Review by Booklist Review
Gr. 3-6. My mother threw me from the train. A Jewish woman in Germany today tells how, as an infant, she survived the Holocaust after she was thrown from a train on its way to the camps in 1944 and was taken in and raised by a village woman. The survivor imagines her parents in the ghetto and transports. Did they hold her close and kiss her before throwing her away to save her life? Innocenti, who did the Holocaust picture book Rose Blanche (1991), dramatizes the horror in amazingly detailed photo-like illustrations with an overlay of surreal imagery: a small baby carriage stands on the platform as the Jews are being loaded into the cattle cars; wrapped in bright pink, a baby flies through the air as the train hurtles through pastoral landscapes. The clear, tiny details dramatize both the fragility and the endurance of the infant survivor, as well as the bizarre calm of the normal world. Is the woman's story true? The experience is certainly known to have happened to some babies. --Hazel Rochman Copyright 2003 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This picture book may raise more questions than it answers, starting with the five-pointed die-cut star on the cover, a window to the yellow page beneath. Is this supposed to be a reference to the Star of David, like the one worn by Erika, whom the author (in an author's note) claims to have met in a German village in 1995 and whose story she purports to tell here? Erika believes she was a few months old when she was thrown from a train bound for Dachau and saved by a kind and courageous woman. Her Erika is caught in lengthy conjecture about her parents and their tragic plight. Of her rescuer and of her own life Erika says little, other than the critical news that she has children and grandchildren, and that her star "still shines." (Perhaps this is what's meant by the cover?) Vander Zee has more the beginnings of a story than a nuanced work, but Innocenti (Rose Blanche) lives up to his admirers' expectations with his haunting, even harrowing drawings. Grim black-and-white illustrations show adults and children entering cattle cars, their faces blocked by headscarves or by the barrier reading "Verboten"; the German soldiers present only their impervious backs to readers. As the train pulls out, Innocenti imagines a snow-white baby carriage left by the track, its emptiness speaking volumes. With other images, both real and nightmarish, the art conveys a measure of the anguish of the Nazi victims' vulnerability. Ages 10-up. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
This picture book is a read-aloud candidate for high school classes. It tells a powerful and true story of sacrifice and survival. The book opens in 1944, during the Holocaust. Erika and her mother are traveling in a train car bearing the Star of David. As the train slows to pass a small village, the woman throws her infant out of the window. "On her way to death, my mother threw me to life," recounts the narrator. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Horn Book Review
(Intermediate) This large, square picture book would make an effective introduction to the Holocaust. The author narrates the story in the voice of a woman she happened to meet in Germany in 1995. ""Erika,"" who wore a six-pointed Star of David necklace, knew nothing of her origins except that, as an infant, she was thrown from a train that was en route to a concentration camp; she shared with Vander Zee the haunting questions that are the heart of this brief text: ""Were [her parents] told they were being resettled in a better place?... Had they heard whispered rumors?...did she whisper my name?..."" And, finally, ""What happened next is the only thing I know for sure. My mother threw me from the train."" The spare, straightforward narrative, widely spaced to leave blanks as broad as the gaps in Erika's own early history and punctuated by tiny six-pointed stars, effectively complements Innocenti's handsomely composed, photorealistic black-and-white paintings, where human drama is subjugated to such rectilinear features as bricks, railroad tracks, and barbed wire. Color connotes hope in two framing illustrations of Erika: first as an adult with the author, and finally as a solitary, troubled, yet cared-for child; and also, in an otherwise gray scene, as a pink-wrapped bundle hurtling from the train to safety. Most poignant (and provocative) are the tiny, five-pointed star on the last page and its large, die-cut fellow, which pierces the somber cover--an eloquent if unvoiced reminder of one of the possible consequences of survival: a significant number of Jewish children were saved by people who raised them as Christians. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
