You can view photographs from the Warsaw Ghetto at
He was only twenty-three years old when he organized the ZOB. He is a fictional character, but Mordecai Anielewicz was a real person, a very courageous man who believed that the Jewish people should resist the Germans, fight honorably in what inevitably would be to the death, and let the outside world know what was going on. Misha is an realistic voice for all those who suffered and died in this terrible tragedy, remembering for young generations today. Accompanied by the stark ink drawings, Sax captures the entire range of emotions from horror and terror, to fear, despair and hopelessness that accompanied the annihilation of tens of thousands of Jewish men, women and children. The prose in The War Within These Walls is sparse but effective. When tragedy strikes Misha's family, he becomes despondent.īut then he is recruited by Mordecai Anielewicz, the leader of the Jewish Combat Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa), a resistance group formed to fight the Germans in self-defense. Inside him, anger grows but he knows he must find a way to get for his mother and sister. Misha watches as his mother slowly starves, and his sister becomes listless and quiet.
The Germans do not allow food to be brought into the ghetto and it isn't long before everyone is starving. Misha, his younger sister Janina, and their parents are forced to live in cramped rooms, filled with strangers. Jews from Warsaw and the surrounding countryside are forced into the ghetto. Eventually the area where the Jewish population of Warsaw lived was sealed off, dividing the city into two sectors, the Jewish ghetto and the Aryan section. The story is told in the voice of Misha, opens with the invasion of Poland in 1939 by the Nazis who quickly begin harassing and humiliating the Jewish population. This beautifully crafted short novel with its stark Chinese ink and conte pencil drawings by illustrator Caryl Strzelecki tells the ugly story of the massacre of Jewish men, women and children, who decided to resist the German soldiers sent to "liquidate" the ghetto - a Nazi euphemism for mass murder. All of Aline Sax's novels are historical fiction which is not surprising since she has a doctorate in history and works at the University of Ghent's Institute for Public History.You can find the author's website here. Written by Flemish author, Aline Sax, this short illustrated novel tells about the Warsaw ghetto uprising during the Second World War.
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