The War within These Walls by Aline Sax (review)

In this fictional memoir, a young Jewish man known only as Misha recounts his experience in Warsaw from the German invasion of 1939 through the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of spring, 1943. “I had never felt so Jewish before,” Misha remarks as relocated Jews are crammed into his city, and he initially regards them more with resentment than sympathy: “Like dirty water, they kept pouring into the mouth and nostrils of the ghetto. Until it would be impossible for us to breathe.” Food supplies dwindle and when Misha’s sister is lost in one of their nighttime raids, he despairs of saving his starving parents on his own. When deportations begin in 1942, and rumors of the true fate of deportees circulate throughout the ghetto, Misha is primed to take any risk, so when a man introduces himself as Mordechai Anielewicz and urges Misha to join the armed resistance, he’s ready and willing. Misha’s narration is tense and terse, his clipped sentences pared down to the pinched poetry of a man whose worldview has become as emaciated as the bodies of his neighbors. The book design underscores this reduction to elemental needs, with slate-blue text on cream background sporadically switching to a stark word or phrase of simple cream on blue with startling effect. Strzelecki’s ink and pencil illustrations, also in deep slate and gray, recall woodcuts, depicting both moments of private sorrow and public violence. This translation from Sax’s original Dutch will be a powerful addition to the Holocaust collection in high school libraries. An historical note on the real Mordechai Anielewicz is appended.