Auslander

July 1, 2011

When his parents are killed in the 1941 Nazi invasion of Poland, 13-year-old Piotr's life takes an unimaginable turn.

As an ethnic German with Nordic features, he's "racially valuable" to the Nazis, so he is sent by the Race and Settlement Office to Berlin to be raised by a German family. Piotr, renamed Peter, is adopted by a professor whose work with the Genealogical Office of the Reich determines the degree of racial purity of individuals. Peter is required to join the Hitler Youth, where he is as much an outsider as he was at school in Poland. He falls in love with Anna, eventually joining her progressive family's efforts to deliver food to Berlin's remaining Jews. Peter discovers disturbing truths about the Nazi's treatment of children deemed "life unworthy of life" from his sister, just as the professor discovers that his adopted Aryan son had a Jewish grandmother. Fearing forced sterilization, Peter attempts a harrowing escape to Sweden with Anna and her mother. Dowswell's skilled narrative weaves its way through flashbacks and several points of view, building in intensity as Peter grows from a child whose life as an "auslander," or foreigner, is dictated by chance and circumstance, to a young man whose growing awareness sparks his final, willful act.

An unflinching account of a rarely told side of the Holocaust. (resources, teacher's guide) (Historical fiction. 10–14)

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

September 1, 2011

Gr 7 Up-Orphaned when the Soviets invade Poland in 1941, Piotr finds himself in a lice-infested orphanage in Warsaw. Discovered there by the Nazi Race and Settlement Office, the 13-year-old is introduced to a whole new world of possibilities. His classic Nordic features and German heritage make him a prime candidate for adoption into a German family. However, once settled into his new home in Berlin, Peter, as he is now called, begins to realize that the Nazi party wants much more from him than he is willing to give. The auslander, the foreigner or outsider, must make his own way. Dowswell takes readers on a thrilling, well-researched adventure through assimilation, resistance, and escape in Nazi Germany, weaving in threads of history that Holocaust literature, to this point, has seldom touched upon. Similar to Susan Campbell Bartoletti's Hitler Youth (2005) and The Boy Who Dared (2008, both Scholastic), The Auslander provides a German teen perspective and delves into the history of the Nazi scientific research programs, particularly eugenics and the race reclamation program. This novel is a superb addition to all collections, combining action-packed adventure with blood-chilling history.-Sara Saxton, Wasilla Meta-Rose Public Library, Wasilla, AK

Copyright 2011 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 15, 2011
Grades 7-10 After his German parents are killed in Poland during WWII, Peter, 13, is adopted from a Warsaw orphanage by a family in Berlin. With his blond hair and Aryan features, he is a perfect model for Hitler Youth even though he is tainted with Slavic blood. Being called auslnder (foreigner) distresses him, but the label is also true: he cannot accept the unquestioning worship of Hitler and the Nazis. What it was like to grow up in war-torn Berlin is the core drama here, and Peters teen viewpoint describes the vicious prejudice as well as the heroic rescuers, like Peters friend Anna, with whom he delivers food to hidden Jewish children and listens secretly to BBC broadcasts and degenerate jazz. Then there is Peters horrifying discovery of his academic foster fathers eugenics: deliberately infecting humans, examining eyeballs. Finally, Peter and Anna flee the Allied bombings of civilians. Will they make it to Sweden?(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)