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  • Last Road to Safety:The Making of a Holocaust Picture Book
  • Esther Raizen (bio)

American author and magazine writer Peggy Mann and Israeli civil servant Ruth Klüger-Aliav published in 1973 the biographical novel The Last Escape: The Launching of the Largest Secret Rescue Movement of All Time. In the novel, they wove the tumultuous life-events of Klüger-Aliav as an organizer of clandestine Jewish immigration from Europe into the story of two immigrant ships bound for Palestine: The Tiger Hill, which left the Romanian port of Constanta on August 3, 1939, and the Hilda, which sailed on January 8, 1940. The work on The Last Escape spawned two adaptations for young readers: Last Road to Safety: A True Story, a picture book based on an episode from the voyage of the Tiger Hill passengers (1975), and The Secret Ship, which recounted the story of the Hilda (1978). Focusing on Last Road to Safety, I bring to light a little-known Holocaust picture book that predated by a decade or more the foundational works of Holocaust literature for young readers written in the United States, and discuss the collaborative effort of the book's writer and illustrator, Peggy Mann and George Stavrinos.

Mann, a native New Yorker, was a prolific writer known primarily for her youth novels and her crusade against marijuana use. She was familiar to Jewish-American audiences through her books on Jewish themes, but gained little recognition among literary critics and scholars.1

Stavrinos was known in the world of magazine and fashion illustration, but not at all in the area of youth literature, as Last Road to Safety was his only children's book.2

Seeking to broaden the audience familiar with the book and its creators, I discuss their respective approaches to the project and point out the characteristics that mark Last Road to Safety as a Holocaust book. I note how these characteristics grew organically out of the norms of the creative art forms adopted by Mann and Stavrinos in the course of their respective careers, [End Page 28] and highlight the interplay between the book's textual and visual narratives as they allow for strategic departures from the base materials that inform the storyline. I discuss the book in the context of encouraging young readers to contemplate the meaning of a traumatic historical event and develop their civic imagination. Finally, I place my own reading of the book in dialogue with the notions of affiliative postmemory and vicarious witnessing, reflecting on my position as an adult reader of a children's book.

How the Book Came to Be

Holocaust literature for young readers, which surged in the 1970s and 80s, came of age in the 1990s with works of authors like Jane Yolen, Lois Lowry, Uri Orlev, Eve Banting, and David Adler, concurrently with the maturation of academic studies on the Holocaust (Haas and Haas). Interest in the curricular value of Holocaust literature for youth began to develop in the 1970s, and resulted in accounts of classroom experiences and library holdings, annotated bibliographies, articles focusing on specific works in a curricular context, curriculum units, and guides for working with young audiences. Early resources were produced within Jewish-education circles, like Selected Books and Pamphlets on the Holocaust by Hyman Chanover (1978), but as Holocaust education gained momentum, interest in Holocaust themes gave rise to more broadly distributed works intended for general audiences, like Edward T. Sullivan's Holocaust in Literature for Youth: A Guide and Resource Book (1999), or a series of works by Samuel Totten and collaborators (2002, 2016). Thomas D. Fallace, who studies the history of Holocaust education, traces the development of Holocaust curricula to the "affective revolution" in the social studies, a wave of interest in the 1960s and 70s in students' "identity, morality, emotions, and values" (Emergence 81), and argues that teachers in the mid-1970s began to introduce the Holocaust into their curricula with the hope of activating the "moral reasoning of their students" (84).

The drive to strengthen young people's emotional resilience and social awareness had guided Mann's approach to her readership throughout her writing career. Mann was active in encouraging the...

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