![]() ![]() The story’s unyielding harshness is somewhat mitigated by its strong undercurrent of friendship and loyalty an author’s note gives further background on this important piece of history. ![]() Transferred from one taxing assignment to another, the children form deep bonds, supporting and caring for each other, but Lida’s desperate anxiety about Larissa is a constant heavy backdrop to her bleak existence, and to the novel. Orphaned before the book opens, Lida and her five-year-old sister, Larissa, are separated in the early pages after that, Lida and her fellow child laborers endure relentless days of cruelty-cold, hunger, filth, abuse, and grueling work-punctuated by deaths. In Stolen Child, Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch introduced readers to Larissa, a victim of Hitlers largely unknown Lebensborn program. ![]() While most were older teenagers or in their 20s, some were as young as 12-or younger, like 10-year-old narrator Lida, who pretends to be 13 to avoid an even-worse fate. Originally published in Canada in 2012, this grim novel from Skrypuch ( Last Airlift) offers an inside look at a little-known aspect of WWII: the Nazis’ capture of millions of non-Jewish youths, many of them Ukrainian, who were forced to become slave laborers, known as Ostarbeiters. ![]()
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