With the same attention to detail and straightforward writing style readers have come to appreciate from her, Deborah Hopkinson looks at how the rescue operation of Jewish children from Nazi occupied Europe, known as the Kindertransport, was able to saved approximately 10,000 young people. In the first half of this fascinating history , Hopkinson details Hitler's rise to power and ties its impact into the lives of a number of Jewish families. Most people don't realize just how widespread anti-Semitic feelings were in 1930s Germany, but as Hitler became more popular, as his followers increased, many Jews who had believed themselves to be as German as their non-Jewish neighbors began to experience a definite change. For example, Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps for no reason, prohibitions were enacted so that Jews in civil service lost their jobs, Jews couldn't go to the movies or visit a park, Jewish children were no longer allowed to attend German s...
(This post gets filed under the rubric Better Late Than Never. My Kiddo arrived home at 2:00 AM Christmas morning, we've been catching up, and I forgot to set this up to publish automatically.) The story of the Christmas Truce of 1914 is an interesting one. The very fact that ordinary soldiers fraternized with each other on the battlefield, even for one day, was considered to be an act of treason by both the British and German governments. But when you realize that war is a political act, and soldiers are the powerless who must carry out the commands of their superior officers unquestioningly, the story about Christmas Truce becomes all the more meaningful. In his Author’s Note to Shooting at the Stars , John Hendrix writes that the truce “stands as a lasting example of ordinary men doing the extraordinary…Armed with carols and Christmas trees, individual men threw away their weapons and walked toward the enemy with a desperate hunger for peace.” I think that the hunger for peace i...
