WHAT WORLD IS LEFT

Anneke Van Raalte’s nonpracticing Dutch Jewish family is sent to Theresienstadt, a concentration camp that the Nazis try to pass off as a model settlement.

Fourteen in 1943, she lives through two years of scarce food, bedbugs, forced labor, and little privacy. Still, life here is preferential to being transported to death camps like Auschwitz, a fate suffered by many, including her best friend and the boy with whom she falls in love. Her family survives, but the Russian liberators and Dutch military are later suspicious: Did her father’s artistic work keep the family alive? Anneke struggles with these thoughts. She details the Nazis’ grandiose plans for the Embellishment, a facade created to fool the 1944 Danish Red Cross committee, which included her father’s fairy-tale murals in the children’s infirmary. In this first-person narrative, Anneke is keenly aware of the moral choices her father and other artists make even as they create clandestine drawings documenting their true plight. This novel, based on the author’s mother’s memories and a book by her maternal grandfather, cartoonist and illustrator Jo Spier, explores the situation of artists who were used by the Nazis to help cover up their heinous crimes. Originally published in 2008, this edition includes a new preface and references. Polak writes authentically, including appropriate details about the camp’s horrors and insights into her protagonist’s conflicted feelings about friendship, romance, family, and religion.

An unusual Holocaust novel told through the eyes of a cognizant, questioning teen.