Hiding from the Nazis by David A. Adler, Karen Ritz (Illustrator), Karen Ritz (Illustrator)

From the Publisher

The true story of Lore Baer who as a four-year-old Jewish child was placed with a Christian family in the Dutch farm country to avoid persecution by the Nazis.

School Library Journal

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

Kirkus Reviews

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.

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