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School Library Journal - 08/01/2016 Gr 6–10—Irena Sendler, a righteous Gentile who rescued approximately 2,500 Jewish children in the Warsaw ghetto, is the focus of this volume. Sendler's father, a Catholic doctor who treated Jews others turned away, grew up speaking Yiddish with close Jewish friends. Her senior role at a government agency positioned her to offer help following the 1939 Nazi invasion of Poland. Sendler and an inner circle of trusted friends, Jewish and Christian alike, used creative means to spirit Jewish children away to safety in orphanages and foster homes. Tortured by the Nazis, she gave up no secrets, keeping the children and her network safe. While the book is strong on general historical context, featuring descriptions of socioeconomic divisions among Jews in occupied Warsaw, it suffers from the wartime loss of direct historical evidence. Many of the individuals portrayed—Sendler included—do not feel fully fleshed out, making the narrative somewhat confusing and lessening the emotional impact. This is a story better suited to shorter treatments, such as Marcia Vaughan's Irena's Jars of Secrets. More readable, engaging volumes on similar individuals exist, such as Irene Gut Opdyke's In My Hands and Alison Leslie Gold's A Special Fate. VERDICT Purchase where there is a high demand for Holocaust nonfiction.—Laura Simeon, Open Window School Library, WA - Copyright 2016 Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and/or School Library Journal used with permission.

Booklist - 09/15/2016 Farrell adapts Mazzeo’s adult book for young readers, recounting the inspiring true story of Polish social worker Irena Sendler, who risked her life to save 2,500 Jewish children in the Warsaw ghetto from the Nazis during WWII. Between 1939 through 1945, ghetto inhabitants increasingly died of disease and starvation and were deported to extermination camps. In the midst of these horrific living conditions, Sendler and a small group of mostly female Jewish friends falsified Jewish children’s paperwork, giving them Catholic identities, and ingeniously smuggled them out of the ghetto under overcoats, in coffins and toolboxes, and through underground sewers and tunnels. Known as “the female Oskar Schindler,” Sendler was arrested and interrogated by the Nazis but never broke under torture. She was short in stature but had immense courage and didn’t consider herself a hero: “What I did was not an extraordinary thing.” The children Sendler saved and the readers of this moving biography would undoubtedly disagree. Final photos and endnotes not seen. - Copyright 2016 Booklist.

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