Richie's Picks: Great Books for Children and Young Adults

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"Oh, I am just a student, sir, and I only want to learn
But it's hard to read through the rising smoke of the books that you like to burn"
--"I'm Gonna Say it Now" by Phil Ochs (Jewish American protest singer.)

"To continue reading their favorite books, the Scholl children formed their own clandestine reading circle and shared forbidden books with others. Hans found himself in trouble again when a Hitler Youth leader caught him reading a book by a Jewish author. The leader ripped the book from Han's hands. 'This filth is forbidden,' said the leader.
"On the night of May 10, 1933, in many German cities, university students and Storm Troopers carried flaming torches and marched behind trucks and oxcarts filled with banned books. In Berlin, Bert Lewyn watched as the Storm Troopers and students tossed the books onto a huge pile and then poured gasoline over it. They touched the pile with their torches. 'The whole thing exploded into a column of flame many feet high,' said Bert. 'I was too scared to say a word.'
"The work of Heinrich Heine, a German poet of Jewish origin, burned among the books. One hundred years earlier, Heine had warned, 'Where one burns books, one will, in the end, burn people.' "

I grew up in suburban Long Island with quite a few Jewish friends. A bunch of them had parents who stuck them in Commack's experimental Extended School Year Program in the mid-Sixties, as my mom did with us. (School for four extra weeks per year worked to my long-term benefit but, at the time Mom volunteered us, was done to my utmost horror). We were tracked together in high school, worked together on Student Council and National Honor Society, and got together for rock concerts, birthday parties and cast parties. To varying degrees we were all pretty good students and all a little bit wild.

"Although a poor student himself, Hitler had definite ideas about education. For Hitler, education had one purpose: to mold children into good Nazis. As soon as the Nazis came to power, they took control of the public schools, called National Schools. They threw out old textbooks and implemented new ones. They rewrote the curriculum from top to bottom, so that it only taught Nazi-approved ideas."

They also threw out any teachers who wouldn't get with the new curriculum, as well as all the Jewish teachers.

Being just one generation removed from the days of WWII and the Holocaust, I have always had a desire to understand how a whole nation could seemingly be accomplices in the murder of six million Jews, some of them close relatives of guys I'd spent weeks camping with and girls with whom I'd often shared saliva.

"In April 1933, the Nazis passed the Law Against the Overcrowding of German Schools. The new law placed a limit on the number of Jews allowed to attend elementary schools, secondary schools, and universities. 'They [the Jews] have no business being among us true Germans,' explained one Nazi teacher to his students...
"Later, the Nazis expanded the law to exclude Jews from German schools altogether and then forbade them from attending any school at all."

HITLER YOUTH doesn't totally solve the mystery for me of how you convince a country to commit such unspeakable atrocities and for the world to condone the evolving process for so long. But as with Susan Campbell Bartoletti's previous award-winning books, HITLER YOUTH is an impeccably researched and eminently readable informational book that goes much farther in explaining the inexplicable than any book I've ever read. Much of the power of HITLER YOUTH comes from the author beginning the book with initial presentations of a dozen young Germans from those days--with photos and thumbnail bios--and then presenting significant amounts of the story in the words of those twelve people.

Included among those twelve are a real hero and heroine, two young siblings who would eventually help form the famed White Rose resistance group:

"Without doubt, his father, Robert Scholl, was proud of his son. He had once told his children: 'What I want most of all is that you live in uprightness and freedom of spirit, no matter how difficult that may be.'
"Those were words that Hans and Sophie Scholl would never forget. Over the years, the brother and sister grew deeply disillusioned with National Socialism. They resented the loss of individual rights and personal freedoms. They wanted the right to make their own decisions and lead their own lives.
" 'I must go my own way, and I do so gladly,' Hans once wrote to a friend. 'I'm not anxious to avoid a host of dangers and temptations. My sole ambition must be to perceive things clearly and calmly.'
"Sophie said it another way. In her diary she once wrote, 'After all, one should have the courage to believe only in what is good. By that, I do not mean one should believe in illusions. I mean one should do only what is true and good and take it for granted that others will do the same.' "

The Hitler Youth was established in 1926. They were kicking Jews out of school in 1933. I can't help but feel that if you were an adult or young adult and hadn't figured it out by then, you had to be racist, extremely ignorant, or both. That includes a number of American journalists of the time who gave the Hitler Youth movement rave reviews. That people inside and outside of Germany did not raise their voices in outrage during the rise of Hitler cost the world those six million innocent Jewish lives, the lives of six million other "enemies of the Reich" (including homosexuals), as well as the millions and millions of additional deaths and scared lives from among those who fought in WWII.

The lesson for me has always been to cherish my own First Amendment rights and to shout out about prejudice, about invading other countries, about book burning, and about questionable political agendas involving public schools.

It is my hope that readers of HITLER YOUTH will perceive connections with today's and tomorrow's current events and that the book will inspire them to similarly shout out when they perceive intolerance in their world.

Richie Partington
http://richiespicks.com
BudNotBuddy@aol.com