More importantly: how do you keep this Jewish child safe during the Holocaust without leaving her fearful, suspicious and unable to connect with others when it's over.
This is the story of Anna Lania, 7, who is living in Krakow in 1939. Her father is a linguistics professor and her mother is dead. Every day of the week, Anna and her father speak a different language, and they visit friends who speak those languages on the appointed day. They speak French with Monsieur Bouchard, Yiddish with Reb Shmulik and German with the pharmacist.
It's an idyllic and wonderful life until Nov. 6, when her father (and all the professors at Jagiellonian University) are called to a meeting. her father leaves her with their friend the pharmacist and goes to the university. At the meeting, her father and colleagues are taken first to a Krakow prison then to internment facilities across Poland before being transported to Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Germany and several months later to Dachau.
When her father doesn't return, the pharmacist becomes increasingly afraid to let her stay. He lets her sleep in his shop overnight and then walks her part way home. When she arrives at her apartment, the door is locked, and the crabby, suspicious Polish lady across the hall only peers at her through a crack in the door. She returns to the sidewalk outside the pharmacy.
There, she meets a man she learns to call the Swallow Man. He provides her with a little comfort, a cookie from the pharmacy and the advice to stay out of sight. She recognizes that he is her best hope for survival and follows him.
This is the beginning of a mutually beneficial relationship as the pair tramp back and forth across Poland, close to the lines of the Eastern Front and eventually into Germany. He teaches her the rules of surviving on the road and on the run, how to deflect questions, how to improvise and how to charm people into offering to you what you need.
Despite the terrible things they see along the way and the desperate things they experience, this is a beautiful book. It reads like a fairy tale, describing their habits and daily and seasonal activities in a string of anecdotes. We never learn who the Swallow Man is, why he's on the run or even if he is Jewish.
In the end, both Anna and the Swallow Man make deep sacrifices for each other's survival.
He prepares her well for going forward with a life of her own after they part. As she approaches a new chapter in her life, she remembers a moment when she told the Swallow Man that she wanted to one day know everything like he did. After a long silence he tells her that he doesn't know everything and doesn't want to. Knowledge is a valuable tool, useful for survival, but it "is also a kind of death," he tells her.
"A question holds all the potential of the living universe within it . . . Questions, Anna -- questions are far more valuable than answers, and they do much less blowing up in your face as well. If you continue to seek questions, you cannot stray far off the proper road."
This is a book that will leave you with many questions. It's a book for those terrible dark times of World War II, but also a book for our times. Ultimately, it's a book about surviving with hope.
The Author: Gavriel Savit
Between performances and rehearsals he read Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, Yann Martel's Life of Pi, Adam Levin's The Instructions, and Lev Grossman's The Magicians.
In an interview with Shira Schindel of the Jewish Book Council, Savit said, "It seems to me, however, that human beings live full lives even in the most atrocious of situations, and it's somewhat regrettable that it's not always possible to see the nuance in human experience within these terrible situations. That, I feel, is one of the most fascinating things: How do you grow up surrounded by this horrible danger?
"But maybe the answer is simply: What is the alternative?"
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