{Synopsis} – A youth in Nazi Germany tells the truth about Hitler.
Bartoletti has taken one episode from her Newbery Honor Book, Hitler Youth, and fleshed it out into a full novel.
When 16-year-old Helmut Hubner listens to the BBC news on an illegal short-wave radio, he quickly discovers Germany is lying to the people. But when he tries to expose the truth with leaflets, he’s tried for treason. Sentenced to death and waiting in a jail cell, Helmut’s story emerges in a series of flashbacks that show his growth from a naive child caught up in the patriotism of the times, to a sensitive and mature young man who thinks for himself.
{My thoughts} – Helmut Hubner is a young child that is growing up in the time when Hitler was becoming more well known. Helmut is a child that asks a lot of questions and he has since he was a young child. In school he becomes known as a child that is wise beyond his years and his teachers have hope for him. They hope that one day he will become somebody important.
Helmut starts questioning the way in which the German populations chooses to follow Hitler once he realizes how wrong the actions are. When he was a young boy he was sent to go buy bread, he was told he couldn’t buy from his families favorite Jewish baker anymore. He was told he could only buy at German shops. This continued to becoming eventually where Hitler would dictate what the German’s could and couldn’t do and his loyal followers would enforce it. If a German went up against Hitler and caused trouble they too were subject be being treated in inhuman ways and sometimes executed. It really depended on how bad the crimes were they were accused of doing.
Helmut decided that he had to do something and he dared to speak out against Hitler. He dared to tell the Germans the truth. He went about doing it by creating pamphlets that would speak the facts. The facts that Hitler was hiding from the Germans. He got his facts be illegally listening to a radio station that was German. He trusted his facts and did what he could to share them with others.
I think for a sixteen year old boy to stand up and fight for what he believed in in such a way is speaks volumes for how smart her was. I think that this depiction of what his life and his final days in prison were like was incredibly well written.
This book helps to show children that no matter your age, if you think things aren’t right and you want to try and change them, no matter the consequences of your actions, that it’s okay to try. That it’s okay to stand up for your beliefs. In the end Helmut Hubner’s story is being shared with the world. His teachers were right about him, he did become someone. He became someone incredible. He became the boy that dared to stand up to Hitler.
Final Conclusion: 5 Star Rating.
