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Karen Ackerman's The Night Crossing is a short, gripping escape story for 9 year olds about a Jewish girl and her family fleeing Austria on foot, in the dark.
It's 1938, and the Nazis have taken over Clara's home town of Innsbruck. The family piano has been sold for firewood. Jewish shops are boarded up. A gang of children chases Clara and her big sister Marta home through the streets, and one of them is Clara's best friend, Hilde.
So Papa decides they have to leave. They'll walk over the mountains to Switzerland and pretend to be Swiss visitors going home.
Clara has two old straw dolls, Gittel and Lotte. They belonged to her grandmother, who carried them over the mountains as a girl on her own night crossing out of Russia. Clara is determined they're coming too.
Mama refuses to leave her silver Sabbath candlesticks behind, so they get sewn into Marta's petticoat. And they clink. Every time they clink, you hold your breath!
The journey is told simply and quietly. The family hides in a barn, walks all night and ducks away from tanks on the road. A young soldier pokes his bayonet into the weeds right beside them, and then Mama's stomach rumbles. It's a super tense moment.
It's short (five chapters and an epilogue), which makes it a good first step into this part of history for a child who isn't ready for a long novel yet.
The book doesn't hide what was happening. A kind baker is dragged out of his shop and a soldier spits on his wife. The short epilogue looks ahead to after the war. It names the camps, and it says plainly that members of Clara's family who stayed in Austria never came back. It's handled gently, but it's real. If you've got a reader who asks big questions, it's a very good one to read together.
If they want another wartime story with a brave girl at the start of it, try The Bomber Dog. In occupied France, Sabine grabs one German Shepherd puppy before the soldiers can take the litter, and runs with it all the way to the coast.
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