Anita Lobel is known for illustrating children's books, often in collaboration with her husband, Arnold Lobel of [Frog and Toad] fame. What I didn't know was that she was a very young Holocaust survivor. This memoir is written for a younger audience, or perhaps it just feels that way because she writes from the perspective of her childhood self. No reflections from her adult self on what she went through or about the war. Instead it is a wonderful glimpse into what it must have been like for a very young child to witness and experience the horrors of war and the Shoah.

Hanusia, as she was called by her family, was five years old when the Germans occupied her hometown of Krakow. She and her parents and younger brother lived in a small apartment, along with her nanny. Her father disappeared one night, and it wasn't until after the war that she learned he had been sent to the Soviet camps. Her mother was able to secure fake documents and spent the war living and working as a Catholic Pole. Fearing for the safety of the children, it was agreed that the nanny would take the children first to the village where family lived, and then to the nanny's tiny village. They disguise her younger brother as a girl, because he could be identified as Jewish the moment he used a public bathroom.

After five years of hiding, the children are caught and taken first to a prison and then to Płaszów concentration camp. Because their nanny was Catholic, they were taken away without an adult. They were ten- and eight-years-old. After stints in several different camps, they are liberated and taken to Sweden. There they spend two years in a sanitarium with tuberculosis, until they are finally reunited with family. Five years later they emigrate to the US and the story ends.

Lobel's story is heartbreaking, yet not emotionally fraught or graphic, in part because she was so young that her memories are at times innocent, and in part because she became emotionally numb to everything except wanting to stay with her brother. She never names her family members, except by diminutives like Mamusia (for Mama), and her brother is never named at all. For their privacy? Or perhaps to maintain the childlike perspective? She includes many photographs from before and after the war. I highly recommend this short memoir for its unique perspective from a very young child survivor. ( )

Summary:

No Pretty Pictures: A Child Of War by Anita Lobel is a biography about her (Anita Lobel's) life as a jew during WW2. Before she was a refugee, Anita was a decently well off child. When she was almost five years old however, many of her family's belongings were taken by Nazis. Later many of her family members were deported and eventually Anita's mother and Nanusiu (nanny) had to take her and her brother to the countryside to try to get away from the Nazis. Anita's mother stayed in the city, as she had false papers to get her by, and the children and Nanusiu had to go to the countryside. Anita, here brother, and Nanusiu survived by begging and trading household goods from the old house for food. After moving many places and living in hiding they eventually move into a convent in which they stay for a while. Later the convent was caught housing Jews, and the Nazis took Anita, her brother, and the rest of the Jews to a prison, in which they would stay before being shipped off to a concentration camp. Many Jews were shot after they came in. The time she did spend in the prison camps she fortunately was able to get good food from a Nazi soldier who let her and some of her other deported family eat in his room. This went on until the camp was marched into the Auschwitz. They only spent one night there though and they had to move into a train the next day. The train took them to a small base in which they stayed for many days. They were then saved by soldiers (Anita knew they weren't Nazis but she didn't know who they were) who took them from the base and into Sweden. Anita and her brother were sick with tuberculosis and had to stay in a sanatorium. Almost a year later Anita was sent a letter from her mother, and after a while she got a letter from her father too. Anita had to leave the sanatorium and leave her brother behind, as she had recovered from tuberculosis and her brother had not. She was taken to Poland to a shelter for Polish refugee children, where she stayed until her parents came to get her. When she was taken back by her parents, she lived in a boardinghouse with her parents. Eventually her parents got jobs and were able to afford new clothes for Anita. When her brother finally recovered from tuberculosis they needed to get a larger apartment. Anita was finally able to go to school for the first time in her life. When she was in high school, Niania died from a brain tumor. When Anita was sixteen, her parents decided to move to America. She left behind her best friends and her first boyfriend to leave for New York City.

My Thoughts:

This story was really great for me to understand how the Jews were treated and lived in hiding during WW2. It was absolutely heartbreaking to read how Anita completely lost so much of her trust for people because of living in hiding so long. Anita, even after being saved by the soldiers, was so wary of everyone trying to help her. She thought that the Polish refugee shelter was another prison camp. It is fortunate she was able to hide for so long, she might not have made it out of the prison camps alive if she was caught earlier in the war. It was also sad reading that her brother didn't even recognise his father when he came back from the sanatorium. Her brother was way too young to remember his father before the war. This book gave me a lot of insight on what it was like to live in hiding from the Nazis and live in prison camps as a Jew. ( )

I would use this book as an independent read for fifth graders or middle school students. I would use this book for advanced readers in fifth grade and middle school students because the topic and detail it goes into during the war might be too graphic or mature for younger students. I would use it as an independent read for students who like to read about world war II and the Nazis because it's not written like a history book and isn't written like a typical biography.

This book could be a class text for middle school students. It is a little tricky with the foreign languages used (even though it often translates) and it overall would be most appropriate for an older student. As a class text, they could discuss the history taking place and they would enjoy the story being told of life on the run.

No Pretty Pictures: a child of war –Anita Lobel
3 stars

Anita Lobel is an award winning illustrator of children’s books. I love her artwork. I have read On Market Street and The Rose in My Garden to many groups of children. Her pictures are vibrant and full of life. Although the title prepared me, I was deeply affected by her stark, unadorned memoir of her childhood. She was barely five years old, essentially the age of children that I teach, when the Germans invaded Poland. She does not relate her story in a child’s voice, but she tells it from the child’s perspective without adding adult interpretations or explanations until the epilog of the book. From my adult perspective this made the story even more horrifying. There is the helpless child who does not, cannot, understand what is happening to her.
The miraculous thing is that Anita and her young brother, who was frequently disguised as a girl, did survive the concentration camp. They were liberated and sent as refugees to Sweden. In Sweden they recovered from tuberculosis in a sanatorium until they were reunited with both of their surviving parents.
This memoir was intended for a young adult audience so the language is simple. I found myself wanting more from the narrator as she described her own reactions to being reunited with her family. She frequently refers to her own confusion about religious issues, but she never speaks to how she personally resolved these questions. There is an emotional distance in the telling of this story that is not a result of the reduced vocabulary. I think that Anita Lobel’s emotional expression is in her artwork, not in her prose.

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