Tell No One Who You Are

Starred review from August 29, 1994
Regine Miller was 10 when her teenage brother was taken by the Nazis. Not long after, her father, determined to protect her from the perils facing Jews in WWII Brussels, sent Regine to the relatively safe but cheerless house of a widow who seemed more interested in the money she received from Regine's father than in Regine herself. Buchignani, a journalist who met Miller at a 1991 gathering of Jews who survived WWII in hiding, tells the story as if it were a novel, recreating Regine's experiences with aching clarity. The reader shares Regine's loneliness with the widow, her devastation when her father abruptly disappears and her terror at being sent into a succession of mostly unloving homes. Unlike Anne Frank or the heroines of Johanna Reiss's The Upstairs Room, Regine eventually "hides" in plain sight-given a false identity, she dares not tell even the few sympathetic adults she meets that she is Jewish, much less share her fears about her own family. Buchignani sets Regine's tale into context with brief end notes about the fate of Jews in Belgium and organized resistance in aid of Jewish children; he conveys both a human drama and a chilling moment in history. Ages 12-up.