![]() ![]() Loving both kids and books equally as I do, perhaps helping children and the adults who care about them find good books through this blog is the next best thing to being there. Retired after 32+ years as an elementary librarian, I really miss the joy of bringing together the right book with the right reader at the right time. ![]() Labels: Danish Resistance 1940-1945 (Grades 3-7), Dutch Resistance, Jews in the Netherlands, World War II Stories (Grades 5-10) The Upstairs Room was named a Newbery Honor Book and is followed by The Journey Back: Sequel to the Newbery Honor Book The Upstairs Room which documents with equal depth and honesty the immediate postwar years of the reunited de Leeuw family.įor mature young readers, these two memoirs provide a way to experience firsthand what this momentous period in history was like with someone whose skillful writing puts the reader there with her in the upstairs room. A poignant afterword describes Reiss's return visit to the Oostervelds with her own two young daughters, as she shows them how she climbed into the hiding place behind the false closet when the Germans searched the upstairs room. Ultimately it is the loving kindness and courage of the Oostervelds and other families who risk their lives to hide them which give the de Leeuw girls strength to hold out until their liberation in the spring of 1945. At times, both girls despair, feeling that capture and death may be better than their virtual imprisonment in the upstairs room. Unlike Anne Frank, Annie's story has the happy difference that author Johanna Reiss lives to write, as an adult, the gripping tale of her three years in hiding, a time of both mind-numbing boredom and incredible terror as the Nazis one by one ferret out Jews hidden nearby by the Resistance.Īs Reiss writes, Annie's voice is that of a ten-year-old, separated from all but one sister, longing to feel the sun on her face and run free, and yet learning from smuggled Resistance newspapers of the gas chambers and slave labor camps which will be her fate if she is discovered. The girls are placed by the Resistance with an seemingly ordinary Dutch farm family, the plain-spoken Johan Oosterveld, who, along with his wife Dientje and mother Opoe, are the real heroes of this autobiographical account which eerily parallels the experiences chronicled in Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. Breathing through my mouth made less noise.Īnnie and her older sister Sini de Leeuw go into hiding in 1942 as the Germans begin to round up Dutch Jews for labor and death camps. ![]() Sini put her arms around me and pushed my head against her shoulder. We heard her footsteps as she ran down the stairs.įootsteps. We heard her lower the shelf and close the closet door. They're here!" She closed up the hiding place with the piece of wood. ![]()
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