Greenfeld weaves personal testimonies of 13 hidden children from Germany, France, Belgium and Poland into a more general account of the persecution of Jews, beginning with seeds of anti-Semitism, through Hitler's rise to Chancellor of the Third Reich to the liberation of the camps, and carrying the narrative through to the emigration to America. Most of these children were separated from their parents as infants, toddlers, or as pre-adolescents, and hidden in convents, orphanages, in crowded sleeping quarters in homes, in cellars and attics, in hay stacks, underneath barns, and in the woods. These children today include educators, a dentist, psychologists, a civil engineer, and one Nobel Prize winner.

Greenfeld captures the terror of little children who depended on strangers -- and upon themselves -- to outwit the Germans and the Poles, in the midst of exposure to starvation, murder, death and emotional abuse. "A cry or a laugh -- the basic familiar sounds of childhood," Greenfeld tells us, had to be suppressed. In retrospect, we see that silence meant increasing the chances of survival. Towards the end of the war, when 50 Jews were hiding in an abandoned building in Warsaw, a father who could not silence his crying baby choked him to death in order to save the others from being discovered; other children witnessed this act of desperation.

A family that survived intact was seen as an oddity. Throughout their years of hiding, children who constantly worried if their parents would return were not always filled with joy at reunions with strangers who looked like skeletons, without teeth, pale and weak. At times they did not speak the same language.

The Hidden Children, a highly graphic account of the horrors of hiding, may not be appropriate for fifth graders: the book is more suitable for pre-adolescents and adolescents. Nonetheless, The Hidden Children is a valuable contribution to the Holocaust literature for young readers.

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