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  • Beyond Courage: The Untold Story of Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust
  • Elizabeth Bush
Rappaport, Doreen . Beyond Courage: The Untold Story of Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust. Candlewick, 2012. [240p]. illus. with photographs. ISBN 978-0-7636-2976-2 $22.99 Reviewed from galleys R* Gr. 7-12.

"Even as a Jew, growing up in a Jewish household, I had only ever heard that 'Jews went like lambs to the slaughter' during the war." This, as Rappaport explains in her introduction, was once a prevailing view and the starting point for her own research, an exploration that led her to uncover a wealth of true stories that testify to many forms of Jewish resistance under the Nazi regime. The stories are organized here into chronological sections, covering Hitler's rise to power in the mid-1930s; German expansionism during the war; ghetto life and the "final solution"; transit, labor, concentration, and death camps; and partisan activity throughout Europe. The content of many stories will be generally familiar to many readers—the heartbreaking family decisions to send children away in the Kindertransport; the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the planned escape from the Sobibor Death Camp. Less acclaimed but equally compelling are tales of the Jews who built entire communities deep in wilderness areas of Eastern Europe, Jewish workers in German factories who quietly sabotaged war materials, teenage Jewish girls in Greece who defied deeply entrenched gender roles to fight with the resistance. Rappaport's engrossing storytelling will entice many teens to read cover-to-cover, while the organization and rich supporting features will guide teen researchers to specific topics, and the brevity and substance of individual entries will be valued by history teachers for classroom oral readings. A wealth of black and white photographs enhances the presentation, with images ranging from the bravado of freedom fighters posed with their weapons, to the despair of victims awaiting execution, to the solidarity of survivors at post-war reunions. A timeline, source notes for quotations, sources aligned by chapter and section, a pronunciation guide for many personal and place names, and an index are included. Consider this a required purchase for young adult nonfiction collections.

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