Behind The Bedroom Wall
Published by: Milkweed Editions
Written by: Laura E. Williams
Illustrations by: A. Nancy Goldstein
This book sparked my interest in the Holocaust as both a historical time period and a personally significant event. I first read this book when I was in third grade and it has remained one of the most meaningful literary encounters of my life. I do not remember where I got the book from or why I selected it; I just remember feeling changed after I read it. Behind the Bedroom Wall is a young adult novel that delves head first into a time period and a state of mind that many modern-day adolescents cannot even begin to comprehend. I cannot describe the power of this book any better than a passage from its back cover:
Filled with adventure, Behind the Bedroom Wall helps us to
understand the madness that drove so many to turn on their neighbors
and the courage that allowed some to resist.
This book was the spark of my fascination with the Holocaust, Jewish religion, and my own family’s heritage. Although I was raised in a nuclear family that did not identify with any particular religion, my mother’s side of the family is of Jewish decent and my father’s side of the family is traditionally Catholic. I grew up with limited exposure to the major holidays and traditions of both cultures; however, I have always had a special interest in Jewish culture. My grandmother is a Holocaust survivor who secretly left Germany as an eleven-year-old Jewish girl on one of the last Kindertransport trains to Great Britain. Her older sister was already in England attending school when their father and grandfather were taken away by the Gestapo in the middle of the night; less than a week later, my great grandmother dressed my Nana in her favorite dress and said goodbye to her forever.As a young child, I could not even begin to wrap my head around the emotional trauma that my grandmother must have dealt with at such an early age, but reading this book helped me understand how disorienting this period really was. Some critics on Amazon.com feel that this novel oversimplifies history and makes for a flat read, but the overwhelming majority (40/44 posted reviews) praise Behind the Bedroom Wall’s stirring plot line. Korinna Rehme is a thirteen-year-old member of her local Jungmädel Nazi youth group who believes that “Hitler is the most wonderful man.” While this statement is unsettling to most readers, it helps to illustrate the extremist mentality that took Germany by storm in the late 1930s. While there are a number of young adult novels that describe the horror and despair of concentration camps and ghettos from a Jewish protagonist’s perspective, this novel makes readers think about the other side’s story and how sometimes, there is no clear line between right and wrong.
This book would be a wonderful addition to an upper-level elementary classroom full of curious readers learning about ethics and duty. Students have numerous opportunities to make predictions about what will happen later in the text, starting with Korinna’s complaints about the mice she hears behind her bedroom wall. If I were giving this novel to a class or a small group, I would be sure to remove the book jacket (if it’s a hard copy) because I feel that the synopsis on the back gives away too much. Milkweed Edition’s website even has a guided reading guide available at http://www.milkweed.org/downloads/cg_BBW.pdf that breaks the novel down into eight suggested lessons, an overview of the text, and helps set the historical context for the unit. There are interdisciplinary connections (creating skits, looking at artifacts), word lists, and writing exercises available FOR FREE. Milkweed Editions also has similar teacher’s guides available for a number of other texts (and did I mention you could download them and save them forever as PDF files?!) Laura E. Williams’ website (http://www.lauraewilliams.com) is not the best resource, but it does have some interesting bits of information. First of all, it lists her direct email, and second, is a link to http://www.btbwthemusical.com/, the site of the recently developed musical adapted from this novel. Though it hasn’t quite made it to Broadway, this just shows the type of scope and sequence this powerful novel can have.
