Escape and Sophie Scholl

I have visited concentration camps in Germany a couple times.  Each time, it has seemed incomprehensible that such atrocities were actually carried out.  As I have witnessed extremist ideologies gain greater acceptance throughout my lifetime, I have come to appreciate the lessons taught by the preserved concentration camps even more.  They are memorials to what happens when we put aside basic individual rights and liberties.  They serve as a stark warning about what happens when societies continue down the slippery slope of denying rights to others in the name of a greater good.  When I first visited the concentration camps, I did not have children, but by the time of my second visit, I did.  That made the lessons of the past a little more emotional since the National Socialists in Germany did not spare children from the horrors of the camps.

Escape: Children of the Holocaust by Allan Zullo (ISBN: 978-0-545-09929-5) and Sophie Scholl: Die Weiße Rose by Achim Seiffarth (ISBN: 978-3-12-556024-6) are books written for young people (junior high kids seemed to be the target audience), but present some of the stories of Nazi Germany that are good for readers of any age to know.   Zullo’s book told the story of about a dozen Jewish children and their survival of the Holocaust.  The stories were varied and all captivating.  They usually started with the pre-war life of the kids or, at least, their life under Hitler when it still wasn’t too crazy.  This allowed for the reader to see how quickly things went downhill.  Inevitably, before long, families were separated, people were in ghettos or concentration camps, and life would never be the same again as kids were forced to grow up quickly and learned that the adult world wasn’t all it was cracked up to be since it induced a lot of pain, suffering, and cruelty.  The kids in Zullo’s book all displayed incredible levels of resiliency, though, scraping by and taking advantage of what was few chances and opportunities were given them, such as a truck taking workers to another camp with a sympathetic guard who was known to let one or two people at a time make a run for it.  The stories, which are of those who survived, do not glass over the fact that the survivors of the ghettos and camps were in the vast minority, and it is sobering to read of all the friends and family these survivors lost.  Seiffarth’s book is written for learners of German, but although relatively simply written, still does a great job presenting a fascinating story.  Sophie Scholl was a young woman who went from teenager to college student during the Nazi rise to power.  Originally a believer in what Hitler was doing, as she came closer to adulthood, she saw the errors intrinsic to nationalist socialism.  Following the lead of her older brother, an activist in the underground resistance, her religious father, who could not abide the unfair treatment of Jews and others oppressed by the regime, and a college professor who encouraged free thinking and debate even when it was unpopular, Sophie joined the resistance, helping to distribute anti-Nazi flyers.  Her efforts helped present what was an unpopular opinion to the masses, especially as she helped found resistance cells among young people in cities outside her hometown.  Eventually, the Nazi regime caught up to her, her brother, others in their circle, including their professor, and they were executed.

As stated above, while both books are juvenile literature, they are quality works.  I enjoyed trying to stretch my knowledge of German, the native language of my grandparents and other ancestors who have a story or two of their own involving the Nazi authorities.  The stories in Escape easily kept my attention, told interesting details, and were from a variety of people, such as those from Germany proper as well as from occupied territories.  This variety gave more flavor and a nice, broad overview of what are certainly not isolated incidents.  I thought Sophie Scholl was also a nice overview that provided sufficient detail to be informative and yet not get bogged down.  I had seen a movie on her a few years ago, but this book gave me some new information and was, I thought, better (I always think that about books relative to movies, though).  Both of these books present an interesting and accurate picture of what life was like under the Nazis — for Jews in the first and for conscientious Germans in the other.  They remind us what we should be fighting to avoid, even if it’s only a step or two in that direction, and the kind of people we should be striving to be, even if that striving leads to unpopular positions, ostracization, and, possibly, the ultimate sacrifice.  Liberty — for ourselves and for others — is worth those things.

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