HEROES IN PLENTY

Some pretty rough material, but certainly an excellent, dramatic handling of one of the most difficult problems of today -- the good people inside Germany, the underground, and the hopelessly large-mass indoctrination of horror and terror. A straight-shooting, likeable English boy starts back from America to rejoin his parents after they lose their oldest boy at the front. His ship is torpedoed, and he begins his incredible journey through Nazi France. Chosen by the Germans for Nazi conditioning, to be returned to England when the war is over, he is put through the paces in a Nazi school. He fails to satisfy as a Nazi and endangers his life. But German underground friends help him, as do others. Escape; the constant threat of recapture, terror, loneliness and bullets; and the boy reaches his home via the first wave of Allied landings in France. Real material, vividly presented. There may be some objection to any humanizing portrait of the Germans, but the insignificance of the internal forces of freedom in contrast to the overwhelming mass of brute, slave souls is horrifying enough. The whole still maintains such as air of soundness and sanity, that not only seventh and eighth graders will like reading the adventure story, but their parents, too, will find themselves interested, and the early teens won't find it too young.