Milkweed

‘It was thrilling just to see a plant, a spot of green in the ghetto desert.’ The plant in question is the milkweed of Spinelli’s title, miraculously managing to flourish ‘by a heap of rubble’ in the Warsaw Jewish quarter of October 1939, the setting for a book which must now constitute the most remarkable of children’s Holocaust fiction. At its centre is a young boy of various names, never quite certain of his identity or origins, although the yellow medal he wears around his neck would seem to point to gypsy ancestry. It is through the innocence, almost the naiveté, of this boy’s eyes that the reader is given a heartrending insight into the conditions of a city under Nazi occupation and the degradation and humiliation of a persecuted childhood lived amidst its Jewish population. This, as he expresses it at one point, is ‘the ghetto where children grew down instead of up’. While this is a story dominated by images of starvation, shootings, beatings and every other imaginable form of dehumanisation, its ultimate message, beautifully conveyed symbolically in the role given to the milkweed plant dispersing its ‘snowy shower’ of seedlings, is one of evil overcome and hope restored.