• The Search and A Family Secret book covers. The Search cover shows a girl running through a plowed farming field away from military vehicles and a farmhouse. The Search is covered over by A Family Secret that is in front. A Family Secret cover shows a red-haired teenage boy in an attic with scattered books and photos. He is holding a covered dagger and a Star of David and looks concerned.
  • The Search open to show inside pages. The left page shows 2 men with Star of David badges on their jackets making plans to escape. The page shows illustrations and text about the Jewish Council and the list of Jews. People were trying to get their names off the list, so they could escape without being discovered. The right page only shows partial illustrations and text. The layout shown in the open book is like a comic book with colored illustrations and talk bubbles.
  • A close-up shot of the inside of The Search. The page shows pictures of a nurse helping a woman and children escape a nursery. It shows a woman escaping with a boy and a girl under the cover of a streetcar passing by that shielded them from a German soldier. The layout shown in the open book is like a comic book with colored illustrations and talk bubbles.
  • 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 sitting on the floor holding open A Family Secret with The Search out of focus in the background. The book on the boys lap is open to show 2 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

The Search and A Family Secret Graphic Novels

The Search and A Family Secret Graphic Novels

$33.99 USD
$29.98 USD $33.99 USD
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From the innocent to the heroic, from the passive to the brutal, these graphic novels do 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.

 

The Search

In this graphic novel about the Holocaust, a Jewish grandmother recounts to her grandson how she escaped from the Nazis and survived. With her grandson's help, she plunges into a search to discover what happened to the rest of her family during their last months at Auschwitz. The Search is a compilation of many stories of Jewish families who experienced the horror of the Holocaust. While the illustrations are not explicit, the narration is fairly specific about the horrors the characters experience.

 

Please note: There is an instance of language on page 25 of The Search. While it will not be new to many middle-school students, parents with young readers may want to hit it with a touch of white-out.

The Search - Esther remembers her own experience of the Holocaust as a Jewish girl living in Amsterdam, and recounts to her grandson Daniel and his friend Jeroen how she escaped from the Nazis and survived by going into hiding in the countryside. Her parents were not so lucky. Esther knows they were sent to a concentration camp and died there, and with Daniel's help she embarks on a search to discover what happened to them during the last months of their lives. After tracking down an old friend who now lives in Israel, Esther finally learns the shocking story of how her parents met their fates at Auschwitz.


A Family Secret - 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.