Requiem

Gr 8 Up—The tragedy and inhumanity of the Terezín ghetto come to life in this powerful collection. The vivid poems, all but one written by fictional inmates, their Nazi oppressors, and local residents, reverberate with suffering, fear, resignation, despair, courage, and unspeakable brutality. In 1941 the ghetto was created as a collection and transport camp for Jews and was later touted as an arts facility to fool the Red Cross inspectors into believing that this was a benign setting to nurture artistic expression. In the one found poem, Valter Eisinger/11956 asks his wife to find another companion if he were to be killed. He died in Buchenwald in 1945. Children's fears of separation and the indignities of daily life spent in filthy and unhealthy conditions cry out from these sensitively written poems, which are given depth and veracity by Janezcko's research. There are even glimpses of suppressed compassion toward the inmates felt by the Nazis. Illustrations discovered after the war and done by actual inmates are interspersed with the poetry. Some are chilling renditions of the horrific prison life while others recall aspects of the life left behind. The faces in one illustration seem to scream out in terror, reminiscent of The Scream by Edvard Munch. An afterword, author's notes, translations of foreign words, an extensive bibliography, and a list of websites are appended. Reading this along with Hana Volavkova's I Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children's Drawings and Poems from the Terezín Concentration Camp (Schocken, 1978) creates an in-depth picture of the perversity of the Nazi's Final Solution.—Renee Steinberg, formerly at Fieldstone Middle School, Montvale, NJ