• A Family Secret book cover shows a red-haired teenage boy in an attic with scattered books, photos, and papers all over the floor. There is an open suitcase next to him and boxes in the background. He is holding a covered dagger in his right hand and a Star of David in his left. He is looking over his shoulder in concern.
  • A Family Secret open to show inside pages. The left page shows a Jewish family in the Netherlands trying to escape to England. The right page shows the German army bombing Rotterdam. The layout shown in the open book is like a comic book with colored illustrations and talk bubbles.
  • A boy holding open A Family Secret to show 2 inside pages. The pages show a red-haired teenage boy looking through an attic and discovering a suitcase full of World War 2 items. He has papers and pictures scattered all around and his grandmother walks in and sees him looking through the items. The layout shown in the open book is like a comic book with colored illustrations and talk bubbles.
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Macmillan

A Family Secret

A Family Secret

$14.99 USD
$14.99 USD
Sale Sold out
From the innocent to the heroic, from the passive to the brutal, this graphic novel does a remarkable job of communicating one of the most perplexing and disturbing events in history. View full details

A Family Secret

A Family Secret provides a graphic novel overview of WWII from a "safe" Dutch girl's perspective as she relates the tale of her Jewish friend who suffered through the terror of the Holocaust. Characters in the book represent a wide diversity in respect to decency – from the innocent to the heroic resistance fighters, from the passive bystanders to the brutal Nazis. Firmly rooted in history and delivering accurate facts along a precise timeline, A Family Secret does a remarkable job of communicating some of the most perplexing and disturbing events in Dutch history. The story and characters from A Family Secret are intertwined and expanded upon in The Search.

While searching his grandmother's attic for likely items to sell at a yard sale, Jeroen finds a photo album that brings back hard memories for his grandmother, Helena. Helena tells Jeroen for the first time about her experiences during the German occupation of the Netherlands during the Second World War, and mourns the loss of her Jewish best friend, Esther. Helena believes that her own father, a policeman and Nazi sympathizer, delivered Esther to the Nazis and that she died in a concentration camp. But after hearing her story, Jeroen makes a discovery and Helena realizes that her father kept an important secret from her.