Tell No One Who You Are; The Final Journey

Both of these books present factually based stories of Jewish children whose lives are engulfed by the genocidal tides of Nazism. Tell No One Who You Are is the childhood biography of Regine Miller, eight years old when the Nazis begin their extermination of the Jews in occupied Belgium. Her father is a defiant Socialist who refuses to flee persecution, but when his son is press ganged into a labour camp, he and his dying wife decide to try to save their surviving child by entrusting her to Fela, a resistance worker dedicated to saving Jewish children by giving them new identities. Most of the book is a harrowing chronicle of a lonely and bewildered child drudging from one cold and exploitative 'haven' to another, all of the time aching for the return of her family. When the war ends, the heartbreak does not, and Regine has to come to terms with the guilt of being a survivor.

The action of The Final Journey is confined to forty odd hours inside the cattle truck transporting 11-year-old Alice, her grandfather, and forty odd fellow prisoners to a labour camp. The events leading up to this vividly described nightmare are related in retrospect, as Alice retreats from the intolerable squalor of her surroundings into memories of a prosperous and fastidious lifestyle. As the book progresses, Alice gains strength from the examples of fortitude and sacrifice surrounding her, and determines to face the ordeals to come defiantly. By the time the train arrives at a station signposted Auschwitz, she is almost optimistic.

Both of these books are written with a straightforward clarity that intensifies the harsh reality of the events described. Buchignani, a journalist, adds brief appendices setting out the facts and figures of the Belgian atrocities, together with his sources. Pausewang's novel, which recently won the 1997 Birmingham Children's Books Award which is judged entirely by children, is more subjective, but no less convincing. Depictions of courage and solidarity provide a counterpoint to what might otherwise be intolerably grim but nevertheless essential reading.