Escape from East Berlin

Andy Marino's Escape from East Berlin is a gripping history story for 10 year olds about a family who wake up one August morning to find a wall running down their street.

What happens

Marta is twelve and lives on Bernauer Strasse. Her cousin Markus lives directly across the road. Now there's barbed wire, steel and concrete between them, so they wave to each other through a window.

It's 1961, and the wall is only months old. Nobody quite knows what the city will look like tomorrow. Marta's mum used to teach in the West and now works in a washing machine factory. A neighbour's joke about the secret police leaves Marta wondering whether it was a joke at all.

What makes it so readable is Marta herself. She's funny and sharp, and she argues with her mum about being twelve, not seven. She copes with the worst of it by cutting her day into small pieces and saying "okay" to get to the next one.

Then she overhears her cousin Harry, a train driver, talking about the border with a very scary one-eyed man. Is Harry planning to escape? And is it true that someone was betrayed?

The story also jumps forward to 1989, where a boy called Kurt has grown up with the wall as a normal part of life.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The first chapter follows Marta's brother Stefan, who is seventeen, as he swims across the harbour at night to visit friends in the West. The guards open fire and he is killed, and the scene stays with him as it happens. The rest of the book is about a family grieving him. Marta's dad adds marks to a chalkboard for every person killed at the border, and he barely gets out of bed.

That's a lot for a young reader. A sensitive child, or one who has lost someone close, will need you nearby. The shooting isn't gory, but it's very real.

For a reader who's curious about how people lived in history, and who can manage something sad, this is brilliant. It makes a hard subject feel very close and human.

What to read next

If your reader wants another story about a wall that splits people apart, try Michael Morpurgo's The Kites Are Flying. It's for slightly older readers and it's sad too. A cameraman meets a boy in the West Bank who flies kites over a wall to the children beyond it.