Three friends
Two sides
One memory

Inspired by a true story

The story starts with three young children

The best of friends

Celebrating a ninth birthday on top of the world

Such innocence, such joy

The only way is down

Deep deep down to the darkest of depths

The story begins by showing how difficult life became for Jewish people in Vienna, slowly at first

One Nazi father moves his family to Munic

One Jewish father moves his family to Prague

One Jewish father stays with his family in Vienna

We follow the three children through the war and bear witness to the horror

The heartache and terror that they loved through

We see the children losing themselves piece by piece

But they never let go of each other

Max joins Hitler Youth and becomes strong and popular to please his father

He wants to belong, to fit in

He wants to make his father proud

Max never loses himself entirely but comes very close

He never forgets his friends but must act as if he has

Max’s story is desperately sad

I never stopped liking him, rooting for him

Not once

Elsa follows a journey similar to others I have read

After a failed attempt at escaping Prague on the Kindertransport

Elsa and her family are moved to a ghetto

Then to Terezin (Therisienstadt) and then to Auschwitz

Her story is utterly heartbreaking

Her family walk away from her to their deaths

Her best girlfriend is killed in front of her

Then at the end one of her oldest friends is ordered to shoot her

There are so many moments from this story that will stay with me

The awful way Max is treated by his father

The way the school staff in Vienna behaved to their Jewish pupils

The humiliation and persecution of the Jewish people for simply being themselves

How quickly and easily friend turned on friend

The description of Leo’s father in Dachau

The final scene between Max and Elsa

How they all tried so hard to be strong and have hope

Elsa arriving at Auschwitz – losing her family and identity

The clever interweaving of lives touching one another throughout the story

I was hooked from the fairground in Vienna

I was so emotionally invested in every character.

Leo lived

His father was taken to Dachau and Auschwitz

Leo and his mother manage to escape to England and start a new life

Though never ever letting go of the old

It was incredibly moving how families were torn apart and carried on

Powered by love

Fuelled by a need to survive for one another

This is an incredibly powerful book, I could not put it down

I had to know how the story would end for the three friends

I wept at several points of this story

How could humans treat other men, women and children in this way?

Little things really affected me like

Checking each other for lice in the camps

Dregs of soup from dirty bowls

Eating beetles if they could catch them

A slip of cloth that was perhaps once a blanket

Now more holes than material and no recognisable colour beneath the dirt

Lots of little details like this build the bigger picture in a powerful and emotive way

And then the immense intense cruelty!

Just unimaginable pain and suffering for so long

Yet always there was family and friends

Small acts of kindness that meant there was the tiniest chink of light

A slim slither of hope

I wanted this story to have the happiest of endings

I hoped with all my heart though I knew from the start it could not be

I am so so so so so glad that I found this book and I feel honoured to have read this story

I accept the baton and I will pass this story and others like it on

For all the children whose stories were never told

For all the children whose stories were never told