A young child enjoys stay­ing at his grand­parents’ home where he can draw at grandpa’s old desk with its three draw­ers. The child’s crayons and pen­cils are in draw­er one, grandpa’s old toys in draw­er two, but draw­er three is a for­bid­den, locked mys­tery until the boy unlocks it. It is there that he finds pho­tographs and fam­i­ly relics of the Holo­caust which he is too young to be per­mit­ted to see, but which the grand­fa­ther feels he must now explain to him. 

How old this child is, is a mys­tery. If he can come up with: ​“There’s a kind of qui­et in Grand­ma and Grandpa’s house. It is the silence of peo­ple who come from a far­away world — a van­ished world that still lives in mem­o­ries,” he must be at least twelve. On the oth­er hand, he might only be age six or younger from the de­scription of his activ­i­ties and the first draw­ing, sup­pos­ed­ly his, and his sob­bing behav­ior upon being dis­cov­ered after hav­ing opened a locked, for­bid­den draw­er. The col­lages are beau­ti­ful and evoca­tive, but the writ­ing is jum­bled. This top­ic need not be intro­duced to a child under age eight, oth­er­wise the child is too young to begin to under­stand the pol­i­tics and stages of per­se­cu­tion of the Shoah. I rec­om­mend instead, The Num­ber on My Grandfather’s Arm by David Adler and The Tat­tered Prayer Book by Ellen Bari, among oth­ers. Both are for ages 8 and up, young enough to start teach­ing them about this tragedy.