Run and Hide: How Jewish Youth Escaped the Holocaust

by Don Brown, Don Brown (Illustrator)

Overview

A gripping nonfiction graphic novel that follows the stories of Jewish children, separated from their parents, who escaped the horrors of the Holocaust. From the Sibert Honor and YALSA Award–winning creator behind The Unwanted, Drowned City, and others. 

In the tightening grip of Hitler’s power, towns, cities, and ghettoes were emptied of Jews. Unless they could escape, Jewish children would not be spared their deadly fate in the Holocaust, a tragedy of unfathomable depth. Only 11% of the Jewish children living in Europe before 1939 survived the Second World War.

Run and Hide tells the stories of these children, forced to leave their homes and families, as they escaped certain horror. Some children flee to England by train. Others are hidden from Nazis, sometimes in plain sight. Some are secreted away in attics and farmhouses. Still others make miraculous escapes, cresting over the snow-covered Pyrenees mountains to safety.

Acclaimed nonfiction storyteller Don Brown brings his expertise for journalistic reporting to the deeply felt personal narratives of Jewish children who survived against overwhelming odds. 

Read more books by Don Brown:

• 83 Days in Mariupol: A War Diary
• In the Shadow of the Fallen Towers: The Seconds, Minutes, Hours, Days, Weeks, Months, and Years after the 9/11 Attacks
• Fever Year: The Killer Flu of 1918
• The Unwanted: Stories of the Syrian Refugees

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780358538165
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	10/10/2023
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	283,221
Product dimensions:	6.62(w) x 10.25(h) x (d)
Age Range:	13 - 17 Years

About the Author

Don Brown is the YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction and Sibert Honor–winning author and illustrator of many nonfiction graphic novels for teens and picture book biographies. He has been widely praised for his resonant storytelling and his delicate watercolor paintings that evoke the excitement, humor, pain, and joy of lives lived with passion. School Library Journal has called him “a current pacesetter who has put the finishing touches on the standards for storyographies.” He lives in New York with his family.

booksbybrown.com

Instagram: @donsart

Don Brown is the YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction and Sibert Honor–winning author and illustrator of many nonfiction graphic novels for teens and picture book biographies. He has been widely praised for his resonant storytelling and his delicate watercolor paintings that evoke the excitement, humor, pain, and joy of lives lived with passion. School Library Journal has called him “a current pacesetter who has put the finishing touches on the standards for storyographies.” He lives in New York with his family.

booksbybrown.com

Instagram: @donsart

Editorial Reviews

09/11/2023

Brown (83 Days in Mariupol) chronicles standout stories of children who managed to escape harrowing circumstances during the Holocaust in this hard-hitting graphic novel. In spare, piercing text and kinetic, thin-lined illustrations, Brown employs meticulously documented firsthand survivor accounts to portray myriad individual experiences. Muted washes of color convey a brief history of the beginnings of the Holocaust, focusing on the sinister, oppressive atmosphere of the period and offering insight into the violence and manipulation that Hitler levied in his rise into power. A judicious use of accent hues, including bold, violent reds and soothing mellow yellows, heightens the drama. Most prominent are recollections of the historic Kindertransport, a program through which families who could afford to sent nearly 10,000 children from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Free City of Danzig to the United Kingdom. Lesser-known stories feature throughout, such as brothers Jack and Joe evading a roundup by hiding in their family’s barn, and blond-haired, blue-eyed 13-year-old Rose’s mother persuading her to pretend to be a Polish citizen while she herself is deported to a concentration camp. Though Brown does not shy away from the reality that more than a million children died, through these true and deftly told experiences, he offers hope amid the devastation. Historical and source notes and a bibliography conclude. Ages 13–up. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

★ "Brown applies his signature graphic-nonfiction approach to the rescue of Jewish young people from the Holocaust. Sequences about broader historical events set the scene before Brown turns focus to individual human stories, showing poignant moments as parents and children say what may be final goodbyes. Striking." — Horn Book (starred review)

"A powerful account focusing on the fates of Jewish children during the Holocaust. Vivid, devastating, and impressively documented." — Kirkus Reviews

"Brown (83 Days in Mariupol) chronicles standout stories of children who managed to escape harrowing circumstances during the Holocaust in this hard-hitting graphic novel. Though Brown does not shy away from the reality that more than a million children died, through these true and deftly told experiences, he offers hope amid the devastation." 
— Publishers Weekly

"Devastating. With illustrations that are at times tender and other times gruesome, Brown has found a way to convey the destruction of the Holocaust to younger readers. Add this graphic novel to your list of resources for teaching and learning about the Holocaust." — School Library Journal

"This indelible graphic perspective grimly etches a crucial acknowledgment of the Holocaust’s harrowing toll on humanity’s youngest and most vulnerable."
— Booklist

"While the narrative boxes throughout convey pertinent information, dialogue bubbles and slightly skewed, unsettling art layer in elements of emotional urgency and intimate heartbreak. The unfortunate parallels to the kidnappings in Ukraine and the family separations at the U.S. southern border offer timely sparks for discussion." — Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books

From the Publisher

10/01/2023

Gr 8 Up—Devastating. With illustrations that are at times tender and other times gruesome, Brown has found a way to convey the destruction of the Holocaust to younger readers. Survival is a key theme along with courage and kindness. However, the reality of the violent atrocities committed by Nazi soldiers is not ignored. For students with an interest in World War II, this graphic novel will provide history lessons in a way that few others can. The vocabulary in the first few pages is a bit daunting for elementary and even middle school students but offers an opportunity to stretch reading comprehension skills. The painful family separations and ordeals faced by frightened children are portrayed with sensitive, realistic imagery. The history of World War II is presented accurately. VERDICT Add this graphic novel to your list of resources for teaching and learning about the Holocaust.—Darby Wallace

School Library Journal

2023-08-11
A powerful account focusing on the fates of Jewish children during the Holocaust.

The narrative opens in 1930 Germany, setting the stage for the rise of the Nazis and noting Europe’s history of antisemitism in the preceding centuries. Heartbreaking pages are devoted to the Kindertransport’s separation of kids and parents. For those remaining, ghettos, camps, and mass murder awaited. Many more pages emphasize the children who survived, their endurance, and the dangerously heroic work of resourceful adults, Jews and non-Jews alike, who protected them. Kids were saved by the thousands, but still, over 1,000,000 perished. Using quotations from survivors and many personal vignettes, Brown successfully animates masses of historical material and individualizes the suffering. Some elements would have benefited from more context: Jews’ crime is said to be “their religion,” but the book does not explain why even secular Jews were targeted. The text notes political machinations and the origins of the Nazi Party’s name, but the party’s misappropriation of the term socialism goes unexplained. The work closes with a historical note recounting post–World War II tragedies from the Partition to the reign of Pol Pot, the Rwandan genocide, and more, along with mention of rising hate crimes, including antisemitism, in the U.S. The devastating impact of the Holocaust on children is only too real in both the text and the dynamic illustrations, which recall the expressive lines and subdued washes of Brown’s The Unwanted (2018).

Vivid, devastating, and impressively documented. (source notes, bibliography) (Graphic nonfiction. 13-18)

Kirkus Reviews