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Product Description
A girl's escape from Nazi Germany.
The city Eva Bentheim once adored is no longer familiar. A swastika is emblazoned on the flag atop the City Hall. Teachers, family, and friends are beginning to disappear. Her father seems gone in a different way; he has become ill, fragile, and despondent as the Nazis gain power. When things get worse, Eva's mother desperately tries to obtain the proper papers for her family to leave the country. Then a horrible night of roundups occurs and Eva's father is taken away. A nocturnal search begins for someone who can help release him from the city jail. Eva's boyfriend, Arno, may have a way to save her father from deportation, but it soon becomes clear that their struggles have just begun. Exquisitely felt and written, Walk the Dark Streets resonates with the indomitability of the human spirit even as a loving family's attempts to stay together grow more and more hopeless.
Amazon.com Review
With Walk the Dark Streets, author Edith Baer continues the story of the Bentheim family she began in A Frost in the Night. In this sequel, Baer, herself a survivor of the Holocaust, chronicles the life of Eva, a child of bourgeois Jewish parents in the fictional German town of Thalstadt during the early years of World War II. Eva slowly becomes aware of the Nazi threat as her family's rights and privileges are methodically and relentlessly taken away. Her father's bookstore is closed because he will not agree to carry Nazi propaganda, and her grandfather is no longer welcome in the neighborhood tavern where he only recently had been surrounded by friends. At school, Eva is banished to the back of the class and excused from "Aryan Folk and Race Science" lessons. Even as a romance begins to blossom between Eva and Arno, a talented young violin player, she is constantly reminded of Hitler's presence as her friends and extended family members desperately try to flee Germany. "Now it seemed hardly more than a dream that they had ever walked these streets with their arms around each other and with their ... childish hopes, the sun on their faces and death a stranger no one knew." Because of her father's lingering illness, Eva's parents wait until the last possible moment before sending their daughter out of the country alone with the hope that she will survive. Told as only a survivor could, Walk the Dark Streets is a compelling and valuable addition to Holocaust literature. (Ages 12 and older) --Jennifer Hubert
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