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When I was in high school, I checked out a book over and over again from the library - Rena's Promise by Heather Dune Macadam. It's about a woman that was on the first Jewish transport to Auschwitz. It's historically accurate and incredibly moving. Eventually, the library card was full of my name printed over and over and over. Eventually, the librarian just gave me the book.
{That was a perk of attending a ridiculously small high school.} Now I teach the book to my senior class. It has a ton of broad, beautiful themes and even though it's a story of two sisters, the boys in my classes easily connect to the people within the pages. It's one of those few gems - a book in which students always read ahead. There's a particular part in the second half of the book where Rena gets put in charge of doling out noodles that were smuggled out of the kitchen for her and her group of friends. They boil the water in the cauldron where they do laundry. They add salt. They sit and wait for the noodles to cook on a cold floor in the middle of the night. And then Rena spoons a precise amount into each dish for each of her co-conspirators. The warm, salty water and the pasta have the girls groaning in bliss. I think about that scene often. They had a pound macaroni in worn, metal bowls (perspective: a box of Barilla). And it was the best thing that had happened to them in a very, very long time. The meal fortified them for another day. You guys, it's not just about the noodles. It's about being prisoners in the middle of a World War and instead of only looking out for themselves, they looked out for each other. They looked out for each other. What kind of world would we live in if we lived just that one lesson? xoxo, B. |
