Hana's Suitcase - Hardcover

Levine, Karen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807531480 ISBN 13: 9780807531488

Publisher: Albert Whitman & Company, 2003

Synopsis

In March 2000, a suitcase arrived at a children's Holocaust education center in Tokyo, Japan. Hana Brady was written on the outside. Children who saw the suitcase on display were full of questions and the director decided to find the answers.

About this title

Reviews

Gr. 5-8. Not another heartbreaker about a child in the Holocaust. Yes, but this one has a new contemporary connection. Alternating chapters tell not only of the Jewish Hana Brady's deportation with her older brother, George, from their happy home in Czechoslovakia, first to Terezin, and then to Auschwitz (where Hana died); but also of Fumiko Ishioka, now a director of a newly established Holocaust education center in Tokyo, who acquires Hana's suitcase, pursues Hana's story, and brings it to today's Japanese children. The account, based on a radio documentary Levine did in Canada (a CD of the broadcast is included), is part history, part suspenseful mystery, and always anguished family drama, with an incredible climactic revelation. The facts are inescapable, illustrated with glowing family photos, Nazi official documents that show Hana's fate, and pictures she drew in the secret art classes in Terezin. The one false note is Levine's showing everything before the Nazis as totally idyllic, and all the victims (even in the camps) as always wise and loving. Recommend this with Linda Sue Park's When My Name Was Keoko (2002), about a Korean child under Japanese occupation during World War II. Winner of the 2002 Sydney Taylor Award for Older Readers. Hazel Rochman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Albert Whitman & Company
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807531480
• ISBN 13: 9780807531488
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 120