cover image Sky: A True Story of Resistance During World War II: Illustrated with Photographs, Documents, and Letters from the Author's

Sky: A True Story of Resistance During World War II: Illustrated with Photographs, Documents, and Letters from the Author's

Hanneke Ippisch. Simon & Schuster, $18 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-689-80508-0

Ippisch is clearly a remarkable woman: a teenager when Germany invaded her native Holland, she risked her life to save Jews and to aid in the Dutch resistance, and, when caught and jailed by Nazis, she maintained a heroic silence. Her stoicism, ironically, impedes her writing, and the power of her memoir depends chiefly on the reader's ability to read between the lines. She presents her story in fragments-a paragraph about the first day of school in her rural village; a few pages about accompanying Jews to safe havens; etc. Unlike Helene Deschamps's recent Spyglass, this book does not stress the life-and-death dangers its heroine braved at every turn. Ippisch rarely shares her emotions (in a fragment called ""Feelings,"" she explains, ""It's not that we did not have feelings, we simply kept them to ourselves"") and her matter-of-fact account downplays the real-life drama of her experiences. She is at her best when describing her imprisonment, at which point her writing is its most detailed-her account of corresponding with her family by means of tiny letters concealed under the laundry labels on her linens is just the sort of information likely to impress readers. A photo of half a dozen of these letters, held in the palm of the hand, is among the reproduced documents, memorabilia and other illustrations that enliven the sparse text. Ages 11-up. (Apr.)