Walk the Dark Streets [Hardcover]

Edith Baer (Author)

Book Description

Age Level: 7 and up

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.

Editorial Reviews

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

From Publishers Weekly

With this haunting, painful sequel to her elegiac autobiographical novel A Frost in the Night (see Fiction Reprints below), Baer ushers her heroine, the German Jewish girl Eva Bentheim, through the rise of the Reich, from 1933 to 1940. Eva's age is not given: even as she is a distinct, lifelike character, she represents an innocence lost to her elders and to her country. As the novel begins, she emerges from a lengthy illness at the same time that Germany succumbs to Hitler. The climate steadily darkens: first some of her classmates show up in Hitler Youth uniforms; Social Democrat and Catholic teachers are fired; a friend's father, a journalist, is severely beaten. Restrictions multiply, but are lifted just as the 1936 Olympics invite the world's attention. Friends and relatives make plans to leave, at increasingly desperate costs (one of Eva's aunts, for example, marries a virtual stranger, because he is Dutch and can offer her a home in Holland). Eva's father can see what lies in store, but he is too ill to escapeAalthough he is offered sponsorship by an American citizen, he knows he will fail the physical at the consulate, and he and Eva's mother decide that Eva must leave by herself. Baer shows how the network of fear slowly tightensAhow apparently innocent acts, like walking down the street with a longtime friend, can suddenly become fatally dangerous. Readers who know the history will find the tension almost unbearable, especially in such passages as those describing the days before Kristallnacht. But virtually no reader will be able to turn away from this implacably paced, resoundingly authentic study in tragedy. Ages 12-up.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 7 and up
  
• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR); 1st edition (October 28, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374382298
• ISBN-13: 978-0374382292
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #972,381 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Recommended For Jews and non-Jews alike!, March 5, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Walk the Dark Streets (Hardcover)

Two thumbs up! This book was a positive influence on me, being Orhtodox Jewish. It was also a positive influence on my best friend who is Christian. The story is perfectly set following one girl through her troubles of WWII.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Okay for some kids!, August 2, 1999

By 

Rebecca Herman (USA) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Walk the Dark Streets (Hardcover)

I read this book when I was 13. I am now 14. I understood this book and its message, and did not find it unsettling. However, people older than me can appreciate it as well. It is a beautifully written book that does not hide the pain and hardship of this time in history.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A gentle,haunting story about a violent time, November 14, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Walk the Dark Streets (Hardcover)

The reader is brought back to the terror filled days and months that engulfed the Jewish community as the full impact of Nazi power became apparent - a gradual, relentless process that escalates suddenly with Kristallnacht. As the day to day events unfold, the reader is swept up in the personal terror and loss that each of the characters feel. It is a wrenching, beautifully written story. Older teens and adult readers alike will be captured by this book.