In recent years there has been a discussion, both inside and outside the Jewish community, about how to talk to children about the Holocaust.
The subject is repeatedly aired at this time of year, with Holocaust Memorial Day on the national and international agenda. Children, naturally curious, will ask questions that parents and teachers may struggle to answer. How young is too young to describe the almost unimaginable pain and cruelty that took place?
Most sensitive educators and writers agree that around age 11 or 12 is about right, whether in school or at home. It makes a difference, probably, if the information is actually about the Holocaust as experienced by young people, often forced to grow up and make impossible decisions about their lives in the most desperate of circumstances.
Two new books published this month seek different approaches to talking about the Holocaust, though they both use a deceptively simple visual medium which is likely to appeal to young people.
The writer and presenter Thomas Harding has an elegant track record in presenting history through the lens of a building. His previous book, for publisher Walker Books, was The House by the Lake, a simple but not simplistic story of 20th century Germany, tracing the lives of five families who lived in the eponymous house. One of the families was his own and he first visited the house, by then in a dilapidated state, with his grandmother in 1993.
Twenty years after that visit, Harding was inspired to write about the modest villa, with delicate illustrations by Britta Teckentrup. The unusual approach struck gold — the book was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award in 2015, long listed for the Orwell Prize in 2016, and became a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week.
Now, ten years later, Harding has returned to his award-winning format. Teaming up once again with illustrator Britta Teckentrup, Walker Books has just published Harding’s The House on the Canal: The Story of the House That Hid Anne Frank.
I suppose it should not have come as a surprise that the house in question, situated on the Prinsengracht canal in central Amsterdam, is 400 years old.
That being the case, it takes Harding quite some time to take the reader from 1612 to 1941, but this gentle introduction to the various incarnations of the house works beautifully.
Harding, writing in co-operation with the Anne Frank Foundation, meticulously takes the reader through the history of the house, telling us of “the woman with 12 children”, Baefje Bisschop, who moved in to the house in 1653, and, in contrast, Isaac van Vleuten, a wealthy merchant, who became the owner in the 1740s; he and his wife Cornelia had no children.
Thomas Harding
It’s fascinating to learn of the building of the house — because right from the start the builder, Dirc van Delft, added a typical-for-the-neighbourhood ‘rear house’ — in other words, an annexe.
We first meet Anne visiting her father Otto in 1941: “Some days the tall man [who had rented the house for his business] was visited by a young girl with a sweet smile. She had a sparkle in her eye and a pen and notebook in her pocket. She was his daughter”.
Harding, quite deliberately, does not linger over the circumstances of the Frank family hiding in the annexed. He says: “The city was no longer safe for the girl with the sweet smile… the top floors of the annexe were now a hiding place. They had to be silent, otherwise the police and soldiers would find them. So still, not a sound. Each minute was a day. Each day was a year.”
And then he writes: “One hot summer’s day, policemen and a soldier came to the house. The men stomped up the secret stairs and found the girl and her family and their friends. They took them away from the house.”
Unlike the tragic Anne Frank, Peter Lantos was a child during the Holocaust — but he survived.
The Boy Who Didn’t Want To Die is Lantos’ third memoir about his heartbreaking wartime experiences, which began in his native Hungary when he was just four years old. Parallel Lines, A Journey from Childhood to Belsen, his first book, took the reader on exactly that devastating journey.
“During lockdown,” he says, “I had the idea that I wanted to write for children, from the point of view of a child.” Thus was born his second book, The Boy Who Didn’t Want to Die, published in 2023 to coincide with Holocaust Memorial Day that year.
The reaction, said his publisher, was extraordinary and garnered Lantos various nominations and awards, such as being shortlisted for the 2024 British Book Awards in the category of Children’s Books and winning the United Kingdom Literacy Association Awards in the Information Books category.
Victoria Stebleva, who had contributed an illustration to that book, was approached to work with Lantos for a graphic version of The Boy Who Didn’t Want to Die. The idea, said the publisher, was to open up the narrative to children who were not natural readers.
Steblova has charmingly illustrated Lantos’ journey out of Hungary, using black and white wash for most of the imagery — which shades into blue when the times becomes happier for the family. Sadly there are not many blue-framed pictures. Lantos tells us about his father’s death and one frame says starkly: “Auschwitz. That name again. I started to count the dead in the family. I stopped at 21. Suddenly I started to cry and only stopped when my mother hugged me.”
Peter Lantos
Lantos has the tone of naivety just right, as the four-year old Peter asks artless questions and the adults wrestle with appropriate replies. In one frame, we see Peter and his mother near a building with a smoking chimney. What’s that building, the child asks? I’m not sure, replies his mother, but it’s probably a crematorium. What’s a crematorium, says the child. And his mother responds: Do you have to know everything? In the next frame the little boy admits: “It was the first time I had seen so many dead people.”
Whether or not this is age-appropriate material for small children will depend on the parental or teachers’ choice. But Lantos cleverly shows how even the smallest child can be both witness to horror and at the same time oblivious to it. And at least we know that Lantos, awarded the BEM for his services to Holocaust education, got his wish — and survived.
The House on the Canal by Thomas Harding and Britta Teckentrup is published by Walker Books at £14.99; The Boy Who Didn’t Want to Die by Peter Lantos and Victoria Stebleva is published by Scholastic at £10.99
