cover image Hostage to War: A True Story

Hostage to War: A True Story

Tatjana Wassiljewa, Tatiana Vasileva. Scholastic, $15.95 (192pp) ISBN 978-0-590-13446-0

Wassiljewa was 13 in 1941 when Germans overran her small town near Leningrad; sent to Germany as a captive laborer, she spent three years working 12-hour days in factories, all the while enduring hunger and other privations. She reports the unexpected kindnesses of German civilians who shared with her their own meager rations and the bravery of strangers who risked their lives to dig her out from a bombed building. Perhaps the biggest shock came after the war--it took a full year after liberation for authorities to repatriate her, and then, upon her arrival in Leningrad, she discovered that many fellow returning forced laborers had been summarily declared traitors or spies and sent to labor camps. An afterword notes that more than seven million foreigners were, like the author, forced to work in German factories and farms; this large number notwithstanding, there is little available on the subject for young American readers. The writing itself suffers somewhat from being squeezed into an artificial diary format (only as the book nears the end does the author disclose, ""I wrote my diary in my imagination"") and from pallid prose, possibly the result of this translation's distance from the original Russian (Trenter translated from the German edition). Even so, the story relayed here is intrinsically compelling, enough to sustain the reader. Ages 10-up. (May)