The War within These Walls by Aline Sax

In keeping with the World War II theme of the last blog post, this review concerns a book that commemorates a brave and bloody act of defiance that took place in Warsaw, Poland, exactly 71 years ago. A band of Jews resisted an attempt to exterminate them inside an imprisonment ghetto, fighting off the German troops from April 19^th to May 16^th, 1943, despite being appallingly outnumbered. The War within These Walls uses the imagined character of Misha to tell the haunting story of the will to live despite unspeakable brutality. Written by Aline Sax, illustrated by Caryl Strzelecki, and translated by Laura Watkinson, this fictional account of the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto won a Batchelder Honor as an outstanding children’s book originally published in a foreign language.

          Misha cannot remember ever feeling as Jewish as when the Nazis invaded Poland and began to single out his people for intensive policing. Facing harassments ranging from a mandated armband identifying them as Jews, to unprovoked murders, he and his family hope to remain unnoticed until the occupying forces leave. Instead, a wall appears to seal off a tiny portion of Warsaw in which all the nearby Jews are forced to live. When food runs out, his sister Janina disappears, and the Nazis begin to ship his neighbors to a special “resettlement village” called Auschwitz, Misha finds relief from his paralyzing desperation by joining young Mordechai Anielewicz’s underground resistance team. Soon, however, the group receives news that the ghetto survivors are in danger from a quicker death than starvation. The Nazis are planning to surround the ghetto and slaughter everyone still living. Misha and his friends begin their offensive during April of 1943, holding off the German troops with homemade bombs and a handful of firearms. But as the weeks limp by and the violence escalates, they begin to realize that the best outcome they can hope for is an honorable death.

          Sax’s prose is both sparse and direct, creating a somber feel that does much to evoke the book’s grim happenings. The text, printed on alternately black or white paper, is accompanied by Strzelecki’s ink drawings that capture the horror of the ghetto in just a few lines. Although the Batchelder award designates a children’s book, this work may be best appreciated by older junior and young adult readers for its powerful depiction of resistance in the face of a great crime against humanity.