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We Are Witnesses:
The Diaries of Five Teenagers Who Died in the Holocaust
BOOK DETAILS
Publisher: Square Fish; 1 edition (March 17, 2009)
Paperback: 208 pages
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0312535678
ISBN-13: 978-0312535674
Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
Recommend Age Range: 12+
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Synopsis
Boas presents excerpts from the diaries of five Jewish young people who died in
Nazi concentration camps. "A twelve-year-old Polish villager named David, a
deeply religious fifteen-year-old named Moshe in Belgium, a thirteen-year-old
Lithuanian Communist named Yitzhak, a wealthy thirteen-year-old Hungarian named
Eva, and a budding Dutch writer named Anne Frank are . . . represented here in
their efforts to understand and cope with what is happening around them and to
them." (Bull Cent Child Books) Index. "Grade six and up." (SLJ)
Annotation
Jewish teenagers David, Yitzhak, Moshe, Eva, and Anne all kept diaries and were
all killed in Hitler's death camps. These are their stories, in their own words.
Author Jacob Boas is a Holocaust survivor who was born in the same camp to which
Anne Frank was sent. Includes a photo insert.
From the Publisher
David Rubinowicz, Yitzhak Rudashevski, Moshe Flinker, Eva Heyman, and Anne Frank
were all teenagers during World War II. They lived in different parts of Europe.
They had different lives. But they all had something in common: They were
Jewish, and therefore, under Hitler's twisted rule, they were five of the six
million men, women, and children sentenced to death.
David and the others were also alike in that they all kept diaries. Each of them had hope - even to the very end. Unfortunately, there were no happy endings. Because the final, horrible thing David, Yitzhak, Moshe, Eva, and Anne had in common is that they were all killed. For no reason at all...
Reviews
From Hazel Rochman - BookList
Fifty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, these personal accounts bear
powerful witness to what it was like to be young at the time of the Nazis They
grew up a few miles apart in Nazi Germany. Helen Waterford was Jewish; Alfons
Heck was an ardent member of the Hitler Youth. In alternating chapters, Ayer
sets the personal narratives of these two Germans against the general history of
the rise of Hitler, the course of World War II, and the horror of the Holocaust.
While Helen was in hiding, Alfons was a fanatic believer in the Master Race.
While she was crammed in a cattle car bound for Auschwitz, he was a teenage
commander of frontline troops, ready to fight and die for the glory of Hitler
and the Fatherland. Their postwar experiences in the U.S. are just as
compelling: Helen trying to pick up the pieces of her shattered self; Alfons
awakening to what he'd been part of, determined now to warn the world about it
("All of us, perhaps unknowingly, had looked the other way, preferring not to
know the truth" ). Occasionally the narrative's organization is confusing,
especially the constant switching from Ayer's general history to the
first-person narratives. But the stark contrasts between the Jewish and the Nazi
experiences are dramatic and thought provoking. Both Germans speak quietly and
honestly, without hand-wringing, cover-up, or self-pity. Readers will want to
talk about the questions raised: What would I have done? Could it happen again
Born in 1943 in a Nazi camp, Boas is a Holocaust survivor. He draws on the
diaries of Jewish teenagers to tell what happened to ordinary families as they
were crowded into the ghettos, persecuted, and murdered. Each of the diaries
breaks off suddenly, sometimes in mid-sentence. David Rubinowicz, the son of a
dairyman in the Polish countryside, started keeping a journal when he was 12; he
was gassed in Treblinka. Yitzhak Rudashevski, an ardent communist at 13, lived
in Vilna; he wrote his diary in Yiddish; he describes people wild with terror.
Moshe Flinker, an Orthodox Jew, pretends to be a Gentile in Brussels and asks
what God can intend with such suffering. xe6 va Heyman, an assimilated Jew in
Hungary, watches her grandmother go mad. All the teenagers mourn a special
friend. Like Ayer, Boas incorporates his own commentary with excerpts from each
diary to personalize the history and to compare the individual experiences. Boas
also makes us think in a new way about Anne Frank's classic diary. He points out
that Anne's experience was unusual: in hiding with her family and in being cared
for by loving Gentiles, she had an easier time than most Jews holed up in the
ghettos of Europe. Boas sees "the highest form of resistance" in Anne and all
these young writers. Yet there's no comfort. The final words of Yitzhak's diary,
"We may be fated for the worst," were true.
From The Horn Book, Inc.
Foreword by Patricia C. McKissack. Narrative accounts of five young Jews,
including Anne Frank, whose diaries hold their observations and emotions, give
immediacy to the horrors of the Holocaust. The text provides historical
information and compares the experiences of the diarists, quoting liberally from
the teenagers' writings. Although these condensed versions lack the impact of a
complete diary, the cumulative effect of the five journals is overwhelming.
From Judy Chernak - Children's Literature
From varied backgrounds, different countries, diverse religious outlooks and
assorted experiences, the voices of five youngsters clearly describe how they
coped with the horrible sufferings which preceded their murder. David Rubinowicz,
13, Poland, chronicled his family's hopeless slide from independent dairy
keepers to dispossessed refugees crammed into a ghetto, slowly crushed by the
Nazi machine, death-marched to Treblinka and gassed. Yitzhak Rudashevski, 13,
Lithuania, extolled the glories of learning, hoped the Russians and socialism
would save the Jews, detailed the incredible struggle to maintain schools and
culture in the ghetto, turned partisan at 14 to avoid "being led like sheep to
the slaughter," but was rounded up and killed anyway. Moshe Flinker, a devout
Polish Jew who survived two years of German occupation before fleeing into
Belgium and "passing," filled his diary with poems, prayers and hope for
redemption in the Promised Land but perished at 19 in Auschwitz. Eva Heyman-beautiful,
wealthy, pampered, assimilated, bursting with love for living-wrote from Hungary
for only nine months in her 13th-birthday present diary before she was deported
to Auschwitz, where Mengele himself selected her for the crematorium. This
searing book ends with excerpts from the diary of Anne Frank and contrasts her
relatively secure, though imprisoned, two years and her unshakable faith in the
goodness of people with the main themes of her contemporaries.
From Jewish Book World
Boas, a Holocaust survivor, incorporates his own commentary using excerpts from
each diary to personalize history and to compare individual experiences. He
remarks that Anne Frank's experience of hiding with her family in relative
comfort and care with loving gentiles was atypical. Although only some of the
diaries end in mid-sentence, interrupted by the ultimate horror, all exhibit a
strain of idealism throughout.
From Betsy Hearne - Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books
It's a sign of change in literature for young people that the subjects here--all
victims of the Holocaust--do not offer the hope that many such books have
offered in the past, the hope of survival. . . . Beyond its riveting focus, this
book of diary excerpts is distinguished by editorial intelligence: a marked
variation in the voices gives breadth, and meticulous authorial notes
andtransitional background commentary provide context without overwhelming the
primary sources themselves. . . . In each case, specific details personalize six
million statistics.
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