Resistance

The book is wonderfully written and portrays the horrible travesties that the Jews faced. The story follows Chaya, I think she's around 13-15. She joins a resistence group and see more of the horors of what the Germans are doing to her people. Then tradgety strikes and she and a few other are working to re-build their organization. They do mention the bad situations of the people, but nothing above the age level this book is for.
Overall a good book to descirbe the time, deep charecters, empathy, and just leaves with respect for them.

Merged review:

The book is wonderfully written and portrays the horrible travesties that the Jews faced. The story follows Chaya, I think she's around 13-15. She joins a resistence group and see more of the horors of what the Germans are doing to her people. Then tradgety strikes and she and a few other are working to re-build their organization. They do mention the bad situations of the people, but nothing above the age level this book is for.
Overall a good book to descirbe the time, deep charecters, empathy, and just leaves with respect for them.

Regarding the historical fiction genre, there are many that feature WWII as a backdrop. The reason for this should be obvious: it features an easy bad guy and good guy to write. Many of us have been taught (or should learn) that the Axis powers are bad, and everyone else is good when it comes to WWII. Yet, this easy narrative means that there are so many books about WWII that it can seem like a flooded market, where it can be hard to separate the truly great from the simply good.

This is where Resistance by Jennifer Nielsen enters the picture. I was initially reluctant to read this book, because I had read Nielsen's other historical fiction book, A Night Divided, and just found it fine. Not anything spectacular, just fine. The characters were all flat and one dimensional, and we barely got any background on the world of these people who lived on the east side of the Berlin Wall. What eventually made me want to read Resistance? Firstly, it was the description of the book. The story of a girl in the resistance during the Nazi occupation of Poland was very interesting. Second, there is the personal connection I have to both Poland and the resistance movements of WWII. My father's side of the family is Polish, and my Grandmother on my mother's side was in the French resistance during WWII. This made the story personal for me, and I was eager to see the family resistance stories told from a first-person perspective. Thankfully, as I continued reading, I quickly discovered that Nielsen had seemingly taken all the complaints I had with her previous works and re-written them into the strengths of a novel, creating one that is destined to become a favorite of mine.

One of the best aspects of this novel is the pacing and the thriller feeling of this book. It is not a nice story, with our main character Chaya, facing many challenges and trials to accomplish her various missions for the resistance as a courier. As the book goes on, I found that Nielsen pulled no punches, as we see and hear of deaths and other atrocities that the Nazis commit in this book. It does not get too graphic (this is more of a middle grade/young YA book), but the reader can infer a lot of what may have happened to the people that Chaya meets in her journey, if it is not directly shown. Then there is the pacing of this book. There are lulls in the story, where we get nice character building moments, but this only serves as a way for Nielsen to catch you off guard as something else pops up to make you afraid again for our main characters. Nielsen showed excellent talent, as she honed this skill here so that I was up late into the night, listening for what would happen next, letting the feels of terror, suspicion, and desperation wash over me.

The people are also well done, as Nielsen takes one of my complaints of the last book and turns it into a positive. In A Night Divided, I complained that many of her characters were flat with little dimension about them, other than their name. Here, Nielsen uses this as a strength, noting that Chaya is not supposed to know a lot about the people she works with in case she is captured. The less she knows the better.

There are many complex realities shown here. Many people react to the Nazi occupation in different ways. There are some people, like Chaya, who want to fight the Nazis any way they can. Then there are those who openly support them and what they do to the Jewish population, and everything in between. The reader sees all sides of the occupation, leading them to understand that there are, at times, no easy answers when you are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Would you serve as a Nazi sympathizer, making lists of people to be sent to the camps, if that meant saving your own children? Would you fight back physically through violence or small acts of faith with the people around you? These ideas are presented well and give the reader a sense that times were more complex than the simple Nazis=bad, everyone else=good, story we usually see.

I also liked the little historical tidbits that are sprinkled in. One being the use of occupied troops to do much of the Nazi's dirty work, while being led by a German officer. The Nazi's, for all their talk of superiority, were spread very thin along the eastern front, so they used troops from other occupied nations for defense and as occupational forces whenever they could. This is reflected in the book with Ukrainian soldiers being used in an assault on a Jewish ghetto, rather than Nazi troops. Then there are how they managed to listen to BBC resistance radio broadcasts and how they were made to help resistance fighters. Many people at this time were given German radios that could be tuned only to German stations, so those that could find a radio that could pick up the BBC was extremely important. Little historical facts like these are sprinkled throughout the story, and they lent an air of believability to an already stirring tale.

This novel is one that I know I will want to buy in the future (for those of you who know me, that is saying something). The narrative, in my opinion, lends a voice to those who died in the resistance, and bestows the name of ‘hero' onto those who thought themselves unworthy of such a title. I sincerely hope that this is not the last I see of this book, as it deserves to be widely read, and placed in classrooms across the country. I give it a five out of five.