November 15, 1998
Why Are the Grown-Ups Crying?
Anita Lobel looks back on a childhood dominated by the specter of the Nazis.

A Child of War.
By Anita Lobel.
Illustrated. 193 pp. New York:
Greenwillow Books. $16.
(Ages 10 and up)

Should children today read about the Holocaust? Won't it shock and horrify them, give them nightmares, turn them off reading? Exciting escape adventure is one thing, but what about the truth? Will it help them to think about their own moral choices as potential perpetrators, victims, bystanders? Will they connect that genocide with other accounts of what racism can do, through history and now? As more and more states mandate the teaching of the Holocaust in schools, and as the number of children's books on the subject has grown to a flood, these have become serious issues.

The search for an upbeat, hopeful message is what lies behind the longstanding controversy about ''Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl,'' a controversy that was revived last year. Because her story has been sentimentalized and that famous sentence about believing in spite of everything that people are good at heart has been wrenched out of context and trumpeted on stage and everywhere else as a message of healing and hope, there are many who say children should not read the diary -- including Cynthia Ozick, who wrote in a devastating article in The New Yorker that the diary should have been destroyed. The argument is that if the diary is the only book children today read about the Holocaust, they come away with a distorted view of the truth.

That word ''only'' is the problem. Since the diary was first published in 1947 it has sold more than 25 million copies in 50 languages. You shouldn't deprive young readers of a book that has such enduring power to move them. But one book cannot do it all. The answer is not to slam it or ban it, but to add to it from the wealth of powerful Holocaust literature. Young readers find that it is the personal accounts, like the diary, that are most moving.

Anita Lobel's disturbing memoir, ''No Pretty Pictures: A Child of War,'' a finalist for the National Book Award in young people's literature, is neither sentimental nor exploitative. In fact, Lobel is adamant that she will not ''sanctify'' herself with ''the pride of victimhood.'' She is such a fervent New Yorker that it is hard to believe that she learned English only when she immigrated to the United States in 1952 at the age of 16. She is widely known for her joyful, gorgeously colored illustrated books, including the Caldecott Honor book ''On Market Street'' (1982), and for those she did with her husband, the late Arnold Lobel. Her pictures give no hint of her dark, terrifying childhood.

Barely 5 years old when the Nazis came to her comfortable home in Poland, she spent the next five and a half years in hiding and on the run, from the ghetto to the countryside to a Benedictine convent. Her younger brother was always with her, disguised as a girl to hide his circumcision. Their grown-up protector was their Roman Catholic nanny, Niania, who pretended to be their mother. Then the convent was raided and their Jewishness was revealed. The children were in lineups, marches, transports in trucks and boxcars to the camps -- first Plaszow, then Auschwitz, then Ravensbruck, places of hunger, mud, stench, corpses, chimneys. After the war Lobel spent two blissful years recovering from tuberculosis, nursed by kind caregivers in a Swedish sanitarium. She learned Swedish and went to school in Sweden for the first time when she was 12. She never wanted to leave.

Those who expect one book to tell the whole Holocaust history will not be satisfied. There is no commentary, no context. In fact, the integrity of the storytelling is in the narrowness of the child's viewpoint, the physical immediacy, the bewilderment. The truth is that nothing makes sense.

Why are grown-ups crying? Where is her father? What does ''deported'' mean? She is afraid to ask. She is ashamed to be Jewish. She hates her ''sadly Semitic'' appearance when she is in hiding and even after the war, when she is the dark one among all the blond Swedes.

There are no heroics. Lobel is not aware of her courage. She takes it for granted that she and her younger brother are one individual. When she finds a raw potato in the mud, he and she alternate taking bites out of it. She devotes just part of a sentence to the selections at Ravensbruck, when she dragged him to the left, away from the chimneys. And his disguise is no big deal; there's no drama about it until the Nazis raid the convent and make him pull his pants down.

There's a phys-cal quality to Lobel's memories of the terror. (''The whispers of the trapped grown-ups sounded like the noise of insects rubbing their legs together.'') The deprivation is visceral. (''Feverish, always crouching, diarrhea dripping from my behind, I dreamed of a day I could sleep in a soft bed with clean sheets and sit on a toilet that flushed in a lavatory that had a door that closed.'') Fear is stifled by wave upon wave of hunger. It is just she and her brother; they are reduced to nothing but two hungry, itching lumps. All they want is not to be noticed, not to be singled out. She mourns the loss of her braids when her head is shaved, but otherwise she barely mourns the loss of anything. She does not think about her parents. Only Niania.

When she is safe, she celebrates: ''I had no lice in my stubby hair anymore, no lice in the seams of my pajamas''; she cannot take for granted the ''fat, slithering, luxurious sweetness'' of butter. There is no heartfelt family reunion, just as there is no nostalgia for a pre-Nazi Eden. When her father first writes to her in Sweden, his words are flowery, as if he is learning to be a father again after seven years of not having children. In contrast, she is cold, shut off: ''I had almost forgotten that yes, there would be a mother and a father. Yes. They had been found. From the other side of the Baltic I had had letters. Yes. I had written to them. Yes, of course.''

Her relationship with her mother has always been distant. When they meet again after the war, her mother nags her to cut her hair. ''Didn't she know about the shaved heads in concentration camps?'' the child rages. Niania is the one the child loves. That Niania is sometimes anti-Semitic, not always nice, does not matter. She is the grown-up who raised and nurtured and sheltered the children. Lobel misses Niania in the camps, and always.

The memory is raw. The storytelling frames it. The message is that there is no meaning in this suffering. And yet, if luck was the most important factor in Anita Lobel's survival, so also was the humanity of a Catholic woman who mistrusted Jews yet protected the sister and brother ''with the flapping wings of a demented angel.''

Hazel Rochman is an editor at Booklist, the reviewing magazine of the American Library Association, and the editor, with Darlene Z. McCampbell, of ''Bearing Witness: Stories of the Holocaust.''

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