Hidden by Loic Dauvillier, Marc Lizano, Greg Salsedo

Dauvillier, L., Lizano, M., & Siege, A. (2014). Hidden: a child's story of the Holocaust. New York: First Second.

Hidden is a graphic novel that gives a perspective of a Jewish child that is living during WWII era.  Donuia is a young girl who is learning that certain people of Europe do not like Jewish people and begin treating her and her family very poorly.  One day the police come to her house, where her parents hide her under the floorboards of the house while they are taken away.  The gracious neighbor below finds her hiding place and begins raising her knowing that her parents have been taken away to work camps.  Donuia must live a life as someone else to survive where she poses as Simone Pericard, the neighbors daughter.

The book would be great for grades 3-8 as a stand alone read or a parallel with a history until on the holocaust.

            Hidden is such a unique piece, as it is written from the perspective of a child who is looking for her family and the hardships of having to evade Nazi Germany.   This piece elaborates Jewish culture and is rich with accurate history of what happened in Europe during that that.   It has adult themes, but also appropriate for younger children especially if this is the first time they are learning about the holocaust.

What’s inside?

Allusion:  The entire book is centered around Jewish culture during WWII era, but there are allusions to certain historical aspects of what was going on.  Donuia wears her “sheriff star” as her father calls it, but it is actually the Star of David that all Jews were forced to wear.

Onomatopoeia:

None of us screamed. BOOM! Open up! BOOM!

Themes:

Many themes are introduced in this graphic novel such as:

The Holocaust

Jewish culture

Hardship

Sadness

Missing family

WWII

This novel is mainly illustrations, which are done just as you would imagine a graphic novel would be.  The colors are saturated quite beautifully and each character is fairly represented in each picture.

How can we teach this?

Have your students brainstorm about themes of the novel just as we did above with page numbers representing where they found it in the novel.  Once they have at least 5 of them, have them write about the themes using the textual evidence from Hidden.