No Pretty Pictures

On the death march, Anita and her brother briefly stop at Auschwitz. She sees the deceptive sign above the gate, “Work makes one free” (180), and becomes aware of the “sick stench of burning” (101). Auschwitz was the largest extermination camp complex and had four gas chambers. Of the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, around 1.1 million died at Auschwitz. Anita “realized that the dreaded Auschwitz was empty” (101), so the burning smell could be Nazis trying to destroy evidence of their genocide.

In Sweden, Anita’s brother studies for his bar mitzvah, so her brother isn’t averse to Jewish identity. When a boy turns 13, he can have a bar mitzvah, which is a special religious ceremony and celebration that marks his transition into a full-fledged Jewish adult. When performed by girls, the coming-of-age ceremony is called a bat mitzvah.

As Anita doesn’t leave the death march, she upends her family’s escape plan, and Aunt Bella and Uncle Samuel wind up at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. A work camp and a transit camp, there were no gas chambers at Bergen-Belsen.

Anita’s brother is circumcised. According to Jewish tradition, removing the foreskin from the penis binds the baby to God. At this time in Europe, Christians did not circumcise their children, so circumcision marked someone out as being Jewish. Niania disguises Anita’s brother as a girl so the Nazis won’t check if he’s circumcised.

Anita hears rumors of concentration camps, and eventually she and her brother experience three of them. The Nazis had different types of concentration camps. There were labor camps, transit camps, and extermination camps. Those in labor camps tended to perform hard labor in horrific conditions, while extermination camps generally killed prisoners immediately. Ultimately, the Nazis concentrated Jews and persecuted groups to kill them.

Anita hears the word “deported,” used as a euphemism for genocide. Deportation is the forcible expulsion of someone from a place, and in this case, Jews were deported from their home cities to concentration camps.

In Chapter 1, some of the people around Anita say the German soldiers are French soldiers, but it’s wishful thinking. France and England had a treaty with Poland, so when Germany invaded, they had to declare war against the Germans. Unprepared for war, neither France nor England sent soldiers to Poland.

Niania sees the German soldiers marching and mutters, “Germans, Germans” (2). Her irritated weariness reflects the militaristic, bellicose reputation once attributed to Germany and its people.

Anita’s mom sneaks into the Krakow ghetto to be with her brother, and then she compels Anita and her brother to sneak into the ghetto. The Nazis created the ghettos to isolate Jews from the non-Jewish population. They were overcrowded, unsanitary, and dangerous. At any moment, Nazis could move Jews from the ghetto to the camps. Anita and her family hide to avoid one roundup.

Niania sees a Hasidic man and mutters, “Jews” (3). Hasidim are conservative Jews from the Hasidic sect. Hasidic Judaism emerged in Ukraine in the 19th century, and its adherents wear distinctive, traditional Eastern European clothing. Anita describes her neighbor, the Hasid, as wearing “his long black coat and round saucer-like hat edged in fur” (3).

In Poland, Anita sees young people and assumes they’re a part of the Hitler Youth. The Nazis created the Hitler Youth program to indoctrinate young people and teach them Nazi beliefs.

At the Shelter for Polish Young People, a woman reads a Polish translation of Mark Twain’s American novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Twain’s novel and Lobel’s memoir share similar themes, including displacement and oppression. Huckleberry Finn, the protagonist, runs away from his abusive dad, and his friend, Jim, is a fugitive from slavery.

Anita and her family are from Krakow. It’s a big city in Poland, and Anita has fond memories of walking around Krakow with her dad. Krakow had a vibrant Jewish Quarter before the Holocaust, where Jewish people lived for centuries. When the Nazis invaded in 1939, between 60,000 and 80,000 Jewish people lived in the city, about a quarter of the total population. By the end of the war, all but 2,000 had been killed.

Anita and her brother go to Lapanow when her mom and Niania think they’re no longer safe in Krakow. Lapanow is where Anita’s dad’s family members live, and it’s a small town in Poland where, before the war, Anita and her family spent parts of their summers.

Anita hears the word “liquidation,” and it’s another term that alludes to the Nazis’ genocidal policy.

In the context of the story, the Nazis are the deadly antagonists. They continually displace Anita and bring her and her family constant suffering. Nazi stands for National Socialist German Workers’ Party, and the political party existed before Adolf Hitler. He took it over in 1921 and made it popular. Not all Germans identified as Nazis, but as political dissidents were sent to concentration camps, most Germans either actively supported the party or quietly kept their heads down. The Nazi party controlled Germany and the countries it invaded, and those who acted on behalf of Germany during their period of rule inevitably advanced the destructive, genocidal policies of Hitler and the Nazis.

Ryfka, the Jewish girl at the Polish Shelter for Young People, waits to go to Palestine. Palestine exists today, but it used to encompass all of what is now called Israel, which was created in 1948 in the aftermath of the war. Palestine included cities like Jerusalem and Bethlehem, important cities in Islamic, Jewish, and Christian history, and many Jewish people considered Palestine a homeland. Ryfka’s association with Palestine reinforces her Judaism.

Anita remembers celebrating Passover before the war. After the Nazis invade, she hides matzo so her family can continue to celebrate it. Passover is a Jewish holiday, and it marks the Israelites’ freedom from slavery in Egypt.

Anita and her brother are sent to the Plaszow concentration camp. Plaszow was a labor camp, but as the shootings indicate, the Nazis also executed people there.

Anita and her family are from Poland, a country in Eastern Europe bordered by Russia (then the Soviet Union) and Germany. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, it didn’t want to fight the Soviet Union, so it made a peace treaty with Joseph Stalin, the communist dictator, and the Soviet Union took over parts of Poland. In 1941, Germany broke the agreement and declared war on the Soviet Union.

Shortly after Anita and her brother enter the Ravensbrück concentration camp, the Nazis abandon it, and the Red Army—Soviet Union soldiers—liberate the camp.

As Anita’s dad tries to flee the Nazis in Poland, Russians capture him and put him in a camp. The camp might be a camp the Soviet Union set up in Poland for Polish refugees, or it could be a gulag—a network of forced work camps across the Soviet Union. In either camp, Anita’s dad would have faced brutal, although not overtly genocidal, conditions.

Anita’s dad survives the Russian camp and makes it to Samarkand, a city in Uzbekistan that was a part of the Soviet Union. During the war, Anita’s dad operates a stand at a Samarkand market to earn a living.

After Anita recovers from tuberculosis, she goes from the Swedish hospital to the Shelter for Polish Young People in Sweden. Anita doesn’t like shelter, as she connects it to the trauma of Poland.

Anita spends the second part of the book in Sweden, where she recovers from tuberculosis, reunites with her parents, attends school, and starts to create an identity she’s proud of while in the big city of Stockholm. Many Polish people came to Sweden after the war. A neutral country during World War II, Sweden eventually began to accept relatively large amounts of Jewish people to protect them from the Nazis’ genocidal policy.