Children of the King by Sonya Hartnett

Nov7

Sonya Hartnett’s Children of the King feeds into some of my fondest fascinations:

British history, especially kings and queens and all that jazz.

World War II stories about child evacuees.

Crumbling castles and the ghosts that inhabit them.

Old English houses full of old stuff.

Mysteries of history.

Homeschooling and storytelling.

Themes of courage and small victories and war and peace.

Cecily and Jeremy and their mother have come to the north of England to live with their Uncle Peregrine while London is under siege from Hitler’s bombers. Since Uncle Peregrine live in a big manor house, they decide that it would be only fair for them to take in an extra child evacuee from London. So May comes to live with them. But when Cecily and May find two mysterious boys hiding in the nearby ruins of Snow Castle, they beg Uncle Peregrine to tell them the history of the castle. And he does, even though “its story is as hard as winter” and “cruel” and “scary” and “long”. “Unfit for childish ears.”

Aye, there’s the rub. Although this novel had me enthralled as an adult with my particular fascinations and interests, and although I think it might very well have engaged my interest as a middle school or high school student, it may also very well be “unfit for childish ears.” The horror and unfairness and violence of war are a major topic for discussion, as it surely was in those times when war was so very near and terrible. The adults in the story are not perfect and neither are the children. All of them make annoying, and sometimes stupid or even dangerous, choices. And the history story part of the novel is meant as a mirror or an analogy for the events that are taking place in England in 1940 as war calls for sacrifices that are unfair and horrific and as even children are caught up in a quest for power and dominion that isn’t their fault or their responsibility.

I really loved this book, but you might want to take Charlotte’s review as well as my reservations under consideration before you read it or recommend it to your favorite young reader. I wish I could discuss the history mystery that forms a part of this book with you, but that would be a spoiler, sort of. Suffice it to say that particular slice of history is one of my fascinations, too.

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This book is also nominated for a Cybil Award, but the views expressed here are strictly my own and do not reflect or determine the judging panel’s opinions.

The Extra by Kathryn Lasky

Aug26

Leni Riefenstahl, in case you’ve never heard of her was Hitler’s pet film maker. She became famous with her 193 Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens). Then, Hitler asked her to film the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Riefenstahl became the toast of the film world as she went on a publicity tour for her Olympics movie in the United States in 1938. She told a reporter while on tour: “To me, Hitler is the greatest man who ever lived. He truly is without fault, so simple and at the same time possessed of masculine strength.”

In 1940 Riefenstahl began to make a pet project called Tiefland (Lowland), set in Spain, filmed in Spain and in Germany, and financed by the German government. As extras for the film Riefenstahl used gypsies (Sinti and Roma), unpaid and imported from the concentration camps. The Extra by Kathryn Lasky tells the fictional story of one Sinti girl, Lilo, based on the true history of Anna Blach, a Sinti girl who served as Riefenstahl’s stunt double in the movie. Although Riefenstahl never admitted to mistreating or enslaving the Roma and Sinti extras who worked on Tiefland, it is known that she chose the extras for their “Spanish looks” from the camps and that many, if not all, of them were sent to Auschwitz to die after the filming was complete.

Lasky portrays Riefenstahl in the worst possible light. In The Extra, Leni Riefenstahl is a wolf, self-obsessed, cruel, and opportunistic. Her victims/slaves are the Romani who work and receive somewhat better treatment than they would have received in the camps, but who are subject to the director’s whims and casual acts of callous barbarity. In one scene, that may or may not be true, an extra is killed while the director is filming a scene with a wolf in which she asks the extra to bait the hungry creature with raw meat in order to get a good shot.

I found some of the most interesting material in the book in the author’s note at the end. Although Riefenstah was tried four times for her part in the perpetration of Nazi war crimes, she was never convicted of anything more than being a “follower” or “fellow traveler” of Hitler and the Nazis. She never apologized to the Roma and Sinti for her part in their enslavement and deaths during the filming of Tiefland. She insisted to the end that she was “not political” and that she didn’t know anything about the death camps, although she did grudgingly say in 2002, “I regret that Sinti and Roma had to suffer during the period of National Socialism. It is known today that many of them were murdered in concentration camps.” Riefenstahl lived to be 101 years old, and she is lauded to this day for her outstanding skill as a director and filmmaker and for her second career after the war as an excellent still photographer and underwater photographer.

Can you separate the person from his or her work? If Hitler had been a talented artist instead of a second rate one, could we look at his artwork and not see his atrocities? I find it difficult, and yet I read–and enjoy– lots authors who led less than exemplary lives. Somewhere there is a line between bad behavior that doesn’t spoil the art and egregiously bad behavior that spoils everything it touches. I would find it difficult to watch Tiefland, even though the film itself is supposed to be apolitical, with any kind of objectivity or appreciation.

Poetry Friday: Winston Spencer Churchill

Mar14

Winston Churchill was a fascinating man, and he cultivated many vocations and avocations: soldier, politician, journalist, essayist, biographer, historian, bricklayer, painter, pilot, architect, lecturer, spymaster, head of the navy, member of Parliament, and Prime Minister—just to name a few. However, I’ll bet you never thought of him as a poet.

All students of World War II remember those inspiring and memorable speeches he gave in the House of Commons, on the radio, and in political gatherings. His speeches were carefully formulated, written out and memorized, with stage directions to himself such as “pause here” or “fumble for the correct word.” The orations he gave were typed up (by secretaries) in broken lines to aid his delivery, ‘speech form’ or ‘psalm form’, as William Manchester calls it in his biography of Churchill, titled The Last Lion.

So, after Chamberlain’s betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich, Churchill declaimed:

The whole equilibrium of Europe
has been deranged,
And the terrible words
have, for the time being,
been pronounced
against the Western democracies:

“Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.”

And do not suppose that this is the end.
This is only the beginning of the reckoning.

This is only the first sip–
the first foretaste of a bitter cup
which will be proffered to us year by year–

Unless–
by a supreme recovery of our moral health and martial vigor,
we arise again and take our stand for freedom,
as in the olden time.

Or on October 1, 1939, Churchill spoke the following rather lyrical thoughts on Russia in his first wartime broadcast over the BBC, just after the Russian/German joint invasion of Poland:

I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia.
It is a riddle
wrapped in an mystery
inside an enigma.

But perhaps there is a key.
That key is Russian national interest.

It cannot be in accordance
with the interest or safety of Russia
that Germany should plant itself
upon the shores of the Black Sea.

Or that it should overrun the Baltic States
and subjugate the Slavonic peoples
of southeastern Europe.

No, it doesn’t scan or follow a regular meter, but Mr. Churchill’s “poetry” certainly follows the conventions of free verse with its parallelisms and vivid images, and as I read, I can hear in my mind the familiar voice of Winston Churchill with its rolling cadences and barking baritone:

I would say to the House,
as I have said to those who have joined this Government:
“I have nothing to offer but good, toil, tears, and sweat.”

You ask, what is our policy?
I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air,
with all our might and with all the strength God can give us . . .
That is our policy.

You ask, what is our aim?
I can answer in one word: It is victory,
victory at all costs,
victory in spite of all terror,
victory however long and hard the road may be;
for without victory, there is no survival.

On June 4, 1940:

We shall not flag or fail.
We shall go on to the end.

We shall fight in France,
we shall fight on the seas and oceans,
we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air,
we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be.

We shall fight on the beaches,
we shall fight on the landing grounds,
we shall fight in the fields and in the streets,
we shall fight in the hills;
We shall never surrender.

Finally, perhaps Churchill’s most famous poem/speech, broadcast on June 18, 1940 after Petain’s surrender of Vichy France to the Nazis:

Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization.
Upon it depends our own British life,
and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire.

Hitler knows that he will have to break us on this island
or lose the war.

If we can stand up to him all Europe may be free
and the life of the world may move forward
into broad, sunlit uplands.

But if we fail, then the whole world,
including the United States,
including all we have known and cared for,

Will sink into the abyss of a New Dark Age
made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted,
by the lights of perverted science.

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties,
and so bear ourselves
that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth
last for a thousand years,

Men will still say:
“This was their finest hour!”

A poet indeed.

For Freedom: The Story of a French Spy by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

Dec23

“This book is written as fiction but tells a true story.”

Suzanne David Hall was thirteen years old in 1940 when the Germans invaded France, and she later became a spy for the French resistance. While training to become an opera singer, she relayed messages that helped bring about the Allied invasion of Normandy. The 2003 novel For Freedom: The Story of a French Spy by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley is based on interviews with Hall.

The novel is quite exciting, and the tension builds as Suzanne is called on to deliver her messages more and more frequently and as the spy network in which she works becomes smaller and smaller when the Germans capture the spies one by one. Suzanne is a brave girl, and she continues her work even though she knows the Nazis will torture or even kill her if she is found out. The prose in the story is simple and straightforward, and the pacing is mostly good, although the novel does start out a little slowly. The book is halfway through before Suzanne’s spy adventures start.

For Freedom is a good introduction to so many World War II topics: Dunkirk, Vichy France, the French Resistance, German occupation of France, daily life under German occupation, the Allied invasion of Normandy. But it’s not just a nice “salad” accompaniment to the main course of the history of World War II. The story carried me along and made me feel how difficult it must have been to be involved in the Resistance, never knowing from one day to the next whether this day would be the last before you were captured by the Germans.

Isn’t that what courage is? Courage: to keep doing right, to persevere in the face of uncertainty and even valid reasonable fear. If I were doing something that I knew would lead to disaster, if I were certain that I would be caught and killed and unable to complete my mission, it would be foolish and useless to persist. But if it’s only very likely that I might be arrested and if what I was doing was likely to help many people if I could continue, then bravery would be required. Suzanne was a brave young woman, “a hero of France.”

1940: Events and Inventions

Nov27

April 9, 1940. Germany invades Denmark and Norway, claiming that the invasion is purely defensive.

May 10, 1940. German forces invade Holland and Belgium with their Blitzkrieg or “lightning war”. Both countries have no choice but to surrender. The Germans continue on to France.

May 10, 1940. Winston Churchill becomes Prime Minister of Great Britain, following Neville Chamberlain’s resignation. On May 13, Churchill makes a famous speech in which he tells the House of Commons and the British people:

I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this government: I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival. Let that be realised; no survival for the British Empire, no survival for all that the British Empire has stood for, no survival for the urge and impulse of the ages, that mankind will move forward towards its goal.

June 4, 1940. British forces trapped in France flee from Dunkirk. Under constant German bombardment, warships of the Royal Navy and hundreds of smaller vessels manned by volunteers from the coastal villages of Britain rescue nearly 300,000 British, French, and Belgian soldiers from the beaches and ferry them to safety in England.

June 10, 1940. Mussolini announces that Italy will join forces with Germany; Roosevelt calls the announcement a stab in the back.

The ending to another famous Churchill speech, delivered to the House of Commons on June 18, 1940:

June 22, 1940. The French surrender to the German Blitzkrieg invasion. German troops entered Paris on June 14th, and now Hitler demands that the French sign an armistice in the same railroad car in which the Germans surrendered to the Allies in November 1918.

July 10, 1940. French Marshall Henri Petain establishes a fascist and authoritarian government answering to the Nazis in Vichy, France. France is no longer a republic.

July-September, 1940. The Battle of Britain. The German Luftwaffe sends 1000 planes daily to bomb British ports, shipping, RAF bases, and British radar installations. The Royal Air Force effectively counters the German raids in the air with the help of warnings from the British radar system. Churchill says of the Battle of Britain and the brave RAF pilots, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”

August 21, 1941. Exiled Bolshevik Leon Trotsky is assassinated with an ice pick by Ramon Mercader in Mexico City.

September 24-27, 1940. Japanese aircraft from aircraft carriers in the Gulf of Tonkin attack French positions on the coast of French Indochina (Vietnam and Cambodia). The United States, Britain, and the Dutch government in exile respond to Japanese expansionism by placing an oil, iron ore, and steel embargo on Japan.

September 27, 1940. The Tripartite Pact is signed in Berlin, Germany, establishing the Axis Powers of World War II. The pact was signed by representatives of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan. The three nations agree to a ten-year alliance. Later, other countries sign the pact, including Hungary, Rumania, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Croatia, and Thailand.

October-November, 1940. Seventy people are dying every day, mainly from starvation, in the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, Poland. Occupying Nazi troops continue to herd all Jewish Poles into the 1.3 square mile area; eventually over 400,000 Jews will be contained in the Warsaw ghetto. The Nazis close the Warsaw Ghetto to the outside world on November 16, 1940 by building a wall topped with barbed wire, and deploying armed guards. Leon Uris’s novel Mila 18 tells the story (in fiction)of the Warsaw Ghetto and its inhabitants and their resistance to the Nazi persecution.

1940: Books and Literature

Nov27

Pulitzer Prize for the Novel:
John Steinbeck for The Grapes of Wrath.

Published in 1940:
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway.
Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler.
The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene.
Horton Hatches the Egg by Dr. Seuss.
Over my Dead Body and Where There’s a Will by Rex Stout.
Sad Cypress and One, Two, Buckle My Shoe by Agatha Christie.
Native Son by Richard Wright.
The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis.

Set in 1940:
The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico. Semicolon review here.
Against the Wind by Brock and Bodie Thoene. Reviewed by Beth at Weavings.
Blackout by Connie Willis. Partially set in 1940. Semicolon review here.
While We Still Live by Helen MacInnes. Sheila Matthews, a young Englishwoman is visiting in Warsaw when the Nazis invade. She stays and joins the Polish underground to fight against the German occupation.
The Winds of War by Herman Wouk.
Atonement by Ian McEwen. Semicolon review here.

The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico

Jul21

I’ve seen two movies based on books written by Paul Gallico: Mrs ‘Arris Goes to Paris starring Angela Lansbury, Omar Sharif and Diana Rigg and the blockbuster 1972 movie The Poseidon Adventure starring Shelley Winters, Gene Hackman, Red Buttons, Stella Stevens, Carol Lynley, Ernest Borgnine, and Jack Albertson. However, I’ve never read anything by Mr. Gallico until now.

Paul Gallico was a movie critic, then a very successful sports writer, but he wanted to write fiction. He wrote short stories for various magazines, got a $5000 check for one story, and promptly retired from sports-writing to write fiction. His first and most successful novel(?) was The Snow Goose. Not really a novel or even a novella, the book clocks in at 58 small, widely spaced pages, and I would call it a short story. It was first published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1940, and The Snow Goose was one of the O. Henry prize winners in 1941.

The story itself is set on the Essex coast of England, beginning in “the late spring of 1930” and ending approximately ten years later. The main action of the story takes place in and around the evacuation of Dunkirk by the British near the beginning of World War II. It’s a romantic, and sad story about an artist, his young friend and protege, and a Canada snow goose that makes its way somehow to the Essex coast and becomes a symbol of hope for survivors of the debacle and rescue that was Dunkirk.

I would think that as a gentle introduction to World War II literature, The Snow Goose would be a winner among high school students. Other books and movies featuring the evacuation of Dunkirk:

Books:
The Miracle of Dunkirk by Walter Lord. Nonfiction.

Dunkirk: The Complete Story of the First Step in the Defeat of Hitler by Norman Gelb. More nonfiction.

Dunkirk: The Men They Left Behind by Sean Longden. Times Online review/

On Rough Seas by Nancy L. Hull. Young adult fiction. Fourteen year old Alex lives in Dover, England in 1939, and he is eventually a hero as he participates in the rescue of the British soldiers at Dunkirk.

The Little Ships: the heroic rescue at Dunkirk in World War II by Louise Borden. Picture book. “A young English girl and her father take their sturdy fishing boat and join the scores of other civilian vessels crossing the English Channel in a daring attempt to rescue Allied and British troops trapped by Nazi soldiers at Dunkirk.”

Dunkirk Crescendo by Brock and Bodie Thoene. Rather melodramatic, fast-paced Christian fiction by a pair of prolific writers in the genre of historical fiction. This book is Book #9 of the Zion Covenant series published by Tyndale House.

Atonement by Ian McEwan features Dunkirk in the second half of the story. Semicolon review here.

Movies:
Dunkirk (1958) “Documentary-style film which tells two sides of the evacuation of more than 350,000 troops from Dunkirk beaches in 1940. A British corporal (John Mills) finds himself responsible for getting his men back to Britain from the Dunkirk beaches, after their officer is killed and they are separated from the main allied forces. Meanwhile, a civilian reporter (Bernard Lee) follows the build-up to the eventual evacuation of British and French troops from the beaches of Dunkirk.”

Mrs. Miniver (1942) “Mrs. Miniver nobly tends her rose garden while her stalwart husband participates in the evacuation at Dunkirk. She personifies grace under pressure as the Miniver family huddles in their bomb shelter during a Luftwaffe attack, while she is forced to confront a downed Nazi paratrooper in her kitchen, and while she is preparing for her annual flower show despite the exigencies of bombing raids.” I saw Mrs. Miniver about a year ago, and I thought it was delightful. If you like The Snow Goose and its somewhat sentimental picture of a world at war, you’ll enjoy Mrs. Miniver, too.

The Snow Goose itself was made into a 1971 film starring Richard Harris and Jenny Agutter. I’ve not seen the movie; have any of you?

Nicely maintained website for fans of Paul Gallico and his books.

Don’t Talk To Me About the War by David A. Adler

Jul11

Thirteen year old Tommy Duncan isn’t interested in the news from Europe, news of war. It’s May, 1940, and it just might be the year the Brooklyn Dodgers win the series. And that’s the kind of news that interests Tommy. His friend, Beth, however, talks about the war in Europe all the time, and Tommy doesn’t understand half of what she’s talking about. But he still likes her a lot, even if she does try to get him to read the war news with her when they meet at Goldman’s Coffee Shop to walk to school together.

Tommy and his friends are seventh graders, but they act and feel younger. I think that’s because the story is set in 1940, before the U.S. entered World War II. Even though the kids in the story seem younger than thirteen in some ways, the story feels right, maybe because children didn’t take on a psuedo-sophistication as young as kids do now. They did take on responsibility, however. Tommy’s friend, Beth, does all the cooking and shopping for her family because her mother is dead. And Tommy takes more and more responsibility as the story progresses because his mother is dealing with a mysterious illness that makes her more and more dependent on Tommy and his dad.

The voices of the kids, especially Tommy the narrator, work well and help to set the story in another era. But today’s thirteen year olds and older may become impatient with Tommy and his straightforward way of thinking and talking and behaving. There’s not a lot of nuance or worldly sophistication here. I found it refreshing.

Winter in Madrid by C.J. Sansom

Jul2

Helen MacInnes, but more lugubrious and hopeless.

Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, same setting a few years later, but more complex sentences and British characters.

Alistair Maclean, with less action and more dialogue.

John LeCarre, but set in Spain and less confusingly plotted. (Semicolon review of one of LeCarre’s novels here.

I picked up Winter in Madrid at the library because I read two of Mr. Sansom’s Matthew Shardlake mysteries and enjoyed them very much. (Semicolon review here.) This book is not a mystery, but rather as I indicated by my opening comparisons, it’s a spy novel set in the winter of 1940 as Britain is enduring Hitler’s bombing blitz and hoping that Spain under Generalissimo Franco will not join the Axis powers in declaring war on the Allies.

Harry Brett, the protagonist of the novel, is a survivor of Dunkirk, recently recovered from shell shock and hysterical deafness, who finds himself in Spain working for the Secret Service and spying on an old (public) school friend. That’s public in the British sense, private upper class snob school for us Americans. The friend, Sandy Forsyth, who is the subject of Brett’s somewhat clumsy spying efforts, is a businessman involved in a project that may or may not affect Franco’s decision about whether or not to enter the war. Hence the British interest in Sandy and his project.

The most interesting part of the novel for me was the way that Sansom showed how the belief system of each of the characters in the novel was torn down and destroyed or at least undermined by the realities of life and especially of war. Harry is a conservative, a public school/Cambridge graduate who believes in honor and in traditional British upper class values. But the complications and the sheer messiness of the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War and of being a spy make Harry’s value system at first difficult to follow and later impossible.

Harry’s friend Bernie is a dedicated Communist, probably the most idealistic of the characters in the novel. He, too, becomes disillusioned and confused when he sees his beloved Party under Stalin in alliance with the Fascists that Bernie just lost his freedom and nearly his life in fighting. He manages to hang on to his socialist ideals and his belief in the Communist Party and the coming day of socialist brotherhood, but it’s a confused persistence in a futile hope.

Then, there’s Sandy the dedicated rebel against authority who believes mostly in himself and his destiny to be the “bad boy” who always somehow comes out on top. Sandy doesn’t like anyone telling him what to do, and yet he works with the Facists in Spain who are the most authoritarian and controlling partners in business a man could possibly have.

Christianity, too, is portrayed as corrupt and bankrupt as the Catholic Church and its priests work with the Fascist regime to oppress the people and control them. In the historical note at the end of the book, Mr. Sansom says, “I do not think my picture of the Spanish Church at the period is unfair; they were involved root and branch with the policy of a violent regime in its most brutal phase and those like Father Eduardo who found it hard to square their consciences seem to have been few and far between.”

What Mr. Sansom does best in this novel is create a sense of place and time, showing the confusion and hopelessness of a Spain that’s coming out of the chaos of civil war into the brutal tyranny and suppression of a Fascist dictatorship. Franco did bring order to a country that was a killing field before his Nationalists won the civil war, but the question of whether or not the “cure” was worth the injustice that imposed it is still open. In fact, one of the questions that the novel comes back to time and again is: Can cruelty and injustice be used to fight greater cruelty and injustice? What happens to the character and moral sense of those who use deception and brute force to fight against evil? If there is such a thing as a just war, then must we use all the weapons at our disposal to fight that war, even the weapons of lies and violence and treachery? If we don’t fight withall our might and without mercy, then aren’t we enabling those who are truly dedicated to evil to win and to oppress and murder others?

Winter In Madrid is described on the back cover as an “action-packed thriller,” but the pace of the novel doesn’t live up to that description. It’s really much slower and more thoughtful than a typical thriller, full of moral dilemma and brilliant characterization. The winter setting is a metaphor for the bleakness of the entire plot, and although I usually don’t like novels that end with very little hope or faith for the future, the ending felt right for this novel. It’s a Candide-ish sort of ending in which the main characters, those who are left, decide to cultivate their gardens as the world moves on from catastrophe to catastrophe.

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

The Devil’s Arithmetic by Jane Yolen

Apr3

Organizer Daughter and a friend and I watched the movie version of this book by Jane Yolen this afternoon in conjunction with the urchins’ study of World War II. I read the book a long time ago and didn’t remember much about it. Hence, the ending quite shocked me, as I vaguely remember it shocking me when I read it.

If you’re not familiar with the story, it’s a tale of sixteen year old “typical teenager” Hanna Stern who, when she is forced to attend the annual family Seder, tries to avoid hearing the interminably long stories that her elderly relatives tell about their WW II experiences. However, during the Seder, a mystery intervenes (or is it a dream?), and Hanna is somehow transported back to Poland in the year 1940. She attends a Jewish wedding with some of her relatives who think she is a cousin who has been ill with a fever, and at the wedding, tragedy strikes. The Nazis come to take the Jews to “work camps”, and because Hanna has ben completely inattentive to her family’s history and heritage, she has very little idea of what will happen next to her and to her Polish, Jewish family.

I wouldn’t recommend the movie for any children younger than 13 or 14. Even my high schoolers were, I think, shocked by some of the scenes of brutality and horror that took place in the concentration camp. And that’s despite the fact that I think the movie sort of understates and even misrepresents the reality in some ways. The inmates of the camp are a lot more free to interact and a lot more warmly dressed than I would think was the true state of affairs. Anyway, this movie is for mature teen and adults, and I think it did my teens some good to see enacted some historical facts that they had only read about until now.

The movie stars Kirsten Dunst as Hanna and Brittany Murphy as her friend Rifka.

Semicolon

Books we must have though we lack bread.

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