Benjamin was a prolific writer, cultural critic and philosopher. He was also a German Jew who had left Germany because of Hitler and Nazism, and, like so many other German intellectuals at the time, he moved to Paris. But after France fell to the Nazis in June 1940, Paris’s German population knew they were at risk and it was time to leave Europe. And that’s where the story of Mr. Benjamin’s Suitcase of Secrets begins.



But getting out of Europe wasn’t all that easy, so Mr. Benjamin sought out the help of Mrs. Fittko. Pack light so as not to draw attention to yourself, she told the few people she was willing to lead to safety. But on the night of their escape, Mr. Bennie, as Mrs. Fittko calls him, doesn’t pack lightly, in fact, he packs a big heavy suitcase, one he could barely carry. The problem is that the suitcase would have to be carried over rough terrain and then across the mountains and it was heavy and awkward.



Couldn’t Mr. Benjamin just leave the suitcase behind? Mrs. Fittko asks again. No, he can’t, as he tells her “The contents of this case can change everything.” But just as the group arrive at the border and the possibility of safety is just ahead of them, the guards refuse the allow Mr. Benjamin over the border crossing. He returns to the hotel where he had spent the previous night, and then, Mr. Benjamin and his mysterious suitcase simply disappeared. And to this day no one knows what he had been carrying that was so important to him.



This historical fiction picture book for older readers is as unusual as it is interesting. It is based not only on what actually happened to Walter Benjamin and why he was forced to flee, but also on the mystery surrounding the fate of the suitcase and its contents, which he tells Mrs. Fittko are “more important than my life.”



I have to admit, I never thought I would see a children’s book written about Walter Benjamin yet I really like the way some things were presented. I thought the way it shows that intellectual ideas were such a threat to the Nazis that they felt it necessary to arrest those people “who had extraordinary ideas" was very effective throughout the book, as represented by the importance of the suitcase and Benjamin's need to hold on tightly to it. I also liked that the soldiers who were arresting people didn’t have swastikas on their armband, but a kind of generic mark making it relevant to any act of this type. I did enjoy the variety of people speculating about what they thought was actually in Benjamin’s mysterious suitcase, which also defects the reader from wondering what Benjamin's fate was (in fact, he committed suicide after being turned back).



The textured mixed-media illustrations are wonderful. They are both quirky and serious. Look closely at the different bits that go into making the collages on each page, they almost tell their own story. I thought the one below was really effective at conveying the fear that people must have lived with during that time

This is a book I would definitely recommend for units on WWII, or even on units about refugees. Benjamin was a refugee twice over - once fleeing Germany, once trying to flee Nazi occupied France. Pei-Yu Chang has successfully depicted a world where ideas and opposition are seen as dangerous by those in power, making this a potent and relevant story for today's readers.



You can find a detailed essay on Walter Benjamin, his suitcase, and his attempt to flee the Nazis HERE



Who exactly was Mrs. Fittko? She was a courageous Holocaust activist who helped many people escape the Nazis over the Pyrenees working with her husband and with Varian Fry. Find out more about Mrs. Fittko HERE  



This book is recommended for readers age 7+

This book was borrowed from the NYPL

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Letters from the Lighthouse by Emma Carroll

I was inspired to read this novel when I read about it on Mr. Ripley’s Enchanted Books 

last June. So I ordered a copy from The Book Depository and began reading the day it arrived and finished it in one sitting. Needless to say, it is a really good novel.

It’s February 1941, and even though it isn't usual, older sister Sukie Bradshaw has decided to take siblings Olive, 12, and Cliff, 8, to see a movie after tea. But no sooner do they get through the newsreel but the air raid siren goes off. To make matters worse, Sukie has disappeared. Leaving her brother at the Underground shelter, Olive goes in search of Sukie, and just as she reaches her sister, another bomb falls way too close to them. When Olive wakes up in hospital, she learns that Sukie is still  missing, and that she and younger brother Cliff are going to be evacuated to Budmouth Point, on the Devon coast, for safety. 

Olive has already lost her dad to the war when his plane was shot down, and can’t bear that her sister may be gone too. But how can she figure out where Sukie is and who the man she met just before that bomb fell is if she’s in Devon? Still, as soon as she is able, Olive and Cliff are sent to live with Queenie, the sister of their London neighbor, and Sukie's supposed pen-pal. 

Things don’t work out at Queenie’s, who is always busy doing all kinds of work in the cellar, and using Olive to make deliveries for her around the village. It gets especially hairy after Olive is forced to share her room with Esther Jenkins, an evacuee with whom Olive already has a contentious relationship. Olive and Cliff soon find themselves living with Ephraim, the lighthouse keeper. Life is better at the lighthouse, where Ephraim insists on doing everything, where the food is better and Cliff even has a dog to pal around with. 

It doesn’t take long for Olive to realize that there’s an awful lot of activity on the lighthouse radio, much more that seems right. Meanwhile, Olive is also trying to work out the coded message she found in the coat Sukie was wearing the night she disappeared. The longer Olive is lives in Budmouth Point, the more she realizes that Sukie’s disappearance just might have something to do with the clandestine activity she's noticed among some of the village residents…but what could it possibly be?



Letters from the Lighthouse is an exciting adventure and Olive is very appealing, lively narrator. There was something about her story that reminded me so much of the books I read about kids in WWII that were written during the war. The thing I noticed in those books was the ability to carry on despite the uncertainly of the future. One always hopes for the best, and that is the feeling that Carroll captured writing about Olive's search for Sukie - she is so convinced her sister is okay somewhere in the world and she needed to figure out where.  



As Olive's story unfolds, Carroll also provides the reader with a window though which to see and understand just what it means to be a child and live in a country at war and under siege, realistically depicting the fears and the privations, as well as the importance of family. the value of friends and neighbors, and need to learn trust and tolerance. Heading each chapter with expressions, warnings, and advice that were common during the war also helps give the novel a sense of authenticity.



As much as I enjoyed Letters from the Lighthouse, I did have a few plot points that bothered me - like how did Olive end up with the coat Sukie was wearing when the bomb fell in London, and how what happened to Sukie actually happened. They were explainable, but not to my satisfaction. BUT, these were not game changers for me, and if you like historical fiction about WWII, they shouldn't be for you either. 



This book is recommended for readers age 9+

This book was purchased for my personal library

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