The Pebble: An Allegory of the Holocaust

In 1943, narrator Eitan and his best friend Rivka fly a kite from the roof of a house in a gated Jewish ghetto, where they’ve been imprisoned since Nazi forces arrived the previous spring, heralded by “big black birds.” Thin-lined editorial style art by Dagile˙, rendered in somber earth tones punctuated with startling swathes of black, show a community trying to carry on: “I could hear children laughing, dogs barking, and women chatting,” Marcinkevicˇius writes. But each individual wears a yellow Star of David, and after people are taken away—including Eitan’s father—“nobody ever came home.” While giving a violin concert, Eitan has a waking nightmare about a big black bird, a vision that presages the community’s destruction in a horrifying conflagration. After “everything went silent,” Eitan curls into a ball and becomes “smaller, harder, and smoother, like a pebble.” Years later, Rivka, the event’s only survivor, finds the pebble and leaves it at a memorial that she visits. The creators don’t mitigate the sadness of this sprawling story, but they do challenge readers to consider something equally profound: the blessings and obligations of memory. An end page shows the murdered community embodied as pebbles, and an epilogue describes the objects as “lasting symbols of endurance.” Pale-skinned characters frequently reflect the white of the page. Ages 6–8. (May)