My battered copy of I Am Fifteen – And I Don’t Want To Die originally came from Scholastic Books. I must have read it a dozen times before I graduated high school and at least that many times since then. I’m sure the first thing that attracted me to this book was the fact that the heroine shares my first name, but what keeps me coming back is the immensity and intimacy of the story.
Christine and her family are caught by WWII when it comes to their home in Budapest. They move into the basement with the other tenants of their apartment building as the war rages over their heads. Russian and German troops compete for a few blocks at a time leaving them trapped in No Man’s Land. Eventually, they make their escape, but it is close. Everything is close. And not just in a "the War is at the door" way, but in the way that Christine feels everything. She sobs when her hair catches fire because she leans too close to a candle while reading, but she is overjoyed to see the family piano bombed beyond repair because it means that she will no longer have to suffer practicing at it.
The story is also close because the author lived it and she spares us none of the details. "The man kept struggling with the door and did not notice the danger until the cement wall caught him and sent him spinning against the side of the (train) coach. The crowd froze in horrified silence. Above the metallic rattle of the train, on could distinctly hear the cracking of bones. With his face purple and swollen and blood spurting in gushes from his mouth, the human top lifting himself, then felling back. It seemed that, at last, he was going to fall to the ground. But the wall would not let him go and continued to mangle him for another 20 yards." Maybe not as graphic as Saving Private Ryan, but in some ways, much more so.
The last major conflict that the United States was in ended before I started kindergarten. Americans have very little idea what it’s really like to be in such a terrible, desperate situation. A kid in 9th or 10th grade, really learning about World War II for the first time isn’t going to really understand it. Hand them this book. It brings war to life in a way that movies and television can’t. If you think your kids are too young to read the violence in this book then maybe you should remember that the author lived it at 15.
Recommended:
