Fighter in the Woods: The True Story of a Jewish Girl who Joined the Partisans in World War II by Joshua M. Greene; New York: Scholastic Focus © 2025; ISBN 981546-135852; 137 pages; $18.99; publication date: February 4, 2025.
SAN DIEGO – This story may serve as a primer on the Holocaust for its intended audience, children aged 8 through 12. It augments the narrative with supplemental pages explaining such terms and concepts as World War II, antisemitism, ghettos, partisans, the Holocaust, collaborators, the righteous among the nations, the camps, and resistance.
Author Greene found just the right story for making the Holocaust intelligible to 3rd graders to 7th graders in the first-person account of Celia (Cimmer) Kassow on file at Yale University’s Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies.
She told of the German bombardment of her school, her escape to her parents’ home in a Polish village, the ghettoization of the Jews there, how she and other members of her family ran from that ghetto and later another one, how her parents and some siblings were gunned down, and how she hid from the Nazis in a shallow pit covered over with a board and manure in the barn of a schoolmate’s family.
Eventually, Celia joined a partisan unit in the forest. She participated in sabotage missions, almost getting caught when her unit blew up the Nazis’ temporary ammunition depot. Her fellow partisans were fatalistic; they expected to be killed in combat, but they first wanted to deprive Nazi Germany of as many troops and assets as they possibly could.
Celia and her compatriots lived through World War II because the partisans were devoted to each other and because of plain luck. Eventually, Celia and a husband whom she married after the war moved to the United States, where they raised a family.
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Donald H. Harrison is publisher and editor of San Diego Jewish World.
I want to get this book and read it to my students. I’m not sure how I shall pull that off as an Art teacher, but that is what I want to do.