The Secret Buttons
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Book Overview
Vienna, March 1939. Twelve-year-old Anni Blum and her seven-year-old sister Rosie board a passenger train alone. Their mother stands on the platform in a rose-colored coat, waving until her daughters disappear. Their father is in a Nazi labor camp. The girls carry forged passports, domestic worker visas for England, their knitting, an English phrase book, and a secret their mother didn't explain.
The Secret Buttons follows the sisters from that Vienna train platform through a harrowing border crossing, a ferry across the North Sea, and arrival in an English village that's deep in preparations for war.
In their new home, they must learn a difficult new language, battle flashbacks of broken glass and Papa being taken away, and figure out how to outwit the censors who are blacking out words in letters to and from their mother. At the same time, they're put to work shopping, helping dig a backyard bomb shelter, and preparing Shabbat dinners-not a tradition in their assimilated Viennese household. When a Nazi pilot parachutes out of the sky, British officers with guns surround him - and ask thirteen-year-old Anni to interrogate him in German. What begins as a terrifying moment becomes something else: a girl discovering what she is capable of.
That same cool-headed thinking solves another grown-up dilemma. Their diamond-merchant uncle has secured papers to get ten refugee families to America, but wartime law bars taking valuables out of Britain. Anni's clever solution involves crocheting, diamonds, buttons, and sweaters that keep the refugees warm across the Atlantic and allow them to resettle with more than the shirts on their backs.
In a genre of books in which Jewish children are rescued or hidden by others, Anni and Rosie are the ones who push the story forward.
The journey also changes them from the inside. In England, they discover that their Jewish heritage is worth fighting to preserve. And the story ends not with escape, but with a new kind of belonging: the girls rebuild their family's lost Vienna knitting table in Brooklyn with a circle of multicultural friends.
Inspired by the author's mother's WWII memories of coming to England on a domestic servant visa, the book features illustrations by Italian artist Caterina Baldi.
For readers ages 10 and up. A natural companion for classroom units on World War II, the Holocaust, and immigration.
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