Good Night, Maman

Young readers who have loved and mourned Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl may take solace in the more hopeful ending of Good Night, Maman, Norma Fox Mazer's tender story of a brother and sister's escape from the Holocaust. Like all Jews in France during World War II, Karin and her older brother Marc are on the run from the Nazis. At first the siblings and their strong and gentle mother hide for more than a year in a tiny storage closet in a neighbor's house. But when the searches are intensified, they must leave, traveling on foot and only at night. At last Karin and Marc are lucky enough to find places on a ship bound for the United States, but Maman is too ill for the journey and must stay behind. At the refugee camp in Oswego, New York, Karin takes comfort in writing unmailed letters to her mother, as she and Marc struggle to adjust to a new country, a new language, and each other's changing needs. Marc finally reveals that Maman is dead, a sad fact he has kept to himself to shelter his sister—allowing her to increase her own strength with the support of her mother's remembered presence. Mazer based her novel on historical fact—the camp at Fort Ontario in Oswego was the only official shelter offered to European Jews by the United States.