Talk:YA Book Reviews November 29, 2006

From CRBSLS

Yellow Star by Jennifer Roy

Sylvie is four-and-a-half years old in the fall of 1939. The next five and a half years of her childhood are spent in the Lodz ghetto in Poland. 270,000 people, all Jewish, are crowded into the ghetto and force to work in the nearby Nazi factories. In the summer of 1942, the Nazis promise to take the children from the ghetto to a place where there is fresh air and food; all but a few children are deported. Those few have been hidden illegally by their parents. Sylvie and the other children spend the next two years in hiding, never stepping outside their apartments. This means that they must make no noise and entertain themselves while their parents and older siblings are at work all day. The ghetto is liberated the day before Sylvie's tenth birthday. Only 800 survivors leave the ghetto; twelve of them are children.

The author uses free verse to tell the story of Sylvia Perlmutter, her father's brother's wife--Jennifer's aunt. This was a story that the family kept hidden; nobody talked about the years spent in camps and ghettos during the war. Jennifer coaxed the story from her aunt in numerous telephone interviews over the course of a year. Jennifer Roy lives in Saratoga Springs and Sylvia Perlmutter lived in Albany for many years. Sylvia now lives in Towson, Maryland, volunteers at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D. C., and speaks to school groups about her childhood in the ghetto. CyndiHoffman 11:34, 2 January 2007 (EST)