Forging Freedom

Grade 4-7-Throughout his life, Jaap Penraat had Jewish friends. When the Germans occupied Holland in 1940, it seemed reasonable that he do whatever he could do to help them. Trained as an artist and architect, he began forging ID cards, moving quickly on to permits and exemption papers. Later he employed Jews in a small company making religious statues. Two months in jail reinforced the man's determination to work against the Nazi relocation campaign, and he concocted a plan to smuggle a group of people out of the country. He eventually helped 406 people escape. This compelling biography describes how the boy who, according to a neighbor, liked doing mitzvahs, became a man whose heroism was later honored by the Dutch government and by the Israeli Holocaust Heroes and Martyrs' Remembrance Authority. The author's personal connection to and affection for Penraat is evident in the warmth of his descriptions. Unfortunately, much of the story is told through unattributed or fictionalized dialogue, and while the imagined conversations have the ring of truth, they are not supported by any documentation. Competent watercolors and pictures of forged documents lend some authenticity, but today's young readers have come to expect explicit sources for factual accounts. General statements and information presented only on the jacket are insufficient.
Kathleen Isaacs, Edmund Burke School, Washington, DC
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Chronicling the daring wartime activities of a Dutch friend and neighbor, Talbott (We're Back: A Dinosaur's Story) overcomes a mildly strained narrative by virtue of his freshly conceived and powerfully rendered paintings. The story itself commands attention. Jaap Penraat is barely out of his teens when the Nazis invade Holland, and almost as soon as the Nazi persecution of the Jews begins, Jaap begins counterfeiting identity cards and other documents for his Jewish friends. In 1942 he hatches and executes a stunning plan: he forges a series of papers so he can pass as an official of a German construction company, then applies for official travel permits to bring Dutch "workers" (in fact Jews) to a phony job site in France, from which point they can be smuggled to Spain and other safe harbors. In this way Jaap and a partner save more than 400 people before they halt their operation in May 1944. Talbott saddles this real-life drama with slightly didactic exposition, and his prose is uneven ("Books held a special place in the hearts of the people of Holland"). But his illustrations pack a wallop, incorporating Jaap's forgeries and other documents in full-spread compositions, generous spot art and occasional borders. Depicting throngs of Nazis and Nazi sympathizers, for example, Talbott uses indistinct gray tones to imply the crowd mentality and reserves color for resisters like Jaap. His art revitalizes the traditional images of the war to home in on the individuality and vulnerability of its heroes and its victims. Ages 7-up. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Talbott tells the story of his friend Jaap Penraat, who, as a young architectural student in Amsterdam under the Nazi occupation, saved hundreds of Jews from arrest, first by forging their ID cards, and then by devising an elaborate escape plan to smuggle them over the border to freedom. Some of the telling is awkward, with fictionalized dialogue in a contemporary idiom ("I just don't get it"), and an overt heavy message connecting the schoolyard bully with Nazi brutality ("Bullies--I guess you never get away from them, not even as a grown-up"). But the details of the dangerous rescue mission are clearly authentic, and the reproductions of the forged documents show the trickery. The long text and narrative pictures give a strong sense of the history of the Nazis' rise to power and invasion of Amsterdam: one graphic picture shows barbed wire spreading from Hitler all over the map of Europe. Always present is the horror of what the refugees are escaping, as well as the exciting action and the heroism of the young man who led them to safety. Connect this with the Danish rescue books by Deedy and Levine, reviewed in this section, and also with Ken Mochizuki's Passage to Freedom (1997), about Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese consul in Lithuania, who helped hundreds of Jews to escape by issuing them visas. Hazel Rochman
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