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THE THOUGHT OF HIGH WINDOWS by Lynne Kositsky Kirkus Star

THE THOUGHT OF HIGH WINDOWS

by Lynne Kositsky

Pub Date: March 1st, 2004
ISBN: 1-55337-621-8
Publisher: Kids Can

Superb, wrenching Holocaust fiction. Esther is a Jewish teen snatched out of Germany at the beginning of WWII by the Swiss Red Cross to live briefly in Belgium and later in a castle in France, under the nose of the Vichy government. Lice and other discomforts are made worse by cold torment from peers who consider Esther “old Jewish” (because she’s fat and her family spoke Yiddish and went to shul). After a stint in a holding camp, Esther lives in two different French towns under false identities, eventually (and initially unwillingly) joining the Résistance. Swirling through the story is her tumultuous, ever-changing relationship with mercurial peer Walter. Esther is plagued with guilt and self-hatred as well as terror of dying in the looming Holocaust. Kositsky deftly describes the twisted pains of war, genocide, and cruelty. Kositsky’s poetic and piercing language honors Esther’s severe loneliness and the horrors she witnesses. (author’s note) (Historical fiction. YA)