Wholesale Erika's Story

The haunting true story of a woman who was spared from the horrors of the Holocaust as a child is fittingly paired with Roberto Innocenti’s grimly photorealistic illustrations. Reviews "My mother threw me from the train." A Jewish woman in Germany today tells how, as an infant, she survived the Holocaust after she was thrown from a train on its way to the camps in 1944 and was taken in and raised by a village woman. The survivor imagines her parents in the ghetto and transports. Did they hold her close and kiss her before throwing her away to save her life? Innocenti, who did the Holocaust picture book Rose Blanche (1991), dramatizes the horror in amazingly detailed photo-like illustrations with an overlay of surreal imagery: a small baby carriage stands on the platform as the Jews are being loaded into the cattle cars; wrapped in bright pink a baby flies through the air as the train hurtles through pastoral landscapes. The clear, tiny details dramatize both the fragility and the endurance of the infant survivor, as well as the bizarre calm of the "normal" world. Is the woman's story true? The experience is certainly known to have happened to some babies. –Hazel Rochman, Booklist , November 2003 "I was born sometime in 1944. I do not know my birthdate. I do not know my birth name. I do not know in what city or country I was born," says narrator and protagonist Erika, in introducing her strange Holocaust history. She offers sober speculation on her parents' persecution and removal from their home and eventual placement in a railroad car bound for a concentration camp, where the first part of her known history occurs: "My mother threw me from the train." Someone takes the bundled baby to a woman who braves the risk to become her foster mother, naming her and raising her as her own. Erika went on to a loving marriage and a happy family with children and grandchildren, and "Today, my tree once again has roots." The finely honed text has a spare lyricism, moving with restrained dignity from the opening author's note, which describes Vander Zee's meeting with Erika and introduces her story, through the measured description of Erika's imagined past, to the quiet triumph of her survival and flourishing family life. Innocenti's portraits of the wartime countryside drain the colors until a smoky gray dominates, making them almost monochromatic, emphasizing their photorealistic quality, and tonally matching the text; occasional details, such as the yellow stars on the faceless travelers or the pink bundle containing baby Erika, are picked out in muted color.