The Children's War [Paperback]

Monique Charlesworth (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 13, 2005

This is the story of two children caught in the midst of war.It is 1939 and thirteen-year-old Ilse, half-Jewish, has been sent out of Germany by her Aryan mother to a place of supposed safety. Her journey takes her from the labyrinthine bazaars of Morocco to Paris, a city made hectic at the threat of Nazi invasion. At the same time in Germany, Nicolai, a boy miserably destined for the Nazi Youth movement, finds comfort in the friendship of Ilse’s mother, the nursemaid hired to take care of his young sister. Gripping and poignant, The Children’s War is a stunning novel of wartime lives, of parents and children, of adventure and self-discovery.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Ilse, a sensitive German girl of mixed parentage (a Jewish father and a Christian mother), is 13 when WWII erupts in this moving, morally nuanced and accomplished historical novel. Terrified that Ilse will be discovered as half-Jewish, her mother, Lore, sends her away to Morocco to live with Ilse's charming Uncle Willy. In her attentive, lively uncle, Ilse finds a father figure she could never have in her real father, Otto, who is a passionate but myopic Bolshevik and ineffectual parent. But soon France is invaded by Germany, Willy enrolls in the French Foreign Legion and Ilse is sent to her father, who is now living in Paris. Although Otto is himself fleeing from the Gestapo, he has made a promise to his estranged wife to look after Ilse. Meanwhile, working as a nursemaid in Hamburg, Lore agonizes over the decisions she's made, wondering whether she'll ever see her daughter again. Nicolai, one of Lore's charges in the privileged household she serves, is the same age as Ilse. Secretly disgusted by the Nazis, Nicolai is mesmerized by Lore and eventually wins her trust, convincing her to reveal her secrets. After Otto is arrested, Ilse learns to fend for herself in Paris and later Marseilles, where she joins the Resistance, and Nicolai copes with starvation and air raids in a Hamburg that increasingly is like a vision of hell. Charlesworth beautifully shows how the small weaknesses of good people are magnified when the stakes are high, creating flawed but deeply sympathetic characters. This is an alternately haunting and tender portrait of the lives of innocents caught in the relentless, random path of war.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From School Library Journal

Adult/High School–In the spring of 1939, 13-year-old Ilse Blumenthal begins fending for herself as ordeal after ordeal arises, all stemming from Hitler's rise to power. Her mother sends her from Germany to her uncle's home in Algeria, but she ends up being sent back to her estranged father in France where events force her into many dire situations. At various times, Ilse works for the French underground, lives in a brothel, and tries to deal with her Bolshevik father, all the while searching for a way to reach her mother, Lore, in Germany. Ilse's story is paralleled by that of Nicolai Bucherer, whose nursemaid is Lore. Charlesworth carefully re-creates the experiences of her characters so that their emotions are transmitted without the total ferocity of the events described. She deftly orchestrates scenes, allowing events to carry the story forward through the ordeal of war. As Ilse's and Nicolai's abilities to understand mature, broader insights become more frequent and clearer, providing differing perspectives on the war and its effects. Well drawn, intensely compelling, and admirably crafted.–Pam Johnson, Fairfax County Public Library, VA --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Anchor (September 13, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400032075
• ISBN-13: 978-1400032075
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.9 x 7.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,879,099 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Real suspense, September 7, 2004

By 

Candace "thepageturner" (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Children's War (Hardcover)

In 1939, Ilse Blumenthal's mother scrapes enough money together to send her 13-year-old daughter to her brother in Morocco. In most books this would be the end of the story, but Ilse's life is not so simple. The small, shy girl has a Jewish father and a "pure" Aryan mother, and her father is not only Jewish, he's a communist who has rarely been around. In Morocco, her kind uncle becomes the father she has always wanted but this paradise cannot last. As the war develops, Ilse is sent to her father in Paris and so begins her journey to survive a in a world where the most solid ground can turn to quicksand at any minute.

In Hamburg, her mother finds work as a nanny for friends of her brother. She forms a bond with Nicolai, a boy her daughter's age. Through Ilse and Nicolai we see the world coming apart and two children forced into roles that a sane universe would never ask them to play. The result is a very suspenseful book where like Ilse and Nicolai, you never know what will happen next.

With our fabulous hindsight we often wonder why people-especially Jews-didn't get out of Germany while they could. "Children's War" brings home the tangle of loyalties, loves, hopefulness, and plain disbelief kept people waiting for things to get better. And then opportunities to leave were cut off even before the war began.

I understand from British reviews that this book may be the first of a trilogy. Great. I want to find out how Nicolai and Ilse, if they survive the war, survive the peace.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars thought-provoking and compelling: a wonderful book, December 12, 2004

By 

Laura (Berlin, Germany) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Children's War (Hardcover)

This book is all the more moving for its lack of sentimentality. While the big picture of the horrors of war and the nature of evil is terrifying, it is very much a story of two young people trying to work out the world around them.

Told in alternate chapters from the perspectives of a girl and boy who are at the outset twelve years old, it always leaves you wanting to know more. The characters are wonderfully likeable and the deceptively simple style adeptly captures their changing perspectives as they grow up. The novel is at moments life-affirmingly charming and romantic.

Impossible to put down, well-paced, and suspenseful. Not a word wasted. One of the most powerful books I have ever read.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars compelling and sensitive portrait of children confronting war's horrors, December 4, 2005

By 

Bruce J. Wasser (Lake Bluff, IL) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Children's War (Paperback)

In hindsight, war appears to have some sort of order. There is a coherent sequence of battles, a logic to strategies and a presumption that participants understand their roles in war's panorama. Monique Charlesworth reminds us of the terrifying chaos of war in her challenging and instructive novel, "The Children's War." As the title promises, her novel delves into the psychological horrors children experience as unwilling victims of war's impersonal evils. Because her protagonists are early adolescents at the onset of World War II, they simply cannot fathom the complex series of variables that have engulfed their parents and compelled these adults to decide courses of behaviors that will indelibly stain their children's lives. Charlesworth writes with dignity, strength and courage; her characters are suffused with an integrity that has been forged out of incomprehensible loss and stunning resolve.

Both Ilse and Nicolai, the two youths around whom the narrative of "The Children's War" pivots, are children in exile. Though Nicolai lives in a comfortable German home, he is emotionally removed from his amoral mother and devastated by his father's absence. His self-induced exile from family presages an even more serious existential alienation from the fascist mentality that has overtaken his country. Sensitive, introspective and doubtful, Nicolai contrasts starkly from the goose-stepping, depersonalized youth that the Nazi regime was in the process of creating.

Half-Jewish Ilse repeatedly is torn between her mother and father. The latter, an ideologically pure anti-facist, is aloof and often absent, yet it is with him that Ilse must survive. She would have rather chosen her mother, who in an act of self-sacrifice and love, expatriated her daughter and then, after Ilse was gone, sought to bring her back to Germany so that their fates would be intertwined. Ilse's resiliency is remarkable, all the more so given her innocence and her reluctant absorption into cultures alien to her identity. First in Africa and then in Vichy France, Ilse not only must come to grips with spiritual displacement, but she must survive. After survival comes a search for meaning, one she creates out of valiant acts of rebellion and resistance.

Ilse's mother navigates the war years without certainties, a living set of contradictory decisions for which she has had no ethical training, no prior set of experiences through which she could gain understanding. She gives up her daughter in order to save her. She bestows protection and loving care on another family's children while relinquishing her own daughter to an ordeal most adults are incapable of facing. She denies her identity, her past and even her love for her husband in order to live.

Chaos and confusion course through "The Children's War." Monique Charlesworth never stoops to bromides and tidy resolutions; instead, she compels her readers to confront the harrowing fear and grinding panic children face during the extreme pressures of war. Her characters encounter infidelity, corruption, moral capitulation, defiance, resistance and fading hopes on a daily basis. That they can survive is testimony to the deepest drives humans could have: the need to understand and to act.