RUN AND HIDE

A powerful account focusing on the fates of Jewish children during the Holocaust.

The narrative opens in 1930 Germany, setting the stage for the rise of the Nazis and noting Europe’s history of antisemitism in the preceding centuries. Heartbreaking pages are devoted to the Kindertransport’s separation of kids and parents. For those remaining, ghettos, camps, and mass murder awaited. Many more pages emphasize the children who survived, their endurance, and the dangerously heroic work of resourceful adults, Jews and non-Jews alike, who protected them. Kids were saved by the thousands, but still, over 1,000,000 perished. Using quotations from survivors and many personal vignettes, Brown successfully animates masses of historical material and individualizes the suffering. Some elements would have benefited from more context: Jews’ crime is said to be “their religion,” but the book does not explain why even secular Jews were targeted. The text notes political machinations and the origins of the Nazi Party’s name, but the party’s misappropriation of the term socialism goes unexplained. The work closes with a historical note recounting post–World War II tragedies from the Partition to the reign of Pol Pot, the Rwandan genocide, and more, along with mention of rising hate crimes, including antisemitism, in the U.S. The devastating impact of the Holocaust on children is only too real in both the text and the dynamic illustrations, which recall the expressive lines and subdued washes of Brown’s The Unwanted (2018).

Vivid, devastating, and impressively documented.