Escape: Allan Zullo’s True Stories of Children Who Survived the Holocaust
This book features seven amazing true stories of brave boys and girls who escaped from the clutches of the Nazis during the Holocaust. Their compelling accounts are based on exclusive, personal interviews with the survivors. Using real names, dates and places, these stories are faithful versions of their recollections.
Author: Allan Zullo
Title: Escape: Children of the Holocaust
Format: English paperback (Scholastic), 179 pages
Scope: Seven true survival stories for young readers, based on interviews with survivors
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/0545099293 (ASIN 0545099293)
Resistance, False Names and Kindness
These survivors put up secret resistance, used false identities and deceived the Nazis. Through the remarkable kindness of others and their own inner strength, these children found a way to make it through the horrors of the war. One of them is Halina Litman, who by her ninth birthday already understood what her Jewish faith meant to the German occupiers of her town.
Why These Stories Matter
These enduring stories will captivate you and remind you of the power of hope. Their heartbreaking tales of courage and endurance in the face of unimaginable loss are a testimony to their faith and strength of spirit. Written for young readers, the book is a good bridge between Holocaust fiction and adult history, and a natural companion to The Diary of a Young Girl.
Hidden Children
Most of the children in these stories survived by hiding, in one way or another. Some lived under false Christian names with families who passed them off as relatives; some were moved from farm to convent to cellar; some escaped across borders, or simply ran from a round-up at the right moment. Their survival nearly always depended on adults who risked their own lives to help them. Israel’s Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, honours such rescuers as "Righteous Among the Nations", and books like this one are a reminder that those choices were made by ordinary people.
A Series of True Stories
Zullo wrote Escape as part of a group of Scholastic books built on survivors’ testimony, which also includes Survivors: True Stories of Children in the Holocaust and Heroes of the Holocaust: True Stories of Rescues by Teens, both written with Mara Bovsun. The approach is the same in each: short chapters, one child per story, and a careful note at the end of each account about what happened to the survivor after the war. That final glimpse of adult lives, families and careers rebuilt is often the most moving part.
How to Read It with Young People
The stories are told simply, without graphic detail, but they do not hide the loss: parents, brothers and sisters who did not come back. Readers of ten or eleven can manage them, ideally with an adult to talk to afterwards. The book pairs well with Lois Lowry’s novel Number the Stars, about the rescue of Danish Jews, and with The Diary of a Young Girl; it is also a useful counterweight to fictional fables such as The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, because every name and place here is real.
The Reviewer’s View
The original review called these stories enduring and full of hope, and that is the right word. What stays with the reader is not only the horror but the stubborn will to live, and the kindness of strangers who said yes when saying no would have been far safer.
The Author
Allan Zullo, born in 1947, is an American non-fiction writer. He is a best-selling and versatile author or co-author of more than 120 books on a broad range of subjects, for general audiences and for younger readers. With Scholastic he has written several collections of true stories about children and teenagers in the Holocaust, including Survivors and We Fought Back.
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