Historical fiction has the power to teach the reader about topic, or areas of topics not covered by history class. In my history classes the Holocaust has been a topic. However, the main subject is the German Jews and Hitler’s atrocities. The Polish stories are always left out, which bothers me since the big name extermination camps were in Poland. According to additional reading there is controversy over even saying “polish concentration camps”. They were german concentration camps in occupied Poland. But the book made me realize that although Poland was occupied, there were people that agreed or sided with the occupiers.

I thought the extermination camps you learn about in school were horrible enough. I never learned of the ghettos. The jewish sections of town that were walled off so that people were held like prisoners. It’s a horrible part of history that I wish was taught more in school.

It is one of the reasons I am happy that books like this exist. It brings to light new facets of history you may not have learned of before. In this story we follow Chaya Lindner in her pursuit of a free people and an unoccupied country. She is jewish, but she looks german enough to “pass” and become a courier for the resistance. Her job was to get messages, food, weapons, and even people across the walled off borders of the ghettos. Sometimes to even be the messenger between ghettos. It’s a dangerous job, but if you are sentenced to die anyway, you might as well die fighting. Fighting for peace, fighting for a free way of life, fighting to allow differences in all people because no person is better than another.

In this book, people will live, people will fight, and people will die. The search for an answer of WHY is a constant, and a hope of a better tomorrow is always lurking on the next page. But this book is about survival, and not everyone makes it out alive. The author does not pull punches, does not sweeten the ending, but leaves you as many are in the midst of a war.

Apparently this is not the first Holocaust story the author has written, I know her more from her fantasy books, but she easily engrosses the reader in a part of history some would like to forget. She makes the reader wonder how so many in today's society can still believe that these events did not take place. And even better, she shines a light on what is happening in our current society, and how similar it was to history, with never movie the story past 1943.

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