Recommended.
My thanks to the good people at Puffin for sending the book. We also have a review of [[Grace by Morris Gleitzman]].
They might also look at [[I Am David by Ann Holm]] about a boy escaping from a concentration camp in Eastern Europe, or [[The Road of Bones by Anne Fine]] about Stalin's Russia during the purges. [[Billy the Kid by Michael Morpurgo]] is another lovely story about an old man whose life was blighted by war.