The War­saw Ghet­to Upris­ing has become enshrined in his­to­ry as an exam­ple of Jew­ish resis­tance dur­ing the Holo­caust. The focus of Elisa Box­er and Oksana Drachkovska’s pic­ture book is the secret archive cre­at­ed and hid­den by the ghetto’s res­i­dents. Aware that their sur­vival was imper­iled, they were deter­mined to doc­u­ment the truth about Nazi ter­ror as well as evi­dence of their own human­i­ty when con­fronting destruc­tion. A qui­et­ly dra­mat­ic text, stun­ning pic­tures, and inven­tive design present young read­ers with a truth­ful and inspir­ing vision of heroism.

The book begins in 1946, unfold­ing a mys­tery from the recent past. The nar­ra­tor iden­ti­fies him­self as Hersh Wass­er, ​“the only per­son in the world who knows where the trea­sure is buried and what it con­tains.” Box­er builds nar­ra­tive ten­sion while main­tain­ing the dig­ni­ty of Wasser’s task, which is to direct the search for an irre­place­able item. The buried trea­sure is noth­ing less than a record of the truth.

In a flash­back to 1940, Wass­er describes secret meet­ings held by the ghetto’s pris­on­ers. Under the lead­er­ship of his­to­ri­an Emanuel Ringel­blum, they decid­ed to com­pile a com­plete chron­i­cle of their life under impos­si­ble con­di­tions. Every­one was encour­aged to par­tic­i­pate: chil­dren, par­ents, rab­bis, teach­ers, and work­ers. Nam­ing their project Oneg Shab­bat, or Oyneg Shab­bos in Yid­dish, was a bold state­ment of com­mit­ment to the Jew­ish spir­it. Box­er does not avoid the crush­ing facts of life in the ghet­to, which include dai­ly humil­i­a­tion and phys­i­cal suf­fer­ing. Yet just as pow­er­ful are the expres­sions of hope, as res­i­dents main­tained their cul­ture, reli­gious prac­tice, and hopes for even­tu­al free­dom. Wass­er was one of only three sur­vivors of this his­toric attempt to challenge

era­sure from his­to­ry. Quotes from his diary, and from oth­er mem­bers of the group, are includ­ed with sev­er­al illus­tra­tions. Writ­ten in ele­gant ital­ics and enclosed in a text box resem­bling torn paper, these state­ments give a full pic­ture of how Jews adapt­ed and strug­gled. ​“The bel­ly is emp­ty but the ears are full,” Wass­er writes with hope, while Oneg Shab­bat mem­ber Rachel Auer­bach asks her­self whether ​“there will remain even one wit­ness.” Box­er embeds facts in acces­si­ble metaphor, relat­ing that the archive’s com­pil­ers under­stood that their words might be the only survivors.

Drachkovska’s illus­tra­tions, ren­dered in mut­ed col­ors, cap­ture the per­va­sive dark­ness of the ghet­to as a kind of night­mare, relieved only by moments of courage. In one illus­tra­tion, two girls draw with white chalk on a wall, and a boy plays his vio­lin in the street. Anoth­er scene was inspired by the icon­ic pho­to­graph of a young boy, Nazi guns aimed towards him, rais­ing his arms in fear. The illus­tra­tion is not a lit­er­al repro­duc­tion, but rather an imag­i­na­tive response to that image.

When the war ends, there is at last a scene of joy. This is fol­lowed by the suc­cess­ful, if par­tial, retrieval of the archive one year lat­er. A flock of white paper birds emerge from its pages, and are trans­formed into real doves — sym­bols of life.