LitPick Review
Yellow Star is the story of a young Jewish girl growing up in the Poland Lodz ghetto, during the Second World War in 1939. The Nazis have invaded Poland and detained the whole Jewish population. They have trapped 270,000 people behind a wire fence in the smallest area of the country. Sylvia learns she must keep her eyes down to avoid seeing the terrors of war and her yellow star stitched to her clothes to distinguish her as a Jew. With the sound of frequent gun shots, cries of pain and her friend unknowingly being taken to concentration camps to be murdered, Sylvia must stay focused on staying alive. This seems a huge, harsh feat for a 4 year old but it was everyday life for children in the ghetto.
Opinion:
Written with narratives at the beginning of every chapter but mostly in verse, this is Sylvia's story of how she survived detainment to become one of the only twelve children to survive the Lodz ghetto. This was an amazingly inspiring story, showing the horrors of the holocaust met with the glistening hope of one little girl. I love reading stories of war and this book did not disappoint. It was astounding how well the author depicts a young girl's innocence and the realization of her own ominous death. Unusually, I really did like the way this book was written in verse, it gave it an extra sense of being and made the tale all the more moving. Yellow star was a confronting and beautiful book, making it hard to believe what real people lived through.
