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Faces of Courage (Granville Publishing $16.95)
Having developed a graduate program for B.C. teachers working with students who are blind, visually impaired and/or have multiple disabilities, Sally Rogow has grown to admire the courage of children. This admiration led her to write Faces of Courage (Granville Publishing $16.95), a collection of 12 stories about teenagers in Europe who resisted the Nazis during World War II. Among the heroes and heroines are Jacques, a blind French teen who organized a student resistance group; Yojo, a Gypsy who guided downed British pilots over the Pyrenees Mountains; and the 'Edelweiss Pirates', a group of German teenagers who opposed the Hitler Youth.
Three of the stories are based on actual teenagers, including Jacques Lusseyran, the blind resistance leader who later wrote an autobiography called And There Was Light. Born in Paris in 1924, he was physically blinded by a collision at school at age eight. At age 16, during the German occupation, he headed a resistance movement of 600 French youth. Betrayal led to his arrest and imprisonment at Buchenwald. He survived and wrote several books in which blindness is interpreted as a spiritual advantage. "Lusseyran,"; wrote Oliver Sacks, "sees the 'task' of blindness as reminding us of our other, deeper modes of perception and their mutuality.";
In addition to Rogow's dramatizations based on historical events and circumstances, she has published a monograph, Hitler's Unwanted Children: The Story of Children with Disabilities in Nazi Germany (1999). It appears in the Journal of Holocaust Education. In her collection Faces of Courage, Rogow has reprinted the following quotation from Adolf Hitler about his Hitler Youth groups. "I want a brutal, domineering, fearless, cruel youth. Youth must be all that. It must bear pain. There must be nothing weak and gentle about it. The free, splendid beast of prey must once again flash from its eyes. That is how I will eradicate thousands of years of human domestication. That is how I will create the New Order.";
Sally Rogow was one of the featured writers at the 19th annual Cherie Smith Jewish Book Festival at Vancouver's Jewish Community Centre in mid-November. Faces of Courage 1-894694-20-1
[BCBW Winter 2003]
Three of the stories are based on actual teenagers, including Jacques Lusseyran, the blind resistance leader who later wrote an autobiography called And There Was Light. Born in Paris in 1924, he was physically blinded by a collision at school at age eight. At age 16, during the German occupation, he headed a resistance movement of 600 French youth. Betrayal led to his arrest and imprisonment at Buchenwald. He survived and wrote several books in which blindness is interpreted as a spiritual advantage. "Lusseyran,"; wrote Oliver Sacks, "sees the 'task' of blindness as reminding us of our other, deeper modes of perception and their mutuality.";
In addition to Rogow's dramatizations based on historical events and circumstances, she has published a monograph, Hitler's Unwanted Children: The Story of Children with Disabilities in Nazi Germany (1999). It appears in the Journal of Holocaust Education. In her collection Faces of Courage, Rogow has reprinted the following quotation from Adolf Hitler about his Hitler Youth groups. "I want a brutal, domineering, fearless, cruel youth. Youth must be all that. It must bear pain. There must be nothing weak and gentle about it. The free, splendid beast of prey must once again flash from its eyes. That is how I will eradicate thousands of years of human domestication. That is how I will create the New Order.";
Sally Rogow was one of the featured writers at the 19th annual Cherie Smith Jewish Book Festival at Vancouver's Jewish Community Centre in mid-November. Faces of Courage 1-894694-20-1
[BCBW Winter 2003]
Submitted on November 20, 2003 in By David.
