Description
For fans of Jackie French and Katrina Nannestad, The Year We Escaped is a heart-stopping and remarkable World War II story by talented author Suzanne Leal.
Europe, 1940
With war on their doorstep, German classmates Klara and Rachel, and French brothers Lucien and Paul, are forced to leave their homes. They are taken to Gurs, a French detention camp in the south-west of France. It's a crowded place, with little comfort and even less food.
When Klara and Rachel are promised safe refuge in a remote French village, Lucien and Paul are anxious to join them — and will risk their own lives to get there.
Filled with adventure, danger and intrigue, this is the story of four unlikely friends desperate to escape from a war that keeps coming closer.
Review
Told from the perspective of two teenagers during World War II.
Klara is a German Jewish girl, whose own father served in The Great War. Klara and her mother were taken from their German home in 1940 and sent to Gurs, in the south-west of France to be interred.
Lucien, whose mother has Jewish heritage, lived in Paris with his family until July of 1941 when his father decided that it would be safer if they left Paris. Lucien, his mother and his younger brother were captured at a train station and also sent to Gurs. Life in Gurs was fairly awful, but nothing like some of the other horrors of the concentration camps throughout Europe at this time.
Klara and Lucien became friends during their time at the camp, so when Klara and her friend, Rachel, are moved to a farm to live out the remainder of the war, Lucien is upset. When his mother discovers that Lucien and Klara had been digging out of the camp at night, she decides that Lucien and his 9-year-old brother, Paul, should escape and try to find the place the girls have been taken, in the hope that they too can survive the war. But can they possibly escape?
This book is based on the true story of Gurs, a large detention camp that held over 6000 people during the war. It is insightful and easy to read, with themes of war, displacement, friendship and the help that strangers can provide in times of need. With no atrocities depicted, just the hardship of the camp and, in the end, hope for a better life provided by complete strangers, this is a terrific book that will particularly suit lower secondary readers.
