Irena Sendler and the children of the Warsaw Ghetto by Susan Goldman Rubin, illustrated by Bill Farnsworth

[Review originally published 2011]

Rubin tells the little-known story of Irena Sendler, a Polish social worker who saved over 2,000 Jewish children during World War II. Irena worked with the Polish Socialist Party's resistance movement to issue false papers and aid Jews in the increasingly crowded Warsaw Ghetto. In 1942, she joined Zegota, the secret Council for Aid to Jews and was placed in charge of the Department of Help for Jewish Children. Irena and those she supervised saved thousands of children, smuggling them out of the ghetto in ingenious ways, teaching them to pass as Catholics, and finding safe houses for them. 

Even after she was captured and tortured by the Gestapo, Sendler refused to reveal information about the resistance - or about her secret record of children's names. Her friends managed to rescue her before she was executed and she continued to work for the resistance, despite her injuries and the great danger. When Soviet troops liberated Warsaw, Irena sent the list of names to the head of the Jewish Committee, Dr. Adolph Berman. It was the only record in existence and helped to reunite children with their parents and families.

The story is organized into large pages of text facing full-page oil paintings. Many of the pictures are dark and blurry, showing night scenes; Irena delivering a child to a convent, faded photographs of separated children and their families, and refugees fleeing the Warsaw Uprising. Most of the pictures feature Irena, calm and assured, as she comforted children, made and hid records, and faced the Gestapo.

 
An afterword tells of Irena Sendler's continued suffering under the Communist government and the children and families who remembered her; when Poland was freed from Communist rule in 1989, Irena Sendler was recognized and awarded for her courageous actions. Additional resources, source notes, acknowledgements, and an index are also included.

Verdict: This is an excellent book, well-researched with a good presentation of text. Although the illustrations aren't to my taste, they fit the tone of the book and add emotion to the descriptions. My complaint about this book...why, why, why, was it formatted as a picture book? If this had been written as a chapter book, perhaps with additional photographs and the oil paintings interspersed, I could have booktalked it easily. It's nearly long enough, if the afterword had been expanded into additional chapters it could have hit the magic 100 page mark. As it is, the text is too long for a read-aloud and the schools here don't study World War II until middle school, so there are very few parents or teachers looking for lengthy read-alouds on this subject. If you have a call for materials on World War II and the Holocaust for younger children this is a good choice, but I only need older titles - 5th grade and above - on this subject.

Revisited: This is now out of print, but there have been later titles on the subject of Irena Sendler that work better; Lee & Low did a chapter book, The story of WWII Humanitarian Irena Sendler, and Capstone has an excellent picture book called Jars of Hope by Jennifer Roy which works well for younger children.

ISBN: 978-0823422517; Published April 2011 by Holiday House; Borrowed from the library