From Publishers Weekly
Born in 1943 in the Westerbork concentration camp in Holland, Boas here brilliantly unfolds the history of the Holocaust through poignant excerpts from five teenagers' wartime diaries, enhanced with skillful commentary. Predictably, Anne Frank turns up, in the final section, but, as Boas points out, "alongside the other four diaries, Anne's looks different than when you read it by itself as the sole voice of the Holocaust." By the time readers encounter Anne Frank, they will have met Jewish teenagers trapped in equally tragic but even more violent circumstances in various parts of Europe, from a small Polish village to the Vilna ghetto to Brussels and Hungary. The young writers relay their hopes and fears even as they chronicle the disintegration of their daily lives. One is religious, another politically active, others wrapped up in their families-Boas points out each writer's sensitivities as he explains the terrible traps into which the individual teenagers fall. In exploring their fates, he impresses upon the reader their vitality, and, by extension, implies the enormity of the Holocaust's losses. Ages 12-up. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
"Holocaust survivor Boas bears powerful witness to what happened to ordinary families as they were crowded into the ghettos, persecuted, and murdered." --Booklist, starred review
"Boas ably guides the reader through these literary landscapes of hell, where none of the writers survived...[These] young people make the accounts more universal, and permit us to see the common humanity of each of these different witnesses." --Jewish Bulletin
"We are privy to the thoughts of five adolescents who wrote about, and then died because of, the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews." --Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, starred review
Book Description
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.
We Are Witnesses: The Diaries of Five Teenagers Who Died in the Holocaust 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
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. HC: Henry Holt & Company.
FROM THE CRITICS
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.
Publishers Weekly
Born in 1943 in the Westerbork concentration camp in Holland, Boas here brilliantly unfolds the history of the Holocaust through poignant excerpts from five teenagers' wartime diaries, enhanced with skillful commentary. Predictably, Anne Frank turns up, in the final section, but, as Boas points out, ``alongside the other four diaries, Anne's looks different than when you read it by itself as the sole voice of the Holocaust.'' By the time readers encounter Anne Frank, they will have met Jewish teenagers trapped in equally tragic but even more violent circumstances in various parts of Europe, from a small Polish village to the Vilna ghetto to Brussels and Hungary. The young writers relay their hopes and fears even as they chronicle the disintegration of their daily lives. One is religious, another politically active, others wrapped up in their families-Boas points out each writer's sensitivities as he explains the terrible traps into which the individual teenagers fall. In exploring their fates, he impresses upon the reader their vitality, and, by extension, implies the enormity of the Holocaust's losses. Ages 12-up. (June)
Children's Literature - Judy Chernak
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.
BookList - Hazel Rochman
% This is a multi-book review: SEE also the title "Parallel Journeys". %% Gr. 712. 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.
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