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Sept. 9, 2005
Brave Catholics of the Shoah
Sally Rogow's book has redemptive lessons for a young audience.
PAT JOHNSON
Writing for children or young adults about the events of the Holocaust
is a fine balance. While it is necessary to impart the horror and
inhumanity of that dark epoch, it is also necessary to do so in
a manner that is appropriate to not only the age and sensibilities
of young people, but in a way that is engaging, rather than didactic.
A new book by a Vancouver author effectively captures this balance,
offering a useful and readable contribution to this sub-genre of
youth literature. Sally Rogow, a retired University of British Columbia
professor and an active member of the local Jewish community, has
written They Must Not Be Forgotten: Heroic Priests and Nuns who
Saved People from the Holocaust (Holy Fire Publishing). Rogow
has written numerous books for young readers, including Faces
of Courage: Young Heroes of World War II.
The subject matter of her new book, while challenging for young
readers, is approached from one of the few perspectives of that
era that could be considered optimistic or redemptive. These are
stories that recount the life-threatening risks taken by individuals
in a time of moral chaos.
Her stories approach complex ethical dilemmas in an age-appropriate
manner. The fate of Jewish children, orphaned and left in the hands
of Catholic saviors, is a matter that is still resolving itself
in various ways today. Disguised as Catholics, for their own sake,
these children faced, among unimaginable other hurdles after the
end of the war, the need to discover their own Jewish identities
in the absence of an older generation.
In the story of Sister Alfonsa, a Polish nun who rescued children
despite the threat of execution, the issue of religious continuity
is addressed.
For example, "To make sure that every child knew how to recite
the Catholic prayers and when to make the sign of the cross, she
taught them how to say the prayers. She wanted to be sure that everyone
knew the prayers before she took them to church with the other children.
It was easier to work with the smaller children who had few memories
of their Jewish past, but the older children struggled with their
identities. Some resisted learning the prayers.
"'I don't want to change my religion,' one girl confided to
her. 'My father was a rabbi and taught me wonderful things about
Judaism.'
"'And you must remember the teachings,' Sister Alfonsa assured
her, and carefully explained that they had to learn the prayers
not because she was trying to make them Catholics, but so nobody
would suspect they were Jews.
"After the Allies won the war and Poland was liberated, Sister
Alfonsa took the 13 children to the Jewish Committee. 'They are
Jewish children and belong to the Jewish people,' she said."
Rogow concludes the vignette with a simple but moving depiction
of a 1980 reunion in Israel between the nun, for whom a tree was
planted in Yad Vashem's Garden of the Righteous, and several of
the people whose lives she saved, at risk to her own.
The small book covers a geographic spectrum, giving children an
introduction to the different circumstances faced by Jews (and others)
in different parts of Europe under the Nazis.
By focusing on one of the few bright aspects of the human spirit
during one of its bleakest hours, Rogow succeeds in increasing understanding
of this period while nevertheless providing enough hints of the
violence and terror that threatened to give children an appropriate
sense of foreboding. The terror in this book is oblique. Children
will sense that peril threatens, yet the brutality and inhumanity
is unspoken here. Allowing the imagination of the reader to fill
in these blanks is what makes a book like this suitable to young
readers of different ages.
They Must Not Be Forgotten is filled with close calls. The
constant threat of discovery is the tension that drives each of
the stories. Yet each ends in a relatively optimistic fashion. The
scars left on the
children in the stories is largely unspoken, but perhaps the imagination
of a child is more capable than that of an adult in assimilating
how such trauma might affect someone that age.
In all, the 13 vignettes provide a range of experiences that introduce
the difficult subject of Holocaust history without extinguishing
a child's need to find hope and optimism even in times of darkness.
Pat Johnson is editor of MVOX Multicultural Digest, www.mvox.ca.
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