The Final Journey

by Gudrun Pausewang

Book Overview

Alice is eleven years old, and it is wartime. She is on a train with no seats, no lights, no sanitary facilities. Her parents and her grandmother are missing, and Alice doesn't know where she is... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 014130104X
• ISBN13: 9780141301044
• Release Date: December 1998
• Publisher: Puffin Books
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 4.4" x 7.1"
• Age Range: 10 to 14 years
• Grade Range: Grades 5 to 9

Customer Reviews

Amazing

Eleven year old Alice is loved and spoiled endlessly. But when her and her grandfather are thrust onto a cattle truck with no idea of where they`re going, everything in Alice`s life changes. This book is so horrifyingly realistic. The description of the things and people surrounding Alice in the cattle truck is terrifying. You actually feel like your in the disgusting cattle truck, feeling scared and confused. And when Alice first deals with the delemma of death and the miracle of birth you feel her emotions jumping off the page. This book is really amazing in it`s reality of the horrors of the Holocaust.

The Final Journey

The book was a marvelous book but it also makes you feel grief, and sadness for the main characters. A young girl, Alice, who is Jewish, has been taken away from her home by men she has no clue are. Taken with her, were her grandparents. Alice lives with them because her parents had to myssteriously leave the country, she hadn't heard from them in a while. Alice's granmother also dissaperas at the train station where they were taken by the strange men. So now its Alice and her grandfather left alone on the train for who know how long? Maybe days. Along with them there is a family of 5, a strange old man, and other mysterious characters you will read about. So Alice's journey begins on this train of the unknown, no idea where she is going or what will happen to her and her grandfather when they get there. While you read this book you will discover that its about good and evil and who wins doesn't matter but what really matters is that bravery faces the face of evil.

Very Moving

Attending a german school in 8th grade ('95), I first read this book (in it's original german) for a book rewiew and thoroughly enjoyed it. The story about a girl named Alice describes what it was like for Jews and others to travel to the concetration camps on cattle cars with the unending thirst, heat/cold, death, excrement and fear. It has a double importance for me because Mrs. Pausewang came to our area library and gave a speech on her writing. She is actually a surviving victim of the holocaust herself so she wrote this with experience. The end of the book is a really touching one as is the rest of the story. This story was one of my first favorite books. In fact, I liked it so much, I had my dad pick up a copy of it on a return trip to Germany so I would have it. Now, while doing research for my college Holocaust class I found out that it is translated into English so more people are able to read this wonderful story. Now I can finally recommend it to everyone.

Kudos Ms. Pausewang. Very well done.

A wonderful book. Honest, realistic, terrifying, with characters that you get to know perfectly and pray that somehow they will escape. At the same time as being a book about the Holocaust it is a beautiful, tragic coming-of-age story, and the plot lines are woven together expertly. I just can't recommend this enough. However, it is definitely not for readers under 13 or 14. I also recommend Art Spiegelman's _Maus_ for an original, thought-provoking book about the Holocaust.

A very vivid description!

I rate this book five stars. I think that it gives a realistic feel to what the Jews had to go through in the second world war. I'm fifteen now, and for years the Holocaust has fascinated me. Pausewang's book, The Final Journey, depicts how many Jews were rousted out of their houses and sent to concentration camps in cattle cars because the Germans didn't think that they were worth wasting passenger cars on. What Alice goes through on her journey to Auschwitz and the thoughts she had were the same as many people sent out in the same way. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is or isn't interested in the Holocaust.