A Family Secret (Eric Huevel) and The Search (Huevel, Ruud van der Rol, & Lies Schippers) are two more graphic novels exploring the Holocaust and WWII.Jereon is looking for yard sale items in his grandmother's attic as A Family Secret begins, only to find a cache of WWII era letters, clothing, and newspapers. He learns that the life he knows in the Netherlands is vastly different than that of the one known by his grandmother. Helena lived through the German occupation, lost one brother to the war, and, for many years, assumed that she would never see her childhood best friend Esther, a Jewish person, again because Helena's own Nazi-sympathizing father ratted her out. As so often characterizes the WWII era, though, things were not what they seemed, and a happy reunion awaits Helena after Jereon departs her house and just happens to hear a certain guest speaker at an open-air memorial service.
It is revealed that Helena's father wasn't as cruel as Helena might have thought. Instead of giving Esther to the authorities, he helped her escape. The Search is her story.
These books are published with help from the Anne Frank House, the Jewish Historical Museum of Amsterdam, and the Resistance Museum of Friesland. They are marketed as "stories told from the perspective of modern-day children." There definitely seems to be a desire through these books to craft texts that are accessible to younger children, to expand their options for learning about this era in comics form beyond the weighty Maus.
The full-color art appears inspired by Archie and TinTin, and the young people who learn their ancestors' stories seem realistic enough. While the storytelling is simple, it is informative, and what I like most about these books is that they cover the necessary historical information that most of us "know" while also examining countries and situations that we don't think about so much in regards to the war and genocide but that were just as much a part of the era's exigencies. Reading scenes from the Pacific and learning about how neutral countries such as the Netherlands were affected gave me a fresh and broader perspective. Seeing how the South Pacific evolved from a place of sanctuary to a danger zone deepened my sypathies for a people who, for a while, seemed to find no good place that would allow them to live in peace.
I won't say that these texts are as relevant to the comics form as Maus, but I will say that they offer younger readers -- upper-elementary and middle schoolers -- access to information they need to know and offer all readers perspectives that are often glossed over while studying this dark period of human history.
Each can expand a study of the modern world (1900-1950s) for virtually any class engaging in study thereof, so anything the books lose in stuffy, simplified storytelling they gain in relevance.
A Family Secret is available now. The Search will be available in October 2009. I recommend reading them both, especially if you work with elementary and middle schoolers or with high school students who need highly accessible texts.
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