★★★★☆ Tricky (in a good way!) Holocaust story

Hana's Suitcase: A True Story

Karen Levine

** spoiler alert **

Hana's Suitcase: A True Story tells the story of Hana Brady, a Jewish girl who died, like so many, in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. It is she whose photo we see on the cover. Her parents were taken, then she and her brother George were taken to the Theresienstadt Ghetto, where they were held until 1944. Hana was put on the train to Auschwitz, where she died the day of her arrival. As the book reminds us repeatedly, a million and a half children were among the Jews killed.

It is all too common a story. But Hana is special in one important way. Most of the millions who died vanished with barely a trace. Hana's story was told, mostly through the efforts of an extraordinary educator and researcher, Fumiko Ishioka.

The problem with writing a children's book about the Holocaust is that, in the words of Aragorn, "it is sad, as are all the tales of Middle-earth". There are no happy stories of the Holocaust. But we need to remember it.

Karen Levine accomplishes the job of telling a Holocaust story with a happy ending by a trick. As the title tells you, Hana's Suitcase is not just the story of Hana -- it is also the story of her suitcase. Boring, right?

Fumiko Ishioka is the director of the Tokyo Holocaust Education Resources Center (ホロコースト教育資料センター). In 1998 when Fumiko Ishioka took on the job of coordinator of the Center, she visited the Auschwitz Museum and persuaded an assistant director to loan her some physical artifacts. Among these was a suitcase with the name "Hanna Brady", her date of birth 16-May-1931, and the word "WaisenKind" (orphan).

Ishioka, who is clearly a Force To Be Reckoned With, bent her efforts to finding out more about Hana. She learned that before Auschwitz Hana had lived in the Model Ghetto at Theresienstadt for several years. And she struck gold -- Hana's older brother George had been with her in Theresienstadt, and although he was also sent to Auschwitz, he survived. Ishioka tracked him down -- he was in 2000 a successful plumber (a trade he learned in Theresienstadt) in Toronto. She wrote to him. And There Was Great Joy!

George was able to tell Ishioka (and Levine) Hana's story up to the day on which he boarded the train to Auschwitz, after which he never saw Hana again. We have him to thank for the photos and Hana's story. (Levine continues the story past that point -- this part of the book is lightly fictionalized, in that she tells us of conversations of Hana's from which no witness or participant survived past that day. This reminded me of the similarly mostly true Carry On, Mr. Bowditch.)

Levine, a radio producer, read the story in a Jewish newspaper and produced a radio documentary, which friends persuaded her to turn into a book. It's short -- I read it in about an hour -- and there are plenty of pictures. In her acknowledgements, she gives away the trick, "First and foremost, my thanks go to George Brady and Fumiko Ishioka. This is their story." All the tales of the Holocaust are sad, but this is not exclusively a tale of the Holocaust. For Fumiko and George there is a happy ending, of a sort.

Hana's Suitcase on Amazon

Goodreads review