Pnina Bat Zvi

A book about a family who is separated from their parents during the Nazi rule. Before the parents are carted away by the soldiers the parents give the girls 3 coins. They are to make a promise to only use them if it is very important. The two girls spend several years in Auschwitz . One by one the girls see friends disappear. One day one of the sister gets sick and is taken away to another barrack. A barrack for the sick. Everyone knows what happens to the sick. The sister Rachel takes a serious risk and attempts to get her sister back. She is caught by a guard but Rachael uses the coin to buy off the soldier and it works. Toby however is caught missing from the barrack and the Nazi guard comes to fetch her. The guard turns her German shepherd dog onto Toby. Toby survives the attack but not without tremendous pain. The girls do survive the camp and they were able to keep the promise their parents asked. This book is not for young children. The illustrations are actual faces (cutouts) that look like real people. The story is dark but has a happy ending. A good book for older middle school children.… (mere)

This is an odd book. The illustrations -- digital collages by Isabelle Cardinal -- are quirky, and while not necessarily the wrong choice for a book about Auschwitz, over power the story, which starts abruptly and rather cliched (waking up), and then finishes just as abruptly. This isn't Holocaust 101 For Kids -- we aren't given a primer on Nazis or concentration camps or the Second World War. And that's the saddest thing about this book -- my daughter is privileged enough that she would need a Holocaust 101 before reading this book to understand it. Imagine if you don't have to do that, to introduce that narrative to a child because the existence of it (or similar events like what happened in Rwanda, Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia, etc.) is omnipresent in her and her family's history. That makes me so sad, even if I found the book so uneven.

The Promise by Pnina Bat Zvi and Margie Wolfe went on sale April 18, 2018.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.… (mere)