Between 1939 and 1949, from ages 4 to 14, Uri Shulevitz traveled from Poland to Belarus to northern Russia to what is now Kazakhstan, back to Belarus and Poland, then on to Germany and France, and finally to Israel. He and his parents traversed thousands of miles, fleeing first Nazi-occupied Poland and then the Soviet Union. He eventually settled in the United States and has since become one of our most beloved illustrators, winning the 1969 Caldecott Medal for The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968). His 2009 Caldecott Honor Book, How I Learned Geography (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), recounts an episode from his family’s time in Turkestan, in the Kazakh Republic. In his new memoir, Chance (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Oct. 13), Shulevitz, 85, takes young readers through those 10 years, an often harrowing experience lightened by his two passions: art and story. He spoke to Kirkus by telephone from his home in New York City. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What caused you to write Chance now?

Well, I know I’m old enough at this point. But I wanted to write it before I get even older and start forgetting. There have been books about the Holocaust in this country, and rightfully so. But there haven’t been that many that were about the people who escaped, who ended up in Russia and other countries. There were some books for young readers, for example, of my dear friend Esther Hautzig, The Endless Steppe [T.Y. Crowell, 1968]. There aren’t too many, and mine is one of the few. And that’s why also I think that it was important to tell my story.

Those must have been incredibly difficult memories to relive.

Yes, those were very painful memories, especially some of them. Not every single thing. [But] I didn’t mind reliving them. I assure you, it’s not because I’m a masochist or something. It’s just that it sheds a certain light on one’s life. And it gave me a deeper understanding of what took place. I also wanted to examine—for myself and for the reader—the sequence of events and what took place. And although some of the memories were painful, I didn’t want to avoid them. And I’m glad that I wrote about them.

Since it is difficult material, I’m wondering how you decided to present it for young readers?

Even when I do a picture book, I don’t think of it as being for very young children; I think of it as being for all ages. But I write it in the simplest terms so that children and adults can appreciate and enjoy it. And that’s pretty much the approach that I took when I worked on Chance, as well. So in that sense, it’s very straightforward. [I’m not trying to] twist myself into a pretzel in order to appeal to a certain audience.

[Take] How I Learned Geography. Although it’s such a sad story, children have responded [to it]. I get a lot of emails from teachers [whose] children want to ask me questions about it and so on. We may sometimes have the wrong impression about how a young audience would respond to things. [What] children learn about the world has been imposed upon them. They did not ask to be here, but they were brought by their parents, and now they want to find out what it is, where they are. The range of curiosity is really wide.

I have not been able to get over your having to leave Turkestan before your friend could finish reading The Wizard of Oz to you.

Photo by Paula BrownStories are extremely important to me. And I believe they are very important to people in general. We live in two worlds at once. One of them is the world of the body, and the other one is the world of the mind. Both are very, very important needs. And that is something which really differentiates us from animals. You have to feed your body, you have to eat, you have to have a roof over your head. But you also need to feed your mind and soul. And that’s where stories come in.

I was heartbroken [to leave in the middle of The Wizard of Oz], but I couldn’t remain there by myself. My parents were anxious to get out, because they knew about so many people who got stuck in the Soviet Union and were not allowed to leave. This wasn’t a free country where you could just do what you wanted and go where you wanted to go—you needed papers for all those things. I didn’t realize at the time, when I was listening to The Wizard of Oz, how our trip back to the West would resemble in some ways the hardships of Dorothy in trying to get back to Kansas. So it actually has very deep echoes, which I wasn’t fully aware of at the time, but when I was working on the book, I realized [it]. There were those discoveries which I made, and so it wasn’t all a painful experience to work on the book. It was also a journey of discovery.

This book is a testament to your parents and their will—not just to survive, but to keep you safe. Were you conscious of that at the time?

Yes, I was aware of that. We were starving. Night after night, I went to bed hungry. And when I say hungry, I don’t mean that there was kind of a meager supper—there was nothing, absolutely nothing. It was a different world, it was a different time. When [Chechen refugees] arrived [in Turkestan], they kept dying one by one. They just couldn’t survive in exile from their own country. And yet we managed to.

How do you feel, as a Holocaust survivor, to know that a really shocking number of people don’t know that 6 million Jews were killed?

Well, the subtitle of the book is “Escape From the Holocaust” because I and my parents were survivors as a result of the war. The reason I’m saying this, that I don’t consider myself a Holocaust survivor, is because we weren’t either in the ghetto or in the concentration camps. None of our family in Poland survived. [If we hadn’t escaped] we would have been just as they were. Holocaust survivors deserve all our admiration and respect, but I don’t feel that I deserve that.

Is there something that you would like to say about your book that I haven’t asked you?

My experience was the war, and now, there is also a war against an invisible enemy, the coronavirus. There is a deep connection between the two. As kids in those days, we coped. My lifeline in those horrible times was my drawing and my love of stories. I hope my experience will inspire young readers to seek their own lifeline. In my case, it was drawing and stories, but it doesn’t mean that it has to be that for every single person. Every person has to find their lifeline to give them that deep connection to life and to positive thinking.

Vicky Smith is a young readers’ editor.