Remember World War II: Kids Who Survived Tell Their Stories (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Across the Wall: A Tale of the Abhorsen and Other Stories Timnah Card Nix, Garth Across the Wall: A Tale of the Abhorsen and Other Stories. Eos/HarperCollins, 2005305p Library ed. ISBN 0-06-074714-5$17.89 Trade ed. ISBN 0-06-074713-7$16.99 R Gr. 9-12 This poignant and powerful collection effectively weaves together the voices of those who were children in Europe, the Pacific, and the United States during World War II. Parallel in layout and similar in concept to Allen's Remember Pearl Harbor (BCCB 10/01), Nicholson's volume features a spare narrative that largely lets the interviewed subjects do the talking; her own commentary, set in black type, serves to connect the many first-person accounts, each in a deep green type and offset by a textbox that includes a name, a date of the recollection, and a geographic locale. Organized into three chapters ("World War II Begins in Europe," "War Comes to the Pacific," and "Home Front America"), the concise soundbites of memory flow easily to create a cohesive picture of the diverse experience of youth in the 1930s and 1940s in Allied, Axis, and occupied nations throughout the world. A thoughtfully composed foreword by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (who spent the 1940s living in exile in England after Hitler attacked her home country of Czechoslovakia) grounds the function of this collection as a source of learning from the past, and the reflective memoirs inspire just that. This could therefore serve as a model for an oral history project, but it is also moving when read straight through. Captioned archival photos, various maps, a timeline, a postscript revealing the fate of each of the contributors, and an index are included. Copyright © 2005 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois