Witnesses to War
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Cover Story
This issue’s cover is from The Hutchinson Treasury of Children’s Poetry (cover illustration by Peter Weevers). Edited by Alison Sage (who also edited The Hutchinson Treasury of Children’s Literature), this sumptuous anthology is loosely divided into four sections corresponding to age starting with nursery rhymes and first poems through to poems for older children and classic poetry. Poems from such modern poets as Roger McGough, Ted Hughes, Wendy Cope and Maya Angelou sit alongside poems by Longfellow, Robert Louis Stevenson, Shelley and Shakespeare. The anthology is illustrated in full colour and black and white. Newly commissioned illustrations from, for example, Quentin Blake, Shirley Hughes and Nicola Bayley are included alongside illustrations by Randolph Caldecott, Jessie Willcox Smith and Kate Greenaway. With such a comprehensive range of poems for 2-11 year olds and upwards, this is a wonderful family book.
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Witnesses to War
Anne Frank is one of eight young people featured in this collection of war-time biographies whose lives were irrevocably disrupted by Nazism. Anne Frank was to die in Bergen-Belsen, and because we feel we know her so well via her diary, come to represent the unique loss of each individual among the millions who died. In this well written history, her story is alongside those of seven other children, four Jewish, one Gypsy and two Catholic. They managed to survive but their traumatic individual experiences also represent those of millions of others.
Of the four Jewish children, 11-year-old Beate had to leave her parents behind and escape to England with the Kindertransporte; in occupied France 10-year-old Alice was kept safe at a Protestant boarding school until she could escape with her family over the border to Switzerland; 11-year-old Renee adopted a new identity as a Catholic at a Flers convent until liberation while eight-year-old Joseph got out of the Warsaw ghetto just before the uprising by escaping across a wall. Barbara, a 16-year-old Czech gypsy, survived Auschwitz and managed to escape by jumping into a lorry when being taken to the Lackenback camp for Gypsies. The Catholics, 11-year-old Alexander from Poland and eight-year-old Czech Emilie (from Lidice), were both taken from their families by the Nazis and sent for 'Germanisation' prior to adoption in Germany.
Leapman's accounts are pitched well - his subjects' stories are riveting and well integrated into their historical context. Photogarphs (including some poignant family snaps) and maps help to place events. Leapman's introduction explains Nazi theories of racial purity but he does not dwell on the nature of the evil done to these disparate children. Their stories speak for themselves.
