When We Were Shadows

January 1, 2018

Gr 5-8-The latest in the series is about the real experiences of Walter, a young Jewish boy, who fled Nazi Germany with his family to go into hiding in the Netherlands. Wees uses letters that Walter wrote to his granddaughter in the 1990s as the narrative structure to provide background and context, combining them with the wartime letters he wrote to his grandmother Oma that describe events when he and his family were "shadows." The story begins in 1937, when five-year-old Walter doesn't understand the peril his family faces. As he comes of age, he learns to conquer his fears and help his family survive. Wees emphasizes the transitory and fearful nature of Walter's family's wartime existence, but the narrative is short on historical detail and background about the Dutch Resistance and the "Hidden Village" that sheltered Jewish families and others. Walter's sister must leave the family due to illness, but the book fails to convey the extreme fear and worry that his family would have felt at such a development. Weaknesses in the narrative and lack of detail will limit readers' identification with Walter as well as their understanding of the war in the Netherlands and its place in the Second World War and Holocaust. VERDICT An additional selection where works about World War II are in demand.-Mary Mueller, Rolla Public Schools, MO

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February 15, 2018
A Jewish boy in the Netherlands spends World War II in hiding in this retelling of real-life events.Walter, a 5-year-old German boy, doesn't understand why his family flees to the Netherlands. It's not an unpleasant life for the first few years. Even after he's barred from attending school, he joyfully helps the local farmers with their work. The Underground is very helpful, spiriting first his grandmother and then his sick sister away to safer hiding spots. Constantly aided by the Underground and their helpful neighbors, Walter's family moves time and time again. For over a year they live in a hidden village in the woods, in barracks built into the hillside, eating almost nothing. Through a mix of retrospective first-person narration (ostensibly in the form of stories told to a granddaughter) and wartime letters, readers see the eight years Walter spends whispering in secret bolt holes. Walter never understands Nazi anti-Semitism, and it's neither explained nor shown in any detail; he scarcely encounters a single Nazi during the war, and anti-Jewish laws are mostly absent here. A one-paragraph author's note lightly contextualizes the history (without identifying the tale as a biography of Ze'ev Bar, formerly Walter Bartfeld), though it does not provide any further information about the Nazi persecution of the Jews.Sometimes overloaded with dry detail and better read as a forest adventure then a Holocaust narrative. (Historical fiction. 10-12)

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