I Survived the Nazi Invasion, 1944

Lauren Tarshis's I Survived the Nazi Invasion, 1944 is a serious, fast-moving war story for 9 year olds about a Jewish brother and sister who escape a ghetto and find the fighters hiding in the forest.

What happens

Max Rosen is eleven and his sister Zena is nine. They live in a town in Poland that the Nazis marched into a year ago. Home is now one dark room behind a barbed wire fence. Their papa was dragged away a month ago and nobody knows where he is.

They're also VERY hungry. So when they see a raspberry bush just the other side of the wire, Max wriggles under to grab a handful.

A soldier catches him. What happens next is quick and frightening, and it ends with the two of them running for their lives.

Help turns up in a wheat field. It's a gruff old farmer with a hayloft and a secret. He's already hiding three partisans, who live deep in the forest and blow up Nazi trains. One of them is somebody Max never expected to see again.

Zena is brilliant, by the way. People say she looks like a doll, and Max's view is that she's a doll made of steel. She's also quite sure the robin they saw on the fence was lucky (Max isn't convinced).

It reads very quickly. But Max does a lot of thinking too. Why do some people hate his family, when he loves baseball and comics just like his friends at school? His papa's answer is one to talk about.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

This is a Holocaust story and it doesn't hide that. The opening lines say millions of Jewish people are already dead. Max hears whispers about gunshots in the hills and locked trains. A soldier hits him with a rifle and aims it at Zena. Later two German soldiers are shot dead in front of him, one only a few years older than he is, and Max is shot too (the blood is on the page).

That's a lot. For a child who's upset by guns, or who hasn't met this part of history yet, it's one to read together or save for later. If your reader has started asking about the war, Max is a brave and thoughtful boy to follow through it.

What to read next

This is the ninth I Survived book, and you can read them in any order. For the same war on the other side of the world, try I Survived the Bombing of Pearl Harbor, 1941. Danny is eleven too, and he's alone on a beach in Hawaii on the morning the bombers arrive.