Helpful Score: 3
This short and simple book tells the tale of one family's destruction by the Nazis under Hitler. The story of Friedrich is told from the viewpoint of his closest childhood friend. Both only children, they spend a lot of time together. They live in the same apartment building with a landlord who symbolizes the evil aggressors against the Jewish population. As the story opens, storyteller's father is out of work while Friedrich's father is employed as a civil servent. As Nazism takes root, Friedrich's father is "retired" from his job. Events continue to go downhill for this family and though many of us know the atrocities committed by the Nazis, it's still hard to believe that such an educated population would succumb so easily to genocide through scapegoating of the most ridiculous assertions. A powerful book for teens as well as adults that I definitely recommend.
