VVMBookBlog

And here’s another perspective on war. This time the war is World War I and the setting is the Montana frontier in 1917. This book was a Newbery Honor Book this past year.

Based on the life of the author’s great grandmother, the real Hattie Inez Brooks, Hattie was an orphan at 16 and had been living with whichever relative would take her for almost as long as she could remember. Her current home was in Arlington, Iowa with her Uncle Holt and her very disagreeable Aunt Ivy who has plans for Hattie to quit school and go work in a boarding house in town. One high spot in her life is her friend Charlie, who has enlisted in the Army and is fighting the Germans in Europe. Many chapters begin with Hattie’s letters to Charlie.

Hattie’s life takes a turn the day she receives a letter from her now dead Uncle Chester saying that in his will, he has left her his homestead claim in Montana. If she chooses to accept this gift, she would have less than a year to “prove up” the claim by planting 40 acres of crops and set up 480 rods, or almost 1 1/2 miles, of fenceline. Doing that and paying the filing fee would give her full rights to that land. So she takes her cat and gets on the train to her new life and new home in Montana!

Lucky for Hattie she has some kind and very helpful neighbors nearby, including the Mueller family and their 3 children. This family also stirs up conflict for Hattie and their area because Mr. Mueller is from Germany and doesn’t speak English very well. Since “the Huns” in Germany were the enemy during World War I, fear and distrust of anyone from Germany lead to discrimination and anti-German behaviors against German Americans. And, when Hattie or anyone else spoke up for Mr. Mueller, her patriotism was questioned and she also became the target of the local Montana Defense League, a group of young thugs under the direction of Traft Martin, local rancher and land owner.

I liked this story because of the character of Hattie, her spirit, and her courage to go out west on her own. And I appreciated the perspective of living through a war from the “homeland.” The bigotry and bias against anything thought to be German, most especially people, even led to calling sauerkraut “liberty cabbage” to avoid the German connection. Of course, those attitudes didn’t stop with World War I since we have since gone on to discriminate again the Japanese during WWII and others since then. Remember “Freedom Fries?”

Experiences with wars come from many perspectives and here is another one.

Yellow Star is a real-life story written by the niece of Syvia (now Sylvia) Perlmutter who, as a 4-year-old in 1939, was forced along with her family and 270,000 other Jews into a small area of the city (ghetto) of Lodz, Poland. Here they were forced to live under the control of the Nazis, always fearing the next directive that would take them or their friends into the concentration camps and probable death.

The author, Syvia’s niece, received permission from Syvia to tell this story, but then struggled with how to tell it. How do you take these powerful memories of a little girl, from age 4 to 10, and tell the story in a way that honors the little girl and the thousands who didn’t survive? So she decided to tell it in the short little snippets of memory, as though Syvia was still telling the story. It’s almost like poetry and, like The Book Thief, it’s another story that will stay with you for a long time.

And here’s why:

Remember I said that 270,000 Jews were forced into this ghetto to live in 1939. In 1941 thousands more Jews were added to the already crowded living conditions. Periodic “deportations” removed thousands from Lodz with promises of better living conditions, but the remaining Jews gradually realized their true destinations were the concentration/extermination camps and so they came up with ways to avoid being deported. By 1944 Lodz was the only remaining ghetto in Poland, because the others had all been destroyed. And in 1945 when the war ended and the ghetto was liberated, only 800 people walked out alive, and Syvia, now 10 years old, was one of the 12 surviving children.

How can you forget a book telling that story?