By Patricia Sarles
This article was first published in Synergy, the Journal of the School Library Association of Victoria, Australia in June 2026
A children’s picture book exhibit at the Bergen-Belsen Memorial.
In the summer and fall of 2025, the Bergen-Belsen Memorial site in Germany acquired an exhibit called DrawnTogether. The exhibit consisted of 22 children’s picture books about the Holocaust and was housed in their Museumscafé. Since it is generally not recommended for children under the age of 14 to enter many of the memorial sites in Germany, children often remain in the Museumscafé with a parent or caretaker while the other family member(s) take turns visiting the grounds. However, once seated in the Museumscafé, there is nothing age-appropriate for younger visitors to do to engage with the Holocaust.
In December 2024, Dr. Tatia Gruenbaum, a visiting researcher in Applied Linguistics at Technische Universität Braunschweig in Germany, were introduced to Stephanie Billib, head of the press and public relations department at Bergen-Belsen Memorial. Gruenbaum had received a grant to develop a small picture book exhibit suitable for children aged eight to fourteen. The grant was offered by the Gemeinnützige Hertie-Stiftung (the Hertie Foundation), which funds projects that fight antisemitism and promote Jewish life in Germany. Gruenbaum was looking for a suitable location for her exhibit, which had to be held in Germany. The exhibit was anchored in global citizenship education, a United Nations initiative that positions children as young agents of change. The purpose of the exhibit was to offer a non-traumatic introduction to the Holocaust beyond the school curriculum, allowing children to view lives that might be different from their own and to empathize with the characters. She hoped that empathy combined with understanding might foster the social courage needed to safeguard Jewish life in the future.
Her collection focused on picture books sharing Jewish lived experiences during the Holocaust, as well as stories of friendship, allyship, and hope. The picture books varied in both theme (e.g., the Kindertransport, the hidden child, the Righteous Among the Nations) and illustrative style, and each would be supported by a reading guide. When Gruenbaum presented the exhibit idea and her need for a location, Billib immediately recognised this as the solution they had been looking for to engage younger visitors. She suggested the Bergen-Belsen Museumscafé as the ideal setting for the picture book exhibit.
In June 2025, Gruenbaum found herself at Bergen-Belsen Memorial, and together with Billib and her colleague, Till Amelung, they set up the exhibit. Titled DrawnTogether, spelled as one word, the exhibit emphasised that words and illustrations in picture books are joined together not only to create a single whole, but also to reflect the solidarity between those who helped and those who needed help. Twenty-two publications in English, together with available editions in French, Dutch, German, and Italian, were installed alongside artwork by Israeli artist Shirley Waisman. Reading guides were available both in print and digitally to help children.
Children’s literature about the Holocaust
For the exhibit, Gruenbaum also wrote a Reading Guide with guiding questions for each of the 22 titles. Using the headers, ‘Discover, Observe, Respond,’ the guide serves to help children explore titles they can discover in the Museumscafé. Gruenbaum ensured all language editions were available in the exhibit due to the fact that not all patrons would speak and read English. Topics of books included: Righteous Gentiles, the Kindertransports, the partisans, and the members of the Resistance. Among some of the disquieting subjects were books that included stories of discrimination, Kristallnacht, family separation, and the camps. It was important for Gruenbaum to include a diversity of styles, themes, lives,locations, and reading ages to ensure a good representation from all over the world, including diverse authors and illustrators. However, these books were not in any way meant to traumatize the children. These books were purposely chosen because they were meant to inspire hope.
The intentional selection of titles was of utmost importance to Gruenbaum, who aimed to introduce children ages eight to fourteen to the Holocaust in a non-traumatic way.
For example, the exhibit catalog leads with a children’s book published just last year in Israel. The Picture, by Jacob Jacobson and illustrated by Shirley Waisman, tells the true story of two brothers who had to escape for their lives to the wolf-ridden woods of Lithuania. In the fore-matter, Jacobson writes,
In the Israel of the 1950’s, remembering the Holocaust didn’t require a designated day. The hell of it was etched on the faces of those who had survived. But decades later, as the waves of antisemitism rise and intensify, most of the survivors are no longer with us to tell their harrowing stories. (Jacobson, 2025, n.p.)
The narrative focuses on a seven-year-old boy, who, upon visiting his great-grandfather, notices a framed photograph hanging on the wall depicting two young boys in a forest. He learns his great-grandfather and great-great-uncle were Holocaust survivors and were not afraid of the wolves because the Nazis were ‘much scarier.’
Whereas The Picture is a true story, Stone Angel, by Jane Yolen and illustrated by Katie May Green, is the fictional story of a family living in Paris who must also escape to the forest from the Nazis. Although fictional, this is the story of the many people known to have had to escape for their lives. In Stone Angel, the unnamed narrator, a little girl, tells us:
And then one day the bad men came in their brown shirts, guns in hands. They made us wear yellow stars on our coats so everyone would know we were Juifs, Jews, and call us bad names and take away our houses. (Yolen, 2015, n.p.)
After hiding for a brief time with friends who eventually asked them to leave, they went to hide in the woods, where they met other families in hiding, forced to contend with the wolves as well as fearing the men in ‘brown shirts.’ Unlike the millions of Holocaust stories, Stone Angel does end on a good note with the narrator’s family eventually finding refuge by escaping over the mountains.
Hidden Hope: How a Toy and a Hero Saved Lives During the Holocaust, by Elisa Boxer and illustrated by Amy June Bates, is another book in the exhibit. It tells the story of Jacqueline Gauthier, whose real name was Judith Geller, a teenage girl who posed as a Christian child social worker who carried a toy duck with a secret compartment in which she transported forged papers for Jews trying to escape from the Nazis. Geller was, in fact, Jewish herself and had her own forged papers, we assume, but the people she helped did not know that. What was most important in that moment in time was getting the forged documents to the people who needed them. Although in her narrative, Boxer doesn’t tell her readers what motivated this teenage girl to join the French Resistance, it is obvious to the reader, nonetheless, that Geller was a brave girl who just wanted to help her people flee Nazi-occupied France. As her own family went into hiding, she joined the Resistance, we assume, of her own accord, doing what a brave and bold adolescent felt was right at the time. In the backmatter, Boxer tells us that, in Geller’s own words, she escaped capture on multiple occasions. And, as Boxer writes in the story, ‘… hate has a way of bringing out heroes’ (Boxer, 2023, n.p.).
Another of the books, labeled by Gruenbaum with the themes of social justice and discrimination, is Martin & Anne: The Kindred Spirits of Dr. Martin Luther King and Anne Frank by Nancy Churnin and illustrated by Yevgenia Nayberg. It tells the parallel stories of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Anne Frank, born in the same year, who were subjected to the racism and antisemitism of their times. Although Churnin’s book is about the good that Martin and Anne brought to the world, Churnin only mentions the camps in one sentence. She writes:
Only a few weeks before the concentration camp was liberated, Anne died, along with her older sister (Churnin, 2019, n.p.).
This, and the page prior in which Anne and her family are arrested, are the only sentences in the entire book devoted to what Anne and her family went through. Most of the book has a positive message about two souls who stood for and hoped for a better, more peaceful world. Anne is already well known for her diary entry: ‘Despite everything, I still believe people are really good at heart.’ Churnin’s book ends with similar words of comfort for her young readers, “Love is stronger than hate. Kindness can heal the world” (Churnin, 2019, n.p.).
At such a time when there is such hatred toward Jewish people, both then and now, books such as these prove that there is a need for these narratives, which tell stories of both hopelessness and hope; desperation and aspiration; and of stories of real people enduring and surviving during the darkest period of modern history. How can school librarians use these stories as mentor texts to combat antisemitism in their school libraries, and how does a children’s author convey this history to children? We can do so by focusing on hope and allyship, according to Gruenbaum, and the promise for a better future in light of past lives that were once filled with happiness and peace and later permanently altered by hate and prejudice.
The school library as a safe space
Reading and empathy
According to Bal and Veltkamp (2013), the same neural structures involved in one living their own experiences are triggered when one reads about others’ experiences. Readers become involved in the lived experiences of the characters they are reading about as if they have lived or are living that experience too. This phenomenon is called empathy – the ability to feel another’s pain, hurt, and/or their physical and emotional suffering. When teacher Kate Kessler, writing in English Journal, introduced a Holocaust literature unit to her class, she could not understand her students’ lack of empathy for what Elie Wiesel suffered at Auschwitz and what Anne Frank endured in hiding (Kessler, 1991). Why did these ‘neural structures’ not activate empathy in her students who, in fact, did the exact opposite by identifying with the enemy? The literature alone was not sufficient. Empathy required a personal bridge, a point of connection rooted in the students’ own experiences of marginalisation, before it could be extended outward to others. For school librarians, this is a critical insight: it is not enough to place the right book on the shelf. The conditions in which that book is encountered matter enormously.
Reader’s advisory
Through a reader’s advisory lens is where school librarians can also share their specific abilities and training. When a young patron comes up to the librarian and asks for a good book, the librarian, with their vast knowledge of books, can offer some suggestions. Reader’s advisory is a fancy term for matching the right book with the right reader at the right time. The ‘right time’ is most important because if you can catch the reader right at their point of need for that book and the knowledge contained therein, you can potentially develop a lifetime reader in them.
This is also where displays become important. I have met many a child fascinated by the Holocaust. The images of the emaciated people and the piles of dead bodies that were photographed upon the liberation of the camps are provocative and inspire a morbid curiosity. The pictures alone are hard to believe. If a child learning about the Holocaust for the first time goes to the library to find more information about it, the books the librarian puts in the child’s hands matter. School librarians can look to the 22 books in the DrawnTogether exhibit for inspiration. Nonfiction series commissioned by educational publishers are not recommended because they lack the authenticity and literary craft of genuine storytelling. There are also none in Gruenbaum’s collection.
Bibliotherapy
James Baldwin, the American writer, described the consequences of reading in a most poignant quote from an interview in Life Magazine in 1963. He told interviewer Jane Howard:
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
This sums up the great importance of reading and its potential to transform its reader. It is reading to learn for oneself that one is not alone in their thoughts, feelings, and lived experiences, and that others have lived the same things or similar things. This is precisely what we would want our students to come away with if they were to encounter Holocaust literature in the library. As ‘window’ and ‘mirror’ books, they should be chosen carefully. Think of the child who is the grandchild of survivors; they should be able to see themselves and their family members portrayed in a sensitive manner. The great importance of reading is to learn for oneself that one is not alone in their thoughts, feelings, and lived experiences, and that others have lived the same or similar things. Jewish students, in particular, should also come away feeling proud of what their family member(s) survived. For Jewish students, mirrors in a Holocaust collection matter deeply. The grandchildren of survivors should be able to find their family’s experience portrayed with sensitivity and dignity, and come away with a sense of pride in what their family endured and survived. For non-Jewish students, windows into Jewish lived experiences are equally vital. As Shah (2025) shares in her book, Bibliotherapy: The Healing Power of Reading, bibliotherapy can be thought of as a ‘reading cure’ in the same way that psychotherapy is a ‘talking cure.’
Concluding thoughts
Gruenbaum’s DrawnTogether children’s book exhibit can serve as a model for fostering a safe space in the library. By using this exhibit as an example of a children’s book collection that honors the memories of those who fought and survived the Nazi regime, those who were upstanders such as the Righteous Among the Nations, and those who maintained hope in the face of overwhelming adversity as Anne Frank demonstrated in her diary, librarians can foster hope and empathy in their school libraries. It is fitting that Gruenbaum’s children’s book exhibit should have ended up at Bergen-Belsen, the site of Anne Frank’s death, as Anne Frank, throughout her time in hiding, maintained hope for her future. DrawnTogether does not dwell on the pain and suffering of the Holocaust, but inspires hope for readers as they comprehend this human tragedy.
Just as children might wander into their school library on any given day, the children who visited Bergen-Belsen in the summer of 2025 had the chance to take advantage of the books on display. With nothing else to do in the Museumscafé, the DrawnTogether children’s book exhibit was waiting to be explored. If a professor of Applied Linguistics could put together such an exhibit, then certainly a school librarian could do the same.
References
Bal, P. M., & Veltkamp, M. (2013). How does fiction reading influence empathy? An experimental investigation on the role of emotional transportation. PloS one, 8(1), e55341.
Baldwin, J. (1963, May 17). James Baldwin: A Negro assays the negro mood. Interview by J. Howard. Life Magazine, 54(20), 81–94.
Boxer, E. (2023). Hidden Hope: How a Toy and a Hero Saved Lives during the Holocaust. Illustrated by A. J. Bates. New York, New York: Abrams Books for Young Readers.
Churnin, N. (2019). Martin & Anne: The Kindred Spirits of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Anne Frank. Illustrated by Y. Nayberg. Berkeley, California: Creston Books.
Jacobson, J. (2025). The Picture. Illustrated by S. Waisman [S. Visman]. Tel Aviv.
Kessler, K. (1991). Teaching holocaust literature. English Journal, 80 (To Take a Stand: Argument and Persuasion), 29-32.
Shah, B. (2025). Bibliotherapy: The healing power of reading. Hachette UK.
Yolen, J. (2015). Stone Angel. Illustrated by K. M. Green. New York, New York: Philomel Books, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA).
Appendix: English-edition picture books included in the DrawnTogether exhibit
Argaman, Iris. Bear and Fred: A World War II Story. Translated from the Hebrew by Annette Appel. Illustrated by Avi Ofer. New York, New York: Amazon Crossing Kids, 2020. Ages 10+
Bisson, Michelle. Hedy’s Journey: The True Story of a Hungarian Girl Fleeing the Holocaust. Illustrated by El primo Ramón. North Mankato, Minnesota: Capstone Press, a Capstone imprint, 2017. Ages 12+
Borden, Louise. The Greatest Skating Race: A World War II Story from the Netherlands. Illustrated by Niki Daly. New York, New York: Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2004. Ages 10+
Boxer, Elisa. Hidden Hope: How a Toy and a Hero Saved Lives during the Holocaust. Illustrated by Amy June Bates. New York, New York: Abrams Books for Young Readers, 2023. Ages 10+
Chang, Pei-Yu. Mr. Benjamin’s Suitcase of Secrets: Based on a Very True Story About Walter Benjamin. Translated from the German (Switzerland) by David Henry Wilson. Illustrated by Pei-Yu Chang. New York, New York: North-South Books, 2017. Ages 12+
Churnin, Nancy. Martin & Anne: The Kindred Spirits of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Anne Frank. Illustrated by Yevgenia Nayberg. Berkeley, California: Creston Books, 2019. Ages 14+
Elvgren, Jennifer Riesmeyer. The Whispering Town. Illustrated by Fabio Santomauro. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Kar-Ben Publishing, 2014. Ages 8+
Fried, Hédi. The story of Bodri. Translated from the Swedish by Linda Schenck. Illustrated by Stina Wirsén. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans Books for Young Readers, 2021. Ages 14+
Hanaor, Ziggy. Alte Zachen*Old Things. Illustrated by Benjamin Phillips. London: Cicada Books, 2022. Ages 12+
Harding, Thomas. The House on the Canal: The Story of the House That Hid Anne Frank. Translated from the German by the author. Illustrated by Britta Teckentrup. London: Walker Studio, 2025. Ages 14+
Hausfater, Rachel. The Little Boy Star: An Allegory of the Holocaust. Translated from the French by the author. Illustrated by Olivier Latyk. Introduction by David A. Adler. New York: Milk & Cookies Press, 2006. Ages 10+
Hoyt, Megan. Bartali’s Bicycle: The True Story of Gino Bartali, Italy’s Secret Hero. Illustrated by Bruno Iacopo. New York, New York: Quill Tree Books, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2021. Ages 10+
Jacobson, Jacob. The Picture. Illustrated by Shirley Waisman [Shirli Visman]. Tel Aviv, 2025. Ages 8+
Levy, Debbie. The Key from Spain: Flory Jagoda and Her Music. Illustrated by Sonja Wimmer. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Kar-Ben Publishing, 2019. Ages 10+
Marcinkevičius, Marius. The Pebble: An Allegory of the Holocaust. Translated from the Lithuanian by Jūra Avižienis. Illustrated by Inga Dagilė. New York, New York: Thames & Hudson, 2023. Ages 14+
Meir, Tamar. Francesco Tirelli’s Ice Cream Shop. Translated from the Hebrew by Noga Applebaum. Illustrated by Yael Albert. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Kar-Ben Publishing, 2019. Ages 10+
Schwartz, Ella. Violin of Hope. Illustrated by Juliana Oakley. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Kar-Ben Publishing, 2024. Ages 8+
Sís, Peter. Nicky & Vera: A Quiet Hero of the Holocaust and the Children He Rescued. Illustrated by Peter Sís. New York, New York: Norton Young Readers, 2021. Ages 10+
Stiefel, Chana. The Tower of Life: How Yaffa Eliach Rebuilt Her Town in Stories and Photographs. Illustrated by Susan Gal. New York, New York: Scholastic Press, 2022. Ages 10+
Vagnozzi, Barbara. Lev. Illustrated by Barbara Vagnozzi. Rome: Gallucci, 2016. Ages 10+
Weinstein, Jacob Sager. What Rosa Brought. Illustrated by Eliza Wheeler. New York, New York: Katherine Tegen Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2023. Ages 12+
Yolen, Jane. Stone Angel. Illustrated by Katie May Green. New York, New York: Philomel Books, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA), 2015. Ages 10+
Patricia Sarles is currently Coordinator of Library Services for New York City Public Schools, but considers herself an independent researcher with wide-ranging interests. She has published a book chapter in England and articles for library journals in Canada, Australia, and the United States.