Fritz and Kurt by Jeremy Dronfield and David Ziggy Greene
| Fritz and Kurt by Jeremy Dronfield and David Ziggy Greene | |
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| Category: Confident Readers | |
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Reviewer: John Lloyd
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| Summary: Initially seeming too earnest in its Reithian levels of detail, and forever damning the SS as ugly in ways that evoke their own phrenologists, this still ended up a great, wide-access window to the Shoah. This fairly lengthy junior read could well give much more than countless textbooks on the Nazi camp system. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 384 | Date: January 2023 |
| Publisher: Puffin | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 9780241565742 | |
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I feel like starting this book review with a review of me, if you don't mind. I have been to Auschwitz and Birkenau, and Dachau, and the Nazi camp in Poznan, Poland. I have a fairly wide reading history when it comes to the Holocaust – certainly greater than the average man you could point to on the generalised commuter bus. However, a few years ago I fell into the Heather Morris trap. For I thought The Tattooist of Auschwitz was a well-made book, which it is, and somehow multiple thousands of copies were printed with a quote from my review in them. They don't print like them like that these days, however, probably due to a regular refresh, and possibly because I tried the sequel and found it unreadable – the amount of barrels in Donkey Kong nothing like the risible amount of sharks jumped, and people knowing the reality behind the characters demanding legal settlement over it all for it being errant fiction. This, and the fact The x of Auschwitz has been one of the most common publishing formats over the last years, has put me off reading much Holocaust literature. Hence my ability to read this junior retelling of The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz in full ignorance of the original, adult version.
It certainly opened my eyes, just months after John Boyne did an adults-only sequel to his different covers for different ages The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, to see this be a junior rewrite of a mass market adult Holocaust book. I was left with the feeling this felt the need to be more educational than the adult equivalent. I also was left with the feeling that, in being so repetitive, the author did not have a firm grasp on his target audience's intelligence before he started. But I may have been wrong in seeing that as an issue.
We start with the pair of brothers Fritz and Kurt, and their muckers, doing things any Jewish lad in 1930s Vienna would want to do – kicking things around the empty market place, helping the neighbours, being dutiful when it comes to the synagogue choir and at a vocational school. Kurt has to make sure the lamps are turned on at their very Orthodox neighbours' each Friday night – the Sabbath preventing them for using anything nearly as mechanical and workmanlike as a light switch. But this is the time just before the Austrian leader is going to cave to Hitler's will, and instead of having a national vote to keep the Nazis out, invite them in with open arms. Kristallnacht happened in Vienna just as much as in Germany, as did all the round-ups of Jews. These in their turn leave the younger Kurt at home with his mother and sisters anxious to hear word of an evacuation to Britain or the US, while Fritz and his father are, unknown initially to each other, packed off on the same train to Buchenwald and the stone quarry there. And us wondering how the titular event for the adult variant of all this could come about…
The way every detail about the Nazi history and their camps gets mentioned at least twice aside, the book really works as a suitable eye-opening narrative. Knowing Fritz followed his father into Auschwitz – by wilfully volunteering to be on the same transport train – is given all the import and impact that decision deserves. All ages are able to get an empathy for the lad – even as he becomes a hard-working young man several years older than the children this is marketed to – in a way that would seldom happen with a straighter, non-fiction book. And yet to an adult the fictionalised scenes and made-up dialogue never read as false. The telling avoids the use of hindsight, and the pro-refugee side that could have been given to Kurt's narrative – heck, even with the two narratives running in parallel but only barely in a similar time-frame, the two very different stories in one never become an issue.
In that regard, then, the book ignored a lot it could have included – and that would have left me with the feeling this is still a tainted bookshelf, taken over by the fantastical and the highly dubious. It also included a lot I would certainly have wished many a young learner to gain from it, and she or he would come from this with a strong understanding of not only the Holocaust as seen by a lad and his dad, but in fact the whole turn of the War in Europe. Coming out in time to be in prime shop windows for 2023's National Holocaust Day, I think this has to be lauded as a success. Even with every fact being used twice, from the Austrian leader's name and the initial anti-Nazi street graffiti in Vienna, to the electrified fences surrounding all the labour camps, I still ended not too worried about the lack of a red pen, if it only helps one person's understanding and immersion.
Ultimately, if this book's older relative did for its target audience what this has the ability to do for its own, it's easy to see why the first book was such a success. (And I can't ignore the mention late on of facts that came to light after the first book was presented.) I wish this a similar impact, and I'm grateful for the publishers sending me a review copy. A strong four stars, if not more, from me.
A Lucky Child by Thomas Buergenthal also has a fine eye when it comes to showing what the child wrapped up in the Holocaust would lose.
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