I really enjoyed this book and it was interesting to learn that it is based on a true story. I love reading and learning about different parts of history, though often I do come back to WW2, so this was a book I knew from the start I was going to enjoy. It is based almost entirely off of the true story of two brothers separated during WW2 which makes it even more heartbreaking.
This book follows two brothers Fritz and Kurt who get separated during the early years of WW2, going in different directions. Fritz gets sent to a Nazi concentration camp and Kurt goes to America to live with his extended family as a refugee.
This book had a lot of depth to it and was really interesting along with loads of bits and pieces that I loved. One thing I found to be unique and quite nice about this book is the writing style and how it was written - the writing was telling the brother's story in real-time jumping between the two but it also occasionally had hints as to what happened to them at the end of the war say things like ‘but Fritz didn’t know that yet’, and similar which isn’t something I see often in books and really liked. It also tied in well with the point that the author was telling a true story and that this was something that had happened and had a specific ending.
The key plot and reason I picked up this book are based on the history that it tackles and how it’s got a different target audience to a lot of similar stuff that I’ve read and that it’s unique in someways but at the same time there are a lot of similar books set in WW2 that are fantastic so this book was never going to be completely unique but that’s what I liked. I know the history - it’s something that I have learned about at school, read numerous books about and done some of my own research on but it’s something that I always look for new books on and I often want to hear about different experiences that would have been had.
This book didn’t try to have a unique twist on the war or tell a story that hasn’t been told before because both Fritz and Kurt’s stories have been told very similarly before it just tried to tell the stories it was telling as well as it could and that it did. It was simple and powerful and meaningful because of that. Throughout the book as well it showed different things that could have happened to Jews during this time, so you had some that managed to escape and become refugees, some that were killed or sent to ghettos and died as well as some being sent to concentration camps that proves the point that not everyone was sent to a concentration camp and that other things did happen to these people.
Fritz’s story was really interesting because in some ways if you didn’t know the source of the book then I don’t think it would be completely believable but because you know it’s based as much as possible on a boy’s true story it makes you wonder what else happened that we don’t know about. It was also interesting to hear about the different times of the war for him and how he managed to survive.
Overall I really enjoyed this and I highly recommend it. If you enjoyed another WW2 story I would recommend for the same age range is When the World Was Ours by Liz Kessler.
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