Summary: Rose Blanche is a story about a girl who learns about the concentration camp. I would not recommend this book for elementary school age children.
Media: oils & watercolor ( )

Although I thought this was a lovely and poignant story, I wonder whether children of picture-book age would find it as interesting. If you don't have a basic knowledge of the Holocaust you might well get confused, as so much in this narrative is implied rather than said directly, including the protagonist's death. ( )

A story about a young German girl name Rose during World War II. The story starts as the Nazi soldiers begin to come into Rose’s town. As their trucks and tanks roll through the streets, Rose wonders where they are going, until one day she sees the soldier stop and take a boy, a Jewish boy. She carefully follows and discovers the boy was been taken to a concentration camp. Through the bob-wired fence she meets other children and gives them what food she has. Over time, Rose continues to visit the camp to bring food to the starving children, but as the war is ending, Rose makes one final trip and discovers the camp is gone. In its place a fog, home to an advancing troop of new soldiers, mean while Rose’s mother waits in town but Rose never returns.

This story is an excellent and realistic view of how a child experiences war and issues like the Holocaust. The young innocent girl wants nothing more than to feed the hungry child, but tragically that desire ends her life. Rose’s death make the story even more real in the readers mind, and I believe children will gain a better grasp on how violent war really is. The author does a great job of creating interest in the story and the pictures give a fantastic view of what that time was like.

This book would be a great accompaniment to a lesson over World War II and the tragedies that occurred during that time. During the course of the lesson the class could read this book to see the war from the other side. Another idea would be to use this book to gain a better understanding of concentration camps under Nazi control. Many children don’t understand what happened in those camps and this book would be a good intro into a unit on the Holocaust.

During World War II, a young German girl's curiousity leads her to discover something far more terrible than the day-to-day hardships and privations that she and her neighbors have experienced.