Byers, Ann. Saving Children From the Holocaust.

Byers, Ann  Saving Children From the Holocaust  

 Enslow      2012  128p  31.93 978-0-7660-3323-8 

 ms/hs E-BNS       

   Subtitled A Heroic Story from the Holocaust, this is a book about extraordinary courage and valor. Each chapter offers the personal narratives and photographs of the active participants, both the Jewish escapees and the Danes.  The first-person accounts are presented in italics and discuss the reasons for their actions and the events that took place.          

     During World War II, the Nazis attempted to conquer Europe and rid the world of the Jewish people and others they considered “undesirables.”  They succeeded, to a great extent, in exterminating more than six million Jews and many millions of others.   Only in Denmark was there nationwide resistance to this plan.  The Jews had been welcomed in there as full citizens for several hundred years before the war.  Since the Germans wanted their occupation of Denmark to be as trouble-free as possible because they needed Danish agricultural and industrial products for the war effort, they made no attempt, in the beginning, to remove the Danish Jews.  It was not until 1943, when Hitler demanded the death of the Jews, that the Germans put their plans into action.  Georg Duckwitz, a German attaché living in Denmark, informed his Danish friends of the coming roundup.  Word was spread by the Resistance and the Jews were hidden in the homes of many of their neighbors and later smuggled across the sea to Sweden.  This was the only time in Nazi Germany’s history that a large-scale operation to round up the Jews had failed.  Because of the help of so many of the Danes, the lives of nearly eight thousand Jews were saved.
     The book is both exceptionally well written and very exciting.  Each chapter offers the personal narratives and photographs of the active participants, both the Jewish escapees and the Danes that helped them.  The first-person accounts are presented in italics and discuss the reasons for their actions and the events that took place.  These highlight the factual information given and include what happened in the years after the war. They share their feelings, fears, memories, and the sense of decency that made them become part of the Danish Resistance.  Doing what was right in their eyes was more important than doing what was easy.  The book ends with a chronology, a section of source notes, a bibliography, a glossary, and an index. 
      Holocaust Through Primary Sources (Enslow)     This excellent series contains books covering Kristallnacht, Auschwitz, liberation of the concentration camps, saving the children of the Holocaust, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and rescuing the Danish Jews.  Each presents primary source information that is well-researched and clearly written, providing an excellent discussion of one of mankind’s darkest periods. Holocaust   Susan Ogintz