A Story of Courage, Integrity and Conviction: "The Boy Who Dared" by Susan Campbell Bartoletti

Title: The Boy Who Dared: A Novel Based on the True Story of a Hitler Youth 
Author: Susan Campbell Bartoletti
Publisher: Scholastic Press
Publication Date: February 1, 2008
Reading Level: 13 and up

Synopsis: (from Goodreads) –

Just as the Nazis are rising to power, Helmuth Hübener, a German schoolboy, is caught up in all the swashbuckling bravado of his time. The handsome stormtrooper uniforms, the shiny jackboots and armbands, the rousing patriotism all serve to draw him into this bright new world full of promise and hope. In the beginning his patriotism is unwavering. But every day the rights of people all over Germany are diminishing. Jews are threatened and their businesses are being destroyed. The truth has been censored, and danger lurks everywhere. Anybody can turn on you. The world has turned upside down: Patriotism means denouncing others, love means hate, and speaking out means treason. How much longer can Helmuth keep silent? Told in flashback, Newbery Honor Book author Susan Campbell Bartoletti magnificently explores the life of a heroic German youth who dared to stand up against the Nazi regime.

My Review:

Where has this genre been all my life?

Okay, okay – I need to clarify here.  I read plenty of books about World War II and the Holocaust.  I read The Diary of Anne Frank and Number the Stars in school.  I even went to the Holocaust Memorial Museum on a school trip to Washington DC in 8^th grade (which was hands-down the most memorable stop on that trip.  I don’t remember all the quotes from the war memorials or everything from the Smithsonian – but I remember every single minute I was in the Holocaust Museum.  It will haunt you, disgust you and inspire you to be the very best of humanity. Sound weird, but it’s true).  Most of the things I’ve read or heard about the Holocaust come from the Jewish victims with a little flavor of people who helped Jews hide.  But I have rarely read books about Germans in the 1940s who did not agree with the Nazi plan and even risked their lives to oppose Hitler.

Now, however, I’ve read The Book Thief and The Boy Who Dared – and my heart breaks for those people.

The Book Thief introduced me to the concept that there were Germans who opposed the Nazis (I sort of knew that was the case, but I really hadn’t thought about it very much). Reading The Boy Who Dared drove this point home with me.  Not all Germans were marching in the squares and Heiling Hitler at every turn and corner.  So many of them just wanted to provide for their families and be good people at a time when doing one meant not doing the other.

For most of my life – indeed, for many in my generation, World War II seems like such a distant time in history.  You learn about it the same way you learn about the pilgrims, the American Revolution, the Civil War and the Great Depression.  They are just dates and names in the history book that don’t mean much.  I thought so too – until I realized that my parents were born not even fifteen years after the war was over.  And then I thought that fifteen years really isn’t that long of a time period.  It felt that way when I was a kid, but I’m older now.  And it gives me chills.

I’ve often wondered how the Holocaust was allowed to happen.  Even after all my study and learning how the yellow Stars of David and mandatory curfews and segregated schools slowly became the concentrations camps, it still baffles me how this could happen.  I'll be honest, it scares me to death. You have a country hurting because of an economy that is completely and totally in the sewers because of losing a war, the entire nation was humiliated and they got desperate enough to let Hitler and his guys come in and hijack a country for their own power and personal gain and call it patriotism.

I just realized this review hasn’t talked much about The Boy Who Dared, but I think that’s because I just finished this book and it’s got me thinking about this.  For me, that is a sign of a magnificent piece of writing – that you don’t necessarily notice the writing style or the characters, but the content of the story.  Helmuth Hubener is a fantastic character.  I hesitate to call him a “character” because he was an actual person and these things really happened, but Bartoletti’s characterization of him is so wonderful and I enjoyed reading his thought processes and how he came to do what he did.  This is a seventeen-year-old kid who is illegally tuning into the BBC radio broadcasts and distributing fliers with news of the war from his radio.  But he didn’t just wake up one morning and think “Gosh, I’d really like to get arrested by the Gestapo, so I’m going to print up anti-Nazi pamphlets and really cheese them off.”  Everything he did was driven by the fact that he was taught to respect others and see people as sons and daughters of God and that patriotism does not mean demonizing an entire group of people just because they’re a convenient scapegoat.

The fact that this was written for the YA set – that you would trust teens enough to understand something like this (well, I would anyway) – speaks volumes to the importance of the topic and the reverence that people like Helmuth Hubener deserve.  Anyone even remotely interested in human history owes it to themselves to read this book.

The Bad Things Don't Always Spoil the Good - Review of "The Book Thief"

Title: The Book Thief
Author: Markus Zusak
Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers
Publication Date: December 2005
Reading Level: Age 14 and up

Awards:National Jewish Book Award
Book Sense Book of the Year Award for Children's Literature (2007)
Prijs van de Kinder- en Jeugdjury Vlaanderen (2009)
Printz Honor (2007)
Exclusive Books Boeke Prize (2007)
Zilveren Zoen (2008)
Teen Read Award Nominee for Best All-Time-Fave (2010)
Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis (2009)
ALA's Top Ten Best Books for Young Adults (2007)

Synopsis: (from Goodreads)
It’s just a small story really, about among other things: a girl, some words, an accordionist, some fanatical Germans, a Jewish fist-fighter, and quite a lot of thievery...
Narrated by Death, Markus Zusak's groundbreaking new novel is the story of Liesel Meminger, a young foster girl living outside of Munich in Nazi Germany. Liesel scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she discovers something she can't resist- books. Soon she is stealing books from Nazi book-burnings, the mayor's wife's library, wherever they are to be found.
With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, Liesel learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids, as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement.

My Review:
Oh, "The Book Thief" - you wonderful, wonderful piece of writing you.

This book first came to my attention through the Mark Reads blog.  All I knew was that it was set in Nazi Germany and there was a girl who stole books.  How the two connected, I hadn't the foggiest idea.  But the themes connected in one of the most beautiful ways I have ever seen.

So many of the stories about the Holocaust and World War II and Nazi Germany focus on the horrible things human beings are capable of doing to other human beings and "The Book Thief" is no exception.  But what this book does so magnificently is telling the story of Germans who - surprise! - didn't actually buy into the Nazi propaganda.  In fact, there were plenty of Germans who were just trying to take care of their families and follow the rules and do what they thought was right.

The best thing about this story is Liesel Meminger, the titular book thief who finds joy and solace in the books she "steals" from various places (though one of those places is the mayor's wife's library - and the mayor's wife purposely leaves the door open for Liesel).  She is just a little girl who plays with her friends and gets into mischief - just like any other kid in any other time period, but her experiences are set up against the backdrop of Nazi Germany.  Her childhood is peppered with flashbacks of her foster father's experience in World War I, scenes of Death (the narrator) picking up souls killed in the war and scenes of the people in Liesel's neighborhood taking cover in a basement during bombings.

My favorite chapter is when Max Vandenburg - a Jewish man Liesel's family is hiding - illustrates a story as a gift to Liesel to thank her for her kindness.  I don't want to go into details about Max's story because it is so lovely and wonderful, but the whole chapter was a brilliant depiction of the story as a whole.

This entire story is an exceptional tale of the very worst of humanity sitting right next to the best of humanity.  It takes all the black and white morality in storytelling and sits it on the bench and lets the grays of real people shine through.  Nothing is ever straightforward, as much as we try to make things good and right.  But that doesn't mean you stop trying to live a good and moral life the best way you know how.