Juvenile Picture Books

About the Holocaust: Extending

the Definitions of Children's Literature

Virginia A. Walter and Susan F. March

Despite a variety of definitions, children's books and picture books generally ad-
here to certain conventions. Depicting the Holocaust in children's books challenges
these conventions. The authors review the Holocaust fiterature for children, paying
special attention to two picture books: Let the Celebrations Begin! by Margaret Wild and
Julie Vivas, and Rose Blanche by Roberto Innocenti and Christophe Gallaz. Their
analysis leads them to conclude the books for children that deal with horrific events
should be viewed as a category of their own.

T he question " W h a t is a children's book?" has yet to be conclusively an-

swered. It is a question of considerable interest to scholars w h o concern
t h e m s e l v e s with the genre a n d a question of m o r e t h a n a c a d e m i c interest to
editors, publishers, writers, reviewers, parents, teachers, a n d librarians w h o
w o r k directly w i t h the object in question. Most definitions h a v e tried to s h o w
h o w literature for children differs from literature for adults. A u t h o r a n d critic
John R o w e T o w n s e n d has c l a i m e d that the line b e t w e e n literature for a d u l t s
and literature for children is arbitrary, d r a w n largely for a d m i n i s t r a t i v e or
e c o n o m i c p u r p o s e s in response to the expansion of school a n d public libraries
for children as a n e w m a r k e t for publishing companies. He c o n c l u d e s that " t h e
only practical definition of a children's b o o k t o d a y - - a b s u r d as it s o u n d s - - i s 'a
b o o k w h i c h a p p e a r s on the children's list of a publisher'" ( T o w n s e n d 1971, 10).
For m o s t practical purposes, T o w n s e n d ' s definition m a y suffice. Certainly
people w h o b u y books for children's use in libraries, schools, a n d h o m e s will
consider books w h i c h are clearly p a c k a g e d a n d m a r k e t e d for children as their
first choice for selection. H a v i n g d e c i d e d to publish a n d m a r k e t a title as a
children's book, the publisher gives a n u m b e r of clues that enable us to identify
its potential readers. C h i l d r e n ' s b o o k s t e n d to be shorter a n d are often lavishly
illustrated.
The picture b o o k is a u n i q u e g e n r e in w h i c h the story is told t h r o u g h a
c o m b i n a t i o n of text a n d illustration (Cullinan 1989, 151). P e r r y N o d e l m a n de-

Virginia A. Walter is an assistant professor at the Graduate SchooI of Library and Information
Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has a Master of Library Science degree
from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. from the University of Southern Califor-
nia. Susan F. March is on the faculty of Kehillath Israel Religious School in Pacific Palisades,
California. She has a Master of Arts in Education degree from the University of Judaism in Los
Angeles and a Master of Library Science from UCLA.
Walter and March 37

fines picture books as "books intended for young children which communicate
information or tell stories through a series of m a n y pictures combined with
relatively slight texts or no texts at all" (Nodelman 1988, vii). He finds that
because the words and the illustrations in picture books interact in order to
define and enhance each other, they present particular problems in interpreta-
tion; neither picture nor text is as open-ended as it w o u l d be on its own. Claire
England and Adele Fasick point out that originally picture books were in-
tended for toddlers and very young children, so that their audience determined
their format (England and Fasick 1987). More recently, picture books with a
more sophisticated content for older readers have appeared. Patricia Ciancolo
notes that these stories are presented in a picture book format but with text
and illustrations which challenge older boys and girls with more complex
levels of meaning (Ciancolo 1990, 4-5).
Myles McDowell points out that in addition to the physical differences there
are some other more subtle but still observable differences between children's
and adult books. Children's books tend to feature child protagonists. They
emphasize action and dialogue rather than introspection and description. They
tend to rely on such traditional plot conventions as the quest, travel in time,
and initiation into adulthood. They build on a clear-cut moral schematic and
offer an optimistic rather than a depressing world view (McDowell 1973, 51).
Perry N o d e l m a n finds that more central to children's fiction than simplicity
of style or a shared set of archetypal plots is a particular vision about the
nature of life that is based on the tension of opposites or polarities--freedom
and constriction, h o m e and exile. He argues that the significant theme in
children's literature is the need for individuals to create balance between w h a t
one wishes for and what one must accept (Nodelman 1985, 19-20). N o d e l m a n
implies that children's literature suggests positive ways to address the tensions
raised by these conflicts, that protagonists in novels for children do successfully
create the balance they n e e d in order to go on. This is consistent with
McDowell's notion of an optimistic worldview, and indeed the notion of reso-
lution occurs frequently in discussions of children's literature. No matter how
ambiguous or bleak the situation may seem throughout the plot, the conclusion
must provide the child reader with some resolution. Although some people
have insisted that this requirement prescribes a h a p p y ending for all children's
novels, others have said that all that is needed is a message of hope (Pape 1992;
Paterson 1989).
A promising trend in the academic consideration of the definition of children's
literature stems from reader-response theory. This approach focuses on the
intended reader of the text. If the author intended children to be the primary
readers of the book, then it can be considered a children's book. Peter H u n t
finds that the subject matter, language, and allusion levels of a text all combine
to indicate the level of readership that the author had in mind. In fact, he finds
that the intended reading audience is the only thing that dependably distin-
guishes children's literature from adult literature (Hunt 1991, 46 ff.).
If we are going to define children's literature in terms of its intended readers,
38 Publishing ResearchQuarterly/Fall 1993

then it is important to understand something about the nature of those read-

ers. Barbara Wall points out that children are just beginning to master the
conventions of fiction and that authors must provide them with guides and
clues about how to read their texts (Wall 1991, 204). This is probably the reason
for the more conventional plot motifs and themes in children's literature. In
addition to having less experience with the conventions of fiction, children
have less knowledge about the world in general than adults do. Their own life
experiences are various and significant as a factor affecting their interpretation
of texts, but in general they have more limited frames of reference than adult
readers do.
Many readers continue to expand their frames of reference and stores of
knowledge about the world through their entire life. Basic cognitive develop-
ment, however, is completed during adolescence. In other words, one's capacity
to acquire and interpret knowledge is established by the age of twelve or so.
Younger readers are still developing their cognitive skills in a pattern that has
been shown to be relatively predictable. The pioneering work of Jean Piaget
established the basis for countless studies of how children's capacity to learn
and absorb and process information changes over time (Piaget 1965, Flavell
1985, Siegler 1991). Particularly relevant to our discussion here is the work of
Arthur Applebee, who studied children's responses to narrative from the age
of two to seventeen. He found that children in Piaget's preoperational stage of
cognitive development, from ages two to six, have little awareness of the over-
all structure of a plot, focusing instead on separate incidents. There is a tendency
at this stage to accept any story as "true"; interpretations about meaning tend
to be literal. Young children are unable to formulate statements about the
abstract meaning or purpose of a story. In the concrete operational stage, from
ages seven to eleven, children are able to summarize and categorize plots.
They tend to attribute their subjective responses to the work itself rather than
to their own subjective condition. A child will say, "It was a funny story,"
rather than "This story made me laugh." At the beginning of the formal opera-
tional stage, from twelve to about fifteen, children are able to analyze structure
and character motivation and understand analogies. They are also able to iden-
tify their own involvement and reactions to the text. These skills will develop
through adolescence to an ability to generalize about the meaning of the work
and to assess its impact on the reader's own views (Applebee 1978, 123-125).
In this article, we propose to revisit the problem of defining a children's
book in the context of a particular content area that renders all definitions of
children's literature problematic, the Holocaust of World War II. We will look
closely at two works of fiction about the Holocaust that were published and
marketed as children's picture books: Let the Celebrations Begin! by Margaret Wild
(1991) and Rose Blanche by Roberto Innocenti and Christophe Gallaz (1990).

Holocaust Literature

Holocaust literature is a topic of considerable discussion and debate. Shortly

Walter and March 39

after World War II, critics Edmund Wilson and T. W. Adorno both declared
that writing fiction about the Holocaust was not only impossible, but immoral
(Ezrahi 1980, 6; Rosenfeld 1980, 13). Alvin Rosenfeld (1980, 14) quotes Elie
Wiesel, who has himself written eloquently about the Holocaust in both personal
memoirs and novels: "Auschwitz negates any form of literature, as it defies all
systems, all doctrines . . . . A novel about Auschwitz is not a novel or else it is
not about Auschwitz. The very attempt to write such a novel is blasphemy."
The argument about the immorality of creating fiction about the Holocaust is
related to concerns about exploiting the victims and survivors, as well as the
fear of being coopted by the act of describing evil. There are concerns that
imaginative works about the Holocaust, as opposed to factual texts such as
autobiographies or histories, will somehow subvert the truth of what actually
happened. There is the worry that readers will think the Holocaust is just a
product of the writer's imagination. Among survivors, there has been a heavy
burden, almost an obligation, to record what happened, to preserve an indi-
vidual and collective memory of the cataclysmic series of events that nearly
destroyed the Jewish population of Europe; fiction, particularly fiction by writ-
ers far removed from the events themselves, is sometimes seen as a dilution of
the historical record (Ezrahi 1980, 21).
In addition to this philosophical or ideological problem, novelists who choose
the Holocaust as their topic face other problems related to the craft of fiction
itself. Rachel Meir points out that the writer of Holocaust literature has no
analogies or frames of reference to build on. She writes, "It [the Holocaust] is
an extreme. What analogy can explain it? Auschwitz is like what? Auschwitz
is only like Auschwitz" (Meir 1986-1987, 65). Nonfiction writers can record
endless examples of ghastly events in order to convey the horror, but fiction
writers must select only the most telling details. Ezrahi (1980, 33-34) points out
that some writers, notably Leon Uris and John Hersey, have sought to solve
this problem by writing documentary novels, which claim a closer relationship
to the historic reality than many other works of fiction. The problem remains,
however, that the intended readers are unlikely to have the personal life expe-
riences that will enable them to fully imagine the events being described. Even
language, the basic tool of the writer, is inadequate to the task of conveying
the horror of the Holocaust; it has been impoverished by overuse in everyday
discourse. Sitting down to a late lunch, we say, "I'm starving." Coming home
from a hard day at work, we say, "I'm exhausted, dead tired." What do these
same words mean in the context of the Holocaust experience?
Writers of Holocaust literature for children have all of the problems encoun-
tered by writers of adult literature, plus some additional problems raised by
the fact that the intended reader is a child. Many of these problems can be
anticipated by the earlier discussion of the definitions or characteristics of a
children's book. Some of the problem is inherent in the subject itself. How can
the author present events of the Holocaust both accurately and optimistically?
What resolution is possible? The topics of evil, death, and violence, which
must figure in any accurate treatment of the Holocaust, have traditionally been
40 Publishing Research Quarterly / Fall 1993

reserved for the more allegorical and conventional treatment of the folk and
fairy tale. As Ursula Sherman explains, "But to bring such truths forward into
this century, and see such deeds not as isolated events but as part of a systematic
plan for human extermination, forces writers into the shame-faced admission
that our world is not automatically good, and that grown-ups are not consis-
tently decent and trustworthy" (Sherman 1988, 174). Eric Kimmel, a noted
children's author, writes, "This terrible weight hangs especially heavy over the
juvenile writer, who is torn between his duty toward his subject and his re-
sponsibility toward his craft: not to be too violent, too accusing, too depressing"
(Kimmel 1977, 84).
Other problems involved in creating children's literature about the Holocaust
are inherent in the intended readers, children. Jeffrey Derevensky, a professor
of educational psychology at McGill University, has related childhood devel-
opment stages to the reading of Holocaust literature. He suggests that because
children aged six and under are capable only of reacting personally to literature,
it is probably inappropriate to introduce them to the subject of the Holocaust
through books. At the concrete operational stage, from ages seven to eleven,
children can begin to comprehend the objective events of the Holocaust. They
will be unable to understand the broader philosophical and psychological is-
sues until they reach the stage of formal operational thought, at approximately
age eleven. Derevensky concludes, "Because of the enormity of the act and its
inconceivability in a free democratic society, the child will require multiple
exposures, books with concrete referents, numerous pictures, and much dis-
cussion" (Derevensky 1987-1988, 54).
The problem of the less developed cognitive capacity and limited life experi-
ences of the young reader often manifests itself in a tension between the need
to protect the child and the need to inform. Meir speculates that one reason for
the popularity of Anne Frank's diary among young readers is that the struc-
ture of the book protects Anne from knowing what is ultimately going to
happen to her, just as children need to be protected from knowing the full
truth about the Holocaust. Another device that Meir observes being used by
writers of juvenile fiction to protect children from the full truth is the isolating
of events that deal with only a partial aspect of the Holocaust, such as an
escape from Nazi territory. She notes that when Janusz Korczak accompanied
his group of orphans from the Warsaw Ghetto to the trains transporting them
all to the Treblinka death camp, he kept up the pretense that they were going
on a school outing. "There is no need to disclose everything," she adds (Meir
1986-87, 66).
The situation is even more complex for Jewish children. Those who attend
religious schools or services are likely to have more information about the
facts of the Holocaust than Gentile children will have since the Holocaust is
not routinely taught as part of the public school curriculum. Depending on the
point of view of the child's parents, there may be a particular theological or
philosophical stance to the events. As Marcia Posner (1988) points out, however,
for all Jewish children, there is the problem of trying to assimilate the knowl-
Walter and March 41

edge that during the Holocaust, a government systematically set out to destroy
Jewish children just because they were Jewish. Posner recommends, therefore,
that books about the Holocaust should not be read in isolation but should be
shared with a trusted adult who can provide the child with reassurance that he
or she will be safe.
In spite of the difficulties of writing works of imagination about the Holocaust
for young readers, many authors have tried. Jane Yolen explains her own
motivation for writing about what was for her, as a Jewish author, the "most
difficult and unrelieved period in history, the Holocaust." She explains,

I wanted to throw them [her readers] body and soul into that cauldron so
that they would understand that it had been all but impossible to fight
except to fight to stay alive. That within that hideous arena there existed
not only hate but love, not only carelessness but caring, not only hopeless-
ness, but hope, and an abiding truth within the careful catalogues of lies. I
wanted my readers to remember as if they had been there, without having
to come back to the 1980s with the long numbers scorched into their arms.
I wanted them to remember. To witness. (Yolen 1989, 249)

The novels that Yolen and other children's authors have written about the
Holocaust fall into a number of categories. Eric Kimmel describes these catego-
ries as concentric rings, much like the rings described in Dante's Inferno, ema-
nating from a central core. The ring that lies farthest from the fiery center
includes the resistance novels, depicting young people participating in under-
ground movements and usually portraying Jews as passive victims. The recent
Newbery winner by Lois Lowry, Number the Stars (1989), is an example. Next
are the refugee novels, such as Judith Kerr's When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit
(1987), mostly written as autobiographical accounts by Jewish writers. In these
the characters display great strength of character but relatively little Jewish
identity or commitment. At the next level are the occupation novels, including
the stories of "hiding," such as The Upstairs Room by Johanna Reiss (1972). These
stories focus on the plight of Jews in Nazi-occupied countries. Closer to the
center are the heroic novels which present stories of Jewish resistance. Uncle
Mischa's Partisans by Yuri Suhl (1973) is a good example of this type. At the
fiery center of the universe are the concentration camp stories, depicting what
Kimmel describes as "the eerie, silent world of gas, ashes, and flames" (Kimmel
1977, 88). He goes on to express his ambivalence about this type of novel,
which comes closest to the existential truth of the Holocaust but which is also
the most impossible to write about within the conventions of children's litera-
ture. Interestingly, Ezrahi (1980, 52) notes that there are relatively few adult
novels that are actually set in the camps. She speculates that writers have
stumbled up against irresolvable literary problems trying to depict this closed
world, which had no way out.
We have been able to identify only four works of fiction written for children
that try to deal with the concentration camps. Gideon by Chester Aaron (1982)
42 PublishingResearchQuarterly/ Fall1993

is a straightforward first-person narrative about the experiences of a cynical,

tough y o u n g adolescent who survives both the Warsaw Ghetto and Treblinka.
Its intended readers are twelve- and thirteen-year-olds, making this more nearly
a y o u n g adult novel than a children's book. The Devil's Arithmetic by Jane Yolen
(1988) is a time travel fantasy that could be read by nine- and ten-year-olds. In
Yolen's book, a contemporary Jewish girl who is tired of hearing her parents
and relatives talk about the Holocaust opens the door for Elijah at the family
Passover seder and finds herself back in Poland at the beginning of World War
II. She is r o u n d e d up and taken to a concentration camp along with the other
Jewish inhabitants of the shtetl. She learns firsthand there w h y her family feels
it is so important to remember what happened to Jews during the Holocaust.
Just as she is about to enter the gas ovens herself, she is transported back to
her own time and place in the United States, where the seder is still going on.
The author uses the time travel device, one of the conventional plot devices of
children's fantasy fiction, to link the present with the historical past and to
provide both her y o u n g protagonist and y o u n g readers with a w a y out of the
concentration camp. The other two children's books which focus on the con-
centration camps are Let the Celebrations Begin! and Rose Blanche. We propose to
examine each of these picture books in some detail, analyzing h o w the authors
and illustrators approached the problem of presenting this "eerie silent w o r l d
of gas, ashes, and flames" to y o u n g children.

Picture Books

The creators of Let the Celebrations Begin! are experienced and successful in the
children's book field. Both Margaret Wild, an Australian editor as well as an
author of children's books, and Julie Vivas, the illustrator, have created award-
winning books for children. The American publisher, Orchard Books, is an
established and respected firm. The book is packaged and was reviewed as a
picture book for y o u n g children.
The cover illustration shows the upper bodies and faces of three raggedy,
homely children with shaved heads. Two are holding cloth toys and smiling.
The center child stares pensively out of the picture. The front flap of the book
jacket previews the story and adds:

Six million Jews died in the Holocaust. Against all odds, about one and a
half million people survived. Based on a reference to a small collection of
stuffed toys made by Polish w o m e n in Belsen for the first children's party
held after the liberation, Let the Celebrations begin! is a moving testament to
all that is good in mankind.

This text is not repeated within the book itself, so readers who have encountered
the book without its jacket will not have this information. The title page shows
a patched star of David attached to a scrap of cloth. Most adults will understand
this allusion; m a n y children will not. The verso of the title page has the usual
Walter and March 43

publisher's imprint and cataloging-in-publication information and leads into a

striking double page illustration of a row of barracks behind barbed wire, with
indistinct, dark h u m a n figures moving stiffly between them. The text on the
opposite page is a foreword that reads: "A small collection of stuffed toys has
been preserved that were made by Polish w o m e n in Belsen for the children's
party held after the liberation." The quote is attributed to Antique Toys and Their
Background by Gwen White (B. T. Batsford Ltd., London, 1971).
The actual text begins on the next page. The type is large, and the vocabulary
is simple. The sentence structure is a little more complex and poetic that that
associated with primers for beginning readers, but all other textual clues indicate
that this is a book for y o u n g children. The first page establishes the first-
person narrator and the basic plot situation: "We are planning a party, a very
special party, the w o m e n and I. My name is Miriam, and this is where I live.
Hut 18, bed 22." The accompanying double spread illustration shows five
people sitting and lying on plain w o o d e n ledges. It w o u l d be difficult to tell
that they are women, except for the clue provided by the text itself. The heads
are shaved, the bodies are shapeless beneath the ragged clothes, which may
have once been dresses. There are no background details in this illustration or
in any of the following pictures of the concentration camp. All we see are the
people. We cannot tell yet which one is Miriam.
The story continues. On the next page Miriam introduces her best friend
Sarah, w h o appears to be a little younger than she, and David, w h o is only
four. N o w we can see that Miriam appears to be a y o u n g adolescent w h o
moves between the world of the w o m e n and the world of the children. She
explains that Sarah and David cannot remember life before the camp and like
to hear her tell about her mother and father and the toys she had. There are no
toys in the camp. The w o m e n are making toys, however, out of scraps of
material and bits of thread, to give the children at the first party after the camp
is liberated, an event they are convinced will happen soon. Even old Jacoba,
w h o says they are crazy to be making toys w h e n they need food, donates part
of a sweater. Illustrations show some w o m e n making the toys while others
sleep. At last the liberating soldiers arrive, and here the text is almost a parody
of the traditional child's primer: "See their guns and their tanks and the big
gates swinging open." The accompanying illustration shows the w o m e n and
children h u d d l e d together and staring out from the page at the sight. The
soldiers are never depicted; nor are the Nazi guards. That night the w o m e n
have their party and give the children the toys, an owl for David, a patchwork
elephant for Sarah. Miriam eats soup with the other women, "and so the
celebrations begin."
There is an afterword. The last page of the book shows David happily hold-
ing his toy owl. The text, in the same small, italic font as the foreword text
about the concentration camp toys, is an eyewitness account by a female survi-
vor of the liberation of one camp.
The book raises one significant question of fact. What were all of these chil-
dren doing at Belsen or any concentration camp at the close of the war? His-
44 Publishing Research Quarterly/Fall 1993

torical records indicate that virtually all small children were killed immedi-
ately upon arrival at the camps. Only children old enough to be productive
workers were spared. While there are a few accounts of children being over-
looked by a particular camp official or guard, these are anomalies. Even at
Terezin, which was maintained by the Nazis as a kind of model "family" camp
to display for the Red Cross, only 100 children ultimately survived out of the
15,000 who entered its doors (Eisen 1988; D w o r k 1991). One can only speculate
that if the toys referred to in the foreword were actually made by inmates at
Belsen, they were made in hopeful anticipation of rejoining children w h o had
been left in hiding on the outside.
The author's device of centering the story around children and toys, h o w e v e r
improbable historically, does make the story accessible and interesting to chil-
dren in a way that a story about adults in a concentration camp could not
accomplish. By setting the story just before the camp is liberated, she also
offers the positive ending that is associated with stories for y o u n g children.
Wild does not tell everything about the conentration camp experience; she has
selected only a few details. Through the text, we learn that the children have
no toys, that there is not enough food and people are hungry, that clothing is
scarce enough to make it difficult for Jacoba to part with a piece of her sweater.
By inference, we learn that the children are not with their fathers and mothers;
we do not learn where those fathers and mothers might be. We k n o w that
these w o m e n and children are s o m e h o w imprisoned and waiting for soldiers
to set them free; we do not learn w h y they are imprisoned or by whom. There
is no mention of Nazis or Germany or Jews or gas ovens or death.
The illustrations do not add much more information. The initial double spread
showing the concentration camp barracks and the Jewish star on the title page
are the only additional visual clues. Vivas' illustrations are certainly not con-
ventionally sweet or pretty or sentimental. They are appropriately stark. The
children's faces, however, are puzzlingly round and full. While their arms and
legs are thin, and their clothes are tattered and torn, these do not look like
children who are going through a terrible time. The colors are m u t e d except in
the pictures of the toys that Miriam remembers from her life before the camp.
We have alluded earlier to the lack of background detail in the illustrations;
like the text, they give us only the w o m e n and children, not their physical
surroundings. Julie Vivas paints an eerie world, but one that is devoid of ashes
and flame.
What will the y o u n g reader make of this book? Presumably, a child w h o is
five or younger, and therefore still in the preoperational stage of cognitive
development, will not be able to read this story alone. An adult will read the
book to the child and then can offer as much or as little historical background
as seems appropriate. It is hard to imagine that any child w o u l d not be curious
about the setting of the story. Though brief, the allusions to a life with no
mothers and fathers and no toys would strike a chord with most young children.
The pictures are haunting and strange and unlike most that y o u n g children
Walter and March 45

would have encountered in a picture book and would probably also stimulate
questions: "Why do the women have so little hair?" "Why are they dressed
like that?" We suspect that many children, especially boys, would wonder
why there are no pictures of the soldiers who liberate the camp.
The large type and simple sentence structure are clues that this book is
intended for the beginning reader, a seven- or eight-year-old. At this stage of
cognitive development and reading ability, the child would probably ignore
the factual material in the foreword and afterword and get right to the story
itself. We think questions would arise at this age as well. Jewish children will
probably understand that this is a story about the Holocaust, however imperfect
or incomplete their knowledge about the events of the Holocaust might be.
Will Jewish children--or any contemporary, well-fed, comfortably housed
children--identify with the ragged, hungry children in the book? If they do
connect with these fictional children, will they be able to generalize to the fate
of other children in the Holocaust? Will they assume that the fate of Jewish
children during the Holocaust was to be imprisoned in a place without their
mothers or fathers or toys, with ragged clothes and not enough to eat? If they
do make this incorrect assumption, is this a problem? Some might argue that
this is as much horror as an eight-year-old child could bear. It is almost a
metaphor for the worst fate a child could imagine. Could they start with this
version of the truth at seven or eight and learn a harsher, more accurate version
when they are eleven or twelve and more able to separate their own reactions
from the objective facts?
Perhaps Margaret Wild and Julie Vivas did not intend this book to be shared
with young children. Perhaps the picture book format is meant to be ironic,
forcing adult readers who do not ordinarily read picture books to look at the
Holocaust from a different perspective. Art Spiegelman used an adult comic
strip or graphic novel format very convincingly in Maus I (1986) and Maus II
(1991) to present the story of his father, who survived Auschwitz. Seeing Jews
as mice and the Nazis as cats and approaching the story in visual terms makes
the adult reader pay attention to details that otherwise might be overlooked or
deliberately passed over. There is little evidence, however, that Wild and Vivas
are using the picture book format to confound the expectations of older readers
other than the occasional echoing of the "See Spot run" syntax of childhood
primers.
We remain confused by the book. We admire it for its literary and artistic
merit. We think that a sensitive, informed adult might use this book effectively
as a means of introducing the subject of the Holocaust to six- to eight-year-
olds or as a vehicle for teaching critical thinking skills to eleven- and twelve-
year-olds. We doubt that children under the age of eleven who encounter this
book without adult intervention will learn much about the Holocaust from it;
they are as likely to be misinformed as informed by its content.
Rose Blanche was published originally in the United States in 1985 and reissued
in 1991. The book has won a number of awards, including a Bratislava Golden
46 Publishing Research Quarterly / Fall 1993

Apple for distinguished illustrations and the American Library Association's

Mildren Batchelder Award for a children's book published originally in a foreign
language outside the United States. Roberto Innocenti, w h o coauthored the
text and painted the illustrations, is a well-known European illustrator. On the
back flap of the 1991 edition, he writes:

In this book I w a n t e d to illustrate h o w a child experiences war without

really understanding it. After drawing the first page I chose Rose Blanche
as its title because of the significance of the name. Rose Blanche was a
group of y o u n g German citizens protesting the war. They had understood
what others w a n t e d to ignore. They were all killed. In this book fascism is
a day-to-day reality. Only the victims and the little girl have k n o w n its
real face.

We also learn from the book jacket that Innocenti was born in Italy in 1940 and
experienced World War I! firsthand as a child. The role of Christophe Gallaz in
creating Rose Blanche is unclear; no mention is m a d e of his contribution. As in
Let the Celebrations Begin! the explanatory jacket text is not repeated in the book
itself.
The cover illustration shows a small blond, blue-eyed girl looking intently
and seriously out of a window. Reflected in the w i n d o w is the sight that she
sees o u t s i d e - - w o u n d e d soldiers riding on tanks and trucks. On the title page
is a small enclosed painting of a little girl running d o w n an u n p a v e d country
road which is deeply rutted with the tracks of heavy vehicles.
Like Let the Celebrations Begin!, Rose Blanche is told in the first person in a
simple narrative style. The first page begins:

My name is Rose Blanche. I live in a small town in Germany with narrow

streets, old fountains and tall houses with pigeons on the roofs.
One day the first truck arrived and m a n y men left. They were dressed as
soldiers.
Winter was beginning.

The girl goes on to describe the soldiers and mysterious military vehicles
that continue to come through the town. She likes to walk along the river
sometimes, and the children think that the trucks are going someplace across
the river. One day a truck stops in the town and Rose Blanche sees a little boy
jump from the truck and try to run away. The mayor catches him, though, and
the soldiers put him back on the truck. The illustration depicting the boy's
capture is a visual allusion to the well-known photo of the boy with his hands
up, facing a German soldier's rifle in the last days of the Warsaw Ghetto. 1
Rose Blanche wants to k n o w where the little boy went after that, so she fol-
lows the truck secretly far out into the country where she had never been.
There she sees a clearing barricaded with electric barbed wire. Gaunt children
Walter and March 47

wearing striped prison uniforms are standing behind the wire, in front of long
wooden buildings. They say they are hungry, and Rose Blanche hands a piece
of bread through the wires. Times are hard in the village, but Rose Blanche
continues to hide food in her school bag and take it to the children by the
wooden houses, who are getting thinner in spite of her help. Spring comes,
and Rose Blanche sees the soldiers coming back through the town the other
way. Then one day everybody in town flees, along with the defeated German
soldiers.
The narration shifts to the third person at this point and explains that Rose
Blanche disappeared that day. She walked into the forest again and found that
the clearing where the children had been is now empty. She dropped her
satchel of food and stood still. "Shadows were moving between the trees. It
was hard to see them. Soldiers saw the enemy everywhere. There was a shot."
Soldiers wearing different uniforms and speaking a different language arrived.
Rose Blanche's mother waited for her daughter, who did not return. The last
double spread illustration shows the clearing where Rose Blanche had died,
with flowers entwining the former fence posts and barbed wire of the concen-
tration camp. The last words of the text are: "Spring sang."
The story can be seen as one of the "righteous Gentile" stories, in which a
good and honorable Gentile tries to help the imperiled Jews. Perhaps this story
does not even qualify as a concentration camp story, as Kimmel defined it,
because it stops at the fence of the concentration camp, with Rose Blanche on
the outside looking in. The point of view is clearly not that of the Jewish
victims but of the German child. It is also the point of view of "every child" in
a world at war, the child who is bewildered by the events happening around
her. If we had only the text to guide us, we might be as bewildered as Rose
Blanche. Unlike Julie Vivas, however, who presents visual images of only what
is described in the text and no more, Innocenti fills the background of the story
with richly textured, detailed, hyperrealistic illustrations. Joseph and Chava
Schwarcz remind us, however, not to be misled by the persistent photorealism
of the book; in many ways, this is a highly metaphorical book about the veils
of silence that cover life in this European town (Schwarcz and Schwarcz 1991,
180).
On the first page, it is the pictures that show us how happy the townspeople
and soldiers are at the beginning of the war, waving swastikas and smiling. It
is also the pictures that suggest that times get harder for the villagers as winter
goes on, although never as hard as the conditions in the concentration camp,
of course. The concentration camp inmates are not just gaunt; they are skeletal.
The double page illustration of the villagers in flight before the advancing
Soviet army is full of almost Breughelian details bandaged soldiers, people
carrying belongings in bags and baskets, makeshift carts, bicycles, yoked oxen,
people of all ages. The perspective, looking down on the scene, is dramatic and
adds to the feeling of heightened realism.
The last illustration of the book, showing the clearing in bloom, exactly ech-
oes the illustration two pages before, in which Rose Blanche stands in front of
48 Publishing Research Quarterly / Fall 1993

the empty clearing where the barracks and hungry people had been, looking
d o w n on the shattered fence, where she has placed a purple flower. Behind
her in the fog we see tree stumps and the s h a d o w y figures of soldiers firing
their rifles. On the verso of the last page of text is a small square picture
depicting a close-up of a shredded purple flower on a length of rusty barbed
wire.
In spite of the clearly allegorical or fictional nature of this text, some libraries
have catalogued it with other nonfiction accounts of the Holocaust, thus trying
to ensure that its readers k n o w what they are getting into. A child is thus
unlikely to come across it while browsing in the picture book shelves. At any
rate, it is not as obviously a book for very young readers, as Let the Celebrations
Begin! appears to be. The illustrations are very sophisticated and dark and
more likely to appeal to adults than to small children. We suspect that Innocenti
and Gallaz intended this book for a somewhat romanticized, mythical "every
child" much like their protagonist, a child who is also "no child."
The factual problem here of placing children in the concentration camp seems
less serious here, because the concentration camp inmates are actually such a
small part of the story. As a story of compassion and sacrifice, however, and as
an antiwar statement, the story has considerable power. It could be used quite
effectively with older children as the starting point of a discussion about a
n u m b e r of important ethical issues and as an example of striking book design.

Extending Conventions

Both of these picture books about the Holocaust extend the definitions and
conventions of children's books on several levels. By confronting a topic as
daunting as the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, they take on a subject
that defies the ordinary requirements for resolution and hope in a book written
for children. Wild surmounts this obstacle by isolating an incident that, if true,
is anomalous. Innocenti and Gallaz avoid the most serious problems by pre-
senting their story in near-allegorical style and offering redemption for the loss
of a c h i l d - - a n d less clearly, that of the Jewish victims--in the form of spring
flowers. Certainly neither book discussed here presents more than a fragment
of truth about the Holocaust, but the authors should not be held accountable
for all the information they did not present. No book could ever tell a child
everything he or she should k n o w about the Holocaust. It is possible that
either of these books could stimulate a desire to k n o w more and lead a child to
other books on the subject.
The risks taken by these authors and illustrators are magnified by the picture
book formats they have chosen, raising expectations that these are books for
very y o u n g children. Peter Rabinowitz has written about the conventions which
readers take into account as they approach texts. He points out that these
"rules" of reading serve as a kind of assumed contract between the author and
the reader, laying out the grounds on which the intended reading should take
Walter and March 49

place (Rabinowitz 1987, 43). A n u m b e r of rules of configuration govern a

reader's view about what to expect in a text. One of these rules of configuration
is genre. The reader approaches a mystery novel with different expectations
than those stimulated by a biography. Juvenile picture books raise expecta-
tions based on the assumption that the intended reader is a y o u n g child. Those
expectations are confounded by both of the books in question.
While we have focused our discussion here on children's books about the
Jewish Holocaust, it is significant that two picture books about the bombing of
Hiroshima also present some ambiguity in determining their appropriate audi-
ence. Hiroshima No Pika by Toshi Maruki (1980) presents the events of that day
from the point of view of a seven-year-old girl. The text is a straightforward
narrative of the ghastly experiences of people living in the city on the day the
bomb fell. The pictures present an even more graphic story--naked, b u r n e d
bodies in a raging, oily inferno. The illustrations are highly evocative of the
actual horrors of the events. Unlike the Vivas illustrations for Let the Celebra-
tions Begin!, they are not context-free. Nor do these expressionistic paintings
have the realistic quality of Innocenti's illustrations for Rose Blanche. This may
enhance their strength; as Joseph and Chava Schwarcz point out, Maruki's
paintings seem to overwhelm our emotions and cognitive powers (Schwarcz
and Schwarcz 1991, 172-176). We respond to them viscerally. Even a casual
scanning of Hiroshima No Pika w o u l d indicate that this is not a book for little
children.
My Hiroshima by Junko Morimoto (1990) is more problematic. This is another
eyewitness account, told again from the point of view of a little girl living in
Hiroshima. The book begins with an account of her family and school life. The
text is brief, with simple sentences and easy vocabulary. The pictures are sweet,
almost cute. While the text continues in the same easy-reader style, the quality
of the illustrations changes abruptly with a double-page spread of the mush-
room cloud that erupted over Hiroshima. N o w the pictures are dark, stark,
and graphic in their horror. The easy-to-read text n o w deals with more horrific
subjects as well: "There was a child, screaming, trying to wake-up her dead
mother." According to Ann Hotta, this graphic depiction of the bombing of
Hiroshima is not u n c o m m o n in books for y o u n g children published in Japan,
where the need to remember the horror is considered more important than the
need to protect children (Hotta, 1991). Very y o u n g children are taught about
this consequence of World War II, participate in remembrance ceremonies on
August 6, and make visits to shrines commemorating the dead. There is a
c o m m o n l y understood context in which the events can be placed. Most Ameri-
can children lack this context.
Our analysis of two picture books about the unlikely topic of the Jewish
Holocaust, combined with a brief discussion of two picture books about the
bombing of Hiroshima, has thus led us to a new element in the ongoing discus-
sion of the nature of children's books. We suggest that the context in which a
children's book is read is as important as the content or the format. Perry
50 Publishing Research Quarterly / Fall 1993

Nodelman reminds us that "we can understand pictures, as we can under-

stand any aspect of human existence, only in terms of the depth and subtlety
of the contexts we are able to apply to them" (Nodelman 1988, 106). Most
contemporary American children would require an informed and caring adult
to provide the depth and subtlety of the context of the Jewish Holocaust before
they could process the content of Let the Celebrations Begin! and Rose Blanche. In
War and Peace Literature for Children and Young Adults: A Resource Guide to
Significant Issues (1993), Virginia Walter has written about how adults can use
such books to create a frame of reference to help children understand the
otherwise incomprehensible events or concepts of war and peace. Let the Cel-
ebrations Begin! and Rose Blanche should not be viewed as simply children's pic-
ture books, or even as picture books for "older children"; they are children's
books for adults to share with children. They imply not only a child reader,
but also an adult mediator who will read the book jacket copy and the histori-
cal notes and help the child process the information on their pages.

Note

This photo, apparently taken by Jurgen Stroop, the commander of the German forces who was respon-
sible for rounding up the Jews who were still alive in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, has been reproduced
in many places, including Smoke and Ashes: The Story of the Holocaust by Barbara Rogasky (New York:
Holiday House, 1988), an excellent nonfiction book for older children.

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A Skeptic Among the Scholars

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