We are witnesses : five diaries of teenagers who died in the Holocaust /

Born in 1943 in the Westerbork concentration camp in Holland, Boas here brilliantly unfolds the history of the Holocaust through poignant excerpts from five teenagers' wartime diaries, enhanced with skillful commentary. Predictably, Anne Frank turns up, in the final section, but, as Boas points out, ``alongside the other four diaries, Anne's looks different than when you read it by itself as the sole voice of the Holocaust.'' By the time readers encounter Anne Frank, they will have met Jewish teenagers trapped in equally tragic but even more violent circumstances in various parts of Europe, from a small Polish village to the Vilna ghetto to Brussels and Hungary. The young writers relay their hopes and fears even as they chronicle the disintegration of their daily lives. One is religious, another politically active, others wrapped up in their families-Boas points out each writer's sensitivities as he explains the terrible traps into which the individual teenagers fall. In exploring their fates, he impresses upon the reader their vitality, and, by extension, implies the enormity of the Holocaust's losses. Ages 12-up. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Foreword by Patricia C. McKissack. Narrative accounts of five young Jews, including Anne Frank, whose diaries hold their observations and emotions, give immediacy to the horrors of the Holocaust. The text provides historical information and compares the experiences of the diarists, quoting liberally from the teenagers' writings. Although these condensed versions lack the impact of a complete diary, the cumulative effect of the five journals is overwhelming. From HORN BOOK 1995, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A riveting collection of texts that, rather than variations on a theme, remain stubbornly individualistic, adding up to a stereoscopic vision of the Holocaust. The teenagers who kept these diariesthe son of a Polish dairyman, a young communist in the Vilna ghetto, an Orthodox Jew in Brussels, a Hungarian girl from a wealthy family, Anne Frank in Amsterdamhad practically nothing in common, aside from the fact that they met the same fate. Boas couches longer and shorter quotes from the diaries with historical background and his own reflections. His analysis can be platitudinous, and almost stifling in the case of the Polish boy, the only diarist who was not a city- dweller, and the one with the least-individuated voice. But Boas's historical notes, in conjunction with the diaries, amount to a guided tour of the Holocaust, detailing the strategies used by the Nazis in five different settings. Each diary could stand on its own merit without outside elaboration; all are products of independent personalities, but perhaps nothing could have made them more effective than putting them in one book. Perhaps, too, the most significant result of the editorial process is the perfect order in which the diaries are placed: The book reads like a tragedy in five acts. (b&w photos, index, map) (Nonfiction. 12+)