Hidden: A Child's Story of the Holocaust by Loïc Dauvillier
Illustrations by Marc Lizano; Ink by Greg Salsedo; Translation by Alexis Siegel
Publisher: First Second
Release Date: April 1, 2014
In this gentle, poetic young graphic novel, Dounia, a grandmother, tells her granddaughter the story even her son has never heard: how, as a young Jewish girl in Paris, she was hidden away from the Nazis by a series of neighbors and friends who risked their lives to keep her alive when her parents had been taken to concentration camps.
The Holocaust is a hard subject to broach with children. As a child, I was fascinated by the subject for reasons that I can't even put into words now, but it began with fiction. Devil's Arithmetic, Number the Stars, The Shadow Children, and many many more became part of my regular reading. This book is a fantastic addition to those stories.
Told with honesty, simplicity, and from the perspective of a child, Hidden feels like an autobiography. It shows the people who were willing to help, loss, betrayal, and the continued pain decades afterward. More importantly, it showed these things through graphic novel style illustrations that will draw in young readers, even the reluctant ones. I can't say enough good things about this book and am so grateful that it has been translated into English.
0 comments:
Post a Comment