Really, Really Excellent

Alan Gratz was a speaker at PSLA a couple of years ago, and he was talking about his then new book, Prisoner B-3087.  I had not heard of the book or the author prior to that, for which I was embarrassed and so very thankful that I learned of him and read the book.  It was incredible.  After reading Refuge, I am even more glad because it was even more incredible, if that is possible. This is my pick for the Newbery so far, for sure.

Hitler Youth

Denazification is a term of which I was unfamiliar until reading Projekt 1065:  A Novel of WW2 by Alan Gratz who also wrote Prisoner B-3087.  I read more about former Hitler Youth and I found this article to be of interest, about Melita Maschmann and her Account Rendered memoir.  And this article about Pope Benedict XVI.  And I thought back more to that Pittsburgh Theological Seminary professor who was a Nazi.  He was not a kid though.  So that is different.  Maybe?  How old is "old enough" to know?  Does evil have an age? I just don't know.  I don't know.  I think also about Kurt Waldheim.  And I remember telling a joke to my ninth grade gym teacher, "What is Waldheimer's Disease?"  When you forget you were a Nazi.   I remember being sickened by Waldheim, even then.  It surprised me, but my gym teacher had never heard of him.  I think that was one of those moments when I realized that just because someone is a teacher, doesn't mean they have all the answers.  But that is a topic for another time.
Gratz's book is excellent.  Heart crushing.  But that is life, especially the horrors of it.

Human Nature

I have talked a lot about human nature.  We do horrible things to one another. And the German and Japanese atrocities that led to WW2 are examples of the very worst, of the most horrific behavior that humans have demonstrated. These are the stories that chill one's soul.  No matter how many times I hear them, I am sickened and shocked in whole new and terrible ways.  It seems ironic, maybe, if that is the right use of the term that Hitler and the Nazis would deem Jews, Gypsies,  homosexuals, persons with exceptional abilities to be "inhuman"  when Hitler and the Nazis behaved in such ways that suggest that they are completely void of any kind of humanness.  Even if humanity is evil, how can people such as these have been SO evil.
Prisoner B-3087 is based on the story of Yanek Gruener who survived unspeakable hell at the hand of the Nazis.  Alan Gratz does a remarkable job doing what must have been a hell to write, but needed to be written.