Retired Wilmington teacher's young adult novel follows 'Brothers' living in Nazi Germany

Retired Wilmington teacher Susan Rizzo has written a young-adult novel to teach young readers about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.

Rizzo's "Brothers " begins in 1937, in a small German town near the Polish border. Hans Wolf, 16, and his 12-year-old brother Danny enjoy playing in the woods. Eventually, they find a dog, Fritz, a German shepherd who proves to be smart, brave and loyal.

Danny loves to read, despite his nearsightedness. (The Wolfs are too poor to afford glasses for him.) Since he's clubfooted he's often bullied in school, especially since the Nazis took over, but Hans stands up for him.

Things are changing, though. Hans and Danny's dad lost his job as a cobbler, so now he works on the assembly line in one of the new weapons factories.

The SS roams the town. One day, the brothers' best friend, Chaim, disappears with all his family. Danny, the sharper of the two, knows it's because they were Jewish.

Meanwhile, Nazi indoctrination is starting to dominate the curriculum at school. Now that Hans, who is strong and athletic, is in Gymnasium (which means "high school" in Germany), the Nazis are strongly recruiting him.

Despite Chaim, Hans is seduced by the appeal to patriotism. He winds up enlisting in the SS, but learns to his horror what the new regime means when he's assigned to "training" in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

Meanwhile, Danny finds a new life aiding friends in a resistance movement. His target shooting off in the woods, pays off, especially when his comrades find him a pair of glasses.

This is inevitably a war story, with a level of violence and death toll equivalent to a few hours of playing "Call of Duty." Some school censors might get the fantods, but this is the way combat was, and this is the way the Nazis were.

Rizzo admits to some playing with dates and some anachronisms, conscious or otherwise. (Apparently, we can no longer imagine a world without plastic soda bottles.)

There are also some odd holes. Hans and Danny would have been required to join the Hitler Youth, a Nazi organization that was like a warped, militarized version of the Boy Scouts. They would also have been required to show up for meetings and wear the brown shirts.

Membership was mandatory, unless you were Jewish. Even the future Pope Benedict XVI had to participate. But you don't see the Hitler Youth in "Brothers."

Still, there's much that Rizzo gets right, like her description of the horrors of Sachsenhausen, the training ground for the future butchers of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belson, and of Kristallnacht ("The Night of Broken Glass"), the campaign in November 1938 when Nazi mobs burned synagogues, looted and vandalized Jewish-owned stores and killed or beat hundreds of Jews.

A spoonful of sugar, or comic-book-style violence, helps the medicine go down, and "Brothers" delivers a painless history lesson. This is vital, now that the last survivors of this epoch are passing on.

Rizzo even provides a glossary and, by sticking phrases in the text, teaches readers about three dozen German words.

It's clear Rizzo is a first-time author, but she creates appealing characters. I think her novel will appeal to younger readers, especially boys.

Book review

'BROTHERS'

By Susan Rizzo

St. Petersburg, Fla.: Booklocker, $15.95 paperback

This article originally appeared on Wilmington StarNews: Retired Wilmington teacher's young adult novel follows 'Brothers' living in Nazi Germany