The Author's Guide to Surviving Hitler

By Andrea Warren

Andrea Warren shares with readers how she wrote her award-winning book, Surviving Hitler: A Boy in the Nazi Death Camps, and how the book aligns with the Common Core State Standards for critical thinking, reading, speaking, and writing. She includes information not found in the book as to how she conducted research; interviewed her central character, Holocaust survivor Jack Mandelbaum; selected the photos for the book; structured the book, and created the story's narrative voice. This guide includes suggested exercises and reflective questions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andrea Warren
• Release date: Nov 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9781311658166

Andrea Warren

Andrea Warren is the author of many acclaimed nonfiction books for young readers, including Orphan Train Rider: One Boy's True Story, which won the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award. Andrea lives in Kansas. Visit her website at www.andreawarren.com.

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Title

The Author's Guide to

Surviving Hitler: A Boy in the Nazi Death Camps

and Its Alignment with the Common Core State Standards

By

Andrea Warren

Copyright © 2013 Andrea Warren

Smashwords Edition

All rights reserved. Contact the author for written permission to use any part of this book by any means of reproduction.

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ISBN 13 978-1311658166

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A Word from Andrea Warren

When I was a middle and high school English teacher, I struggled to find nonfiction books my students would enjoy. As an author, my goal is to write books that young readers embrace, history lesson and all, regardless of the subject matter.

Because I wrote Surviving Hitler: A Boy in the Nazi Death Camps before the development of the Common Core State Standards, I was not trying to craft a story that met them. And yet this and all my other books do. I think there is much of value in the Standards. I appreciate that students will be taking a hard look at how my books are constructed, whether I have a specific point of view toward my subject matter, and how the approaches taken by other writers to the same subject matter compare to mine.

I've seen various study guides written by others to help you teach my books. The problem is, the creators of those guides had no knowledge of the choices I made, how I conducted research, why I picked a certain photo to be in a book, or how I selected and interviewed the people in my books.

So I'm writing the guides for my books. This one, on Surviving Hitler: A Boy in the Nazi Death Camps, lays out for you what I did, why I did it, how my book meets the Common Core State Standards, and suggested exercises. I hope you'll find it valuable.

All best to you and your students,

Andrea Warren

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Why I Wrote about the Holocaust

The Holocaust wasn't a subject I had wanted to write about. I didn't read Anne Frank until high school and my American history textbook offered up only a paragraph about Hitler's Final Solution. Next to it was a horrifying photo of emaciated survivors that made me look away.

Today I have Jewish friends who talk about growing up under the black cloud of the Holocaust, hearing the stories of the camps and of extended family members lost to Hitler's madness. But in my little Nebraska hometown, there were no Jews and my friends and I were blissfully ignorant of all this.

My father, a World War II Navy veteran who served in the South Pacific, rarely talked about the war. My mother spoke only of troop trains and of moving from place to place while my father was in training. Her stories were lighthearted. Not long ago I asked her why she had never mentioned the Nazis or the Holocaust when the subject of World War II came up. She was thoughtful in her response. She said she and my father, and my friends' mothers and fathers, had experienced the deprivation of the Great Depression and knew all about the horrors of World War II. But we just wanted to forget. We thought it could never happen again and we didn't want to burden our children with it. You were born after the war and you were our hope for the future. You were our fresh start.

We know now that there is no fresh start. We are never free of the past. It shapes each of us just as surely as it shapes society. Genocide continues in our world today in part because we have not learned the lessons that history has to teach us. The past is prologue.

Which still didn't mean I wanted to write about the Holocaust. That came about in part because of Sam Sander. The spring of 1999 I was a guest at a luncheon to thank community members who had been convocation speakers in Kansas City's Shawnee Mission School District, where I live. Our nametags listed our speaking