The Brass Charm

In these days of historical revisionism, it’s important to keep publishing books about significant events in history. Colonialism, racism and other forms of discrimination should be learned about so that historical injustices are not repeated.

So it is with the Holocaust, a crime against humanity that beggars belief, even nearly 90 years later. Children need to know about this and other crimes, and while parents and writers don’t want to terrify them, the stories shouldn’t be soft-pedaled.

Montreal’s Monique Polak (Why Humans Work, For the Record and many more novels and nonfiction titles) recounts a story of survival and hope from her own family in The Brass Charm. Her mother is the model for the grandmother who was given a monkey charm by a stranger when she was a child prisoner in the Terezin (Theresiezenstadt) concentration camp.

The story is only mildly successful, mostly because the main character, Tali, is only mildly believable. The sadness Tali experiences when her house is badly damaged in a rainstorm feels more like she is being momentarily self-centred. There is no indication that she has a consistently selfish personality. Similarly, Tali’s transforms improbably quickly into an empathetic friend to Elodie, a girl whose friendship she rebuffed, right after her oma shares a story of being rounded up and enslaved by the Nazis. In the memory, the girl/oma cries when she realizes it is her birthday and she is given the monkey charm by a woman she doesn’t know. The woman, along with many others in the camp, are assumed to have been murdered in Auschwitz.

Illustrator Marie LaFrance has been nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award and has won the Ruth Schwartz Children’s Book Award and many others. In The Brass Charm, she uses soft graphite pencil as the basis for her drawings which are then coloured and digitized. Her modern characters dress in bright colours, but those from the past are presented in muted colours. Some also have elongated, narrow limbs, a surreal effect.

However, the drawings of the Nazi roundup and the concentration camp are not representative of what happened, and there is ample pictorial, oral and written documentation of the brutality experienced by anyone they targeted. Nazi soldiers did not stand by watching or talking to each other while people walked quietly and willingly into prison camps. Nor did the inmates look as healthy as she has drawn them while they were worked to death. People did not sit on chairs chatting as they worked, children didn’t peek over tables or idly run about with soldiers ignoring them. These pages should have maximum impact; they should shock and make a child indignant at what took place. But these drawings are a sanitized depiction.

Polak has included an afterword that provides information about the Nazi reign of terror and tells the story of her mother’s experience in Terezin.

The Brass Charm can be used as an adjunct to a lesson about the Holocaust, about humanity and empathy. The cover shows the child from the past giving Tali the monkey charm. Polak’s story can give heart and courage to children to learn that, even in grave, inhumane times, kindness can change people’s lives, as it did the little girl’s, and by its example, those of future generations.