Margaret Baldwin

Thanksgiving by Margaret Baldwin
Story of how the Pilgrims came to be in the US and their journey across the water, the preparation beforehand.
Also includes of the first one and the celebrations of the day today.
Legends of the harvest and how other countries celebrate it then and now.
Love hearing what games the children played while on the ship that can be used today. Recipes of the food used then and how it can be made today.
I received this book from National Library Service for my BARD (Braille Audio Reading Device).… (more)

This memoir-by-proxy is very short, less than 100 pages, but packs a lot of wallop for its size. It tells a story I'd never heard of: in order to prevent a rumored "Aktion" aimed at eliminating the children from the Lodz Ghetto, a group of child laborers made a beautiful fur coat as a birthday present for the wife of a prominent Nazi officer. Each pelt in the coat had a label giving the name and age of the child who'd worked on it. The coat, in addition to being a bribe, was supposed to show that children in the Lodz Ghetto could be productive and useful to the German war effort.

According to the story, it worked, kind of. Every child who worked on the coat was allowed to spend a week at a special holiday camp (in Marysin, maybe?) where everything was clean and the beds had sheets and they could eat their fill, which probably prolonged their lives. And the Aktion was postponed... for a little while.

I have never heard of this anywhere else and wonder about the veracity of the story, but in any case it's a beautiful story and suits its intended 9-to-12 audience. The descriptions of the suffering in the ghetto are implied rather than directly stated, and it's never outright said that deportees are being sent to their deaths. A good book if you can get it.… (more)