Roy, Jennifer Rozines
YELLOW STAR
New York : Marshall Cavendish, 2006
IL 5-8, RL 5.2
ISBN 076145277X

(2 booktalks)

Syvia is only four years old but she knows something is wrong. She has to hide from the Nazis in the cellar and wear the yellow star on her new coat. Her family has to leave their home and join 200,000 other people being resettled into a ghetto for the Jews. Syvia understands the word Jew; she knows she is one; so is the rest of her family. Why people hate them is a question she cannot understand until she lives through the war and is one of only 12 children to leave the ghetto six years later. You’ll have an understanding too when you read this true account called Yellow Star by Jennifer Roy. (New Hampshire Great Stone Face nominee, 2007-2008)

Booktalk #2

Years of hunger, of being cold, of being scared fade into the distance as Syvia copes with the newest indignity in her life, hiding in a hole in the cemetery. Her father is doing his best to keep her alive when so many other children of the Lodz ghetto are being moved. But moved to where, her father wonders, as he tries to keep his family together.

If she survives the day in the cemetery hole, what happens next? She has already given up so much of her childhood. Gone are the days of playing with friends, she has no toys, her last birthday was celebrated without even a piece of bread, and now, she is threatened with being separated from her family. Her family is ALL she has left in life - how can the soldiers be so cruel to the youngest members of the Lodz ghetto?
Will her father keep her safe today in the cemetery? And what about tomorrow, and the tomorrow after that? How can survival be this difficult when you are only 10 years old?   (Rhode Island Teen Book Award nominee 2007-2008)