All of My Mums

Renata Piątkowska's All of My Mums is a true story for 11 year olds about a Jewish boy smuggled out of the Warsaw ghetto inside a cardboard box.

What happens

An old man called Szymon Bauman sits in the park every day with his eyes closed. He isn't dozing. He's remembering, and the book is what he remembers.

He starts where any boy would. Shoelaces he could never tie properly. A best friend called Dawid, shelling him with a wooden rifle from behind the coal shed. Medals made from buttons wrapped in gold foil from chocolate Hanukkah coins.

Then the bombers come, and the house with the red roof and the spiral staircase is a pile of rubble by lunchtime.

What follows is the war as a child actually lived it. Not battles. Armbands with a blue star. Treading only on the cracks between paving stones, because if you step in the middle you fall into a hole. Rice soup stretched with water. A birthday present of two lumps of sugar in shiny yellow paper.

Then a woman the children call sister Jolanta starts knocking with bread and medicine under her coat (several jumpers and three skirts under there too, to give away on her way out). Her real name was Irena Sendler, and she got more than two thousand five hundred children out of the ghetto.

This one is as hard as it sounds, and you should know what's in it first. Szymon's sister Chana is dragged out from under a quilt by her hair and taken to the trains. His mother is starving and pretends she isn't hungry so he can eat. Not everyone in the family comes home, and the book says so plainly at the end.

There's no gore and nothing is dwelt on. It's a child telling you what happened to him, which is exactly why it lands. For a child who already knows a little about the war, this is one of the clearest and kindest ways in. For a child who worries at night, leave it a year.

How many mums can one boy have? Szymon counts four before he's finished, and later a fifth. That's the thread holding it together, and it's the hopeful part.

What to read next

When your reader is ready for more of this history, Morris Gleitzman's Once is in the library. Felix is a Jewish boy in Poland in 1942 who turns everything he sees into a story, which is how he manages to look at it.