Yellow Star

Yellow Star
Author: Jennifer Roy
Genre: Historic Fiction
Grades: 4-7

During World War II the Germans invaded Lodz, Poland. They forced all of the Jewish people into the ghetto for the duration of the war. Out of the quarter of a million of the people that lived in the ghetto only 800 survived and out of the 800 survivors, 12 of them were children. This story tells the experiences of one of those children, Sylvia Perlmutter. While in the ghetto the Nazis started selecting who would be going to concentration camps. Her father, one of the leaders of the ghetto, was able to save his family for being sent to the gas chambers, and also helped Sylvia and 11 other children survive. Her father saved them by smuggling the children from cellar to cellar in the ghetto while other jewish children were Chelmno extermination camp. This book shows how Sylvia and her family had to live, who her friends were, daily life and jobs. In the classroom this book would be useful because it will give students a perspective of how things were in the ghettos.