Fritz and Kurt

Product Information

The RRP is the suggested or Recommended Retail Price of a product, set by the publisher or manufacturer. Fritz, along with his father, is taken to a Nazi prison camp, a terrible place, full of fear. When his father is sent to a certain death, Fritz can't face losing his beloved Papa. He chooses to go with him and fight for survival. Yet I found myself wishing the whole book had focused on Kurt, whose challenges in settling in America — learning the language, making friends — would have been easier for younger readers to relate to, with no need to water them down. I read this book before handing it over to my son, as he has taken an interest in stories from the war.

The Boy Who Followed His Father Into Auschwitz by Jeremy

It is not my place to give more importance to one historical event than another. There are those, however, that have caused more trauma, pain and suffering than anyone can possibly imagine. Talking about these in a classroom to young learners is a challenge. We need the combination of trust and due diligence more than ever. MyHome.ie (Opens in new window) • Top 1000 • The Gloss (Opens in new window) • Recruit Ireland (Opens in new window) • Irish Times Training (Opens in new window) A story based on real-life. A narrative on harrowing events: The Holocaust. Fritz and Kurt is a story about a Jewish family, The Kleinman's, living in Austria during the 1930s; a time when their world was seemingly changed overnight and ripped apart. Hitler invaded, blaming Jewish people for the demise of Germany: they are sent to concentration camps or executed. Jewish residents are sought out, humiliated and bullied - once friends but now enemies. Careful consideration and due diligence are parts of the good practice of anyone doing their job properly. This applies to choosing texts for the classroom – it is one of the main reasons Just Imagine exists. When it comes to the well-being of individual children in the classroom, the teacher will ultimately know what is suitable. When it comes to factual and accurate information, we place trust in the authors (including illustrators), editors and publishers to carry out due diligence. My conversation with Jeremy Dronfield made me think deeply on many things. For example, no one can argue that books aren’t tools for learning. Not every book, of course. And even those that we might think are, may not be suitable for your needs as an educator. Or the needs of a child’s as a learner. But, do we consider that some books might not be in the best interests of the topic you are teaching?It would be remiss not to mention the illustrations by David Ziggy Greene. “David carefully researched using reference photos and film footage.” One particular illustration Jeremy had “planned right from the beginning… Because if you just use the word Stormtrooper, kids are going to think of the Star Wars version.” Meaning David had to research exactly what they looked like, and then refine the details through further discussion. For context, the family central to this story is the Kleinmanns. As a Jewish family in Austria, the 1930s was an unsettling time. Events lead to Fritz and his father, Gustav, being taken away. However, both father and son survived the war, as did Gustav’s secret diary. Kurt, the youngest child, was sent to the USA, while sister Edith was able to go to Britain. The eldest child, Herta, and the mother were taken away against their will at a later date. They never returned. This new version of the story will be completely rewritten for middle-grade readers aged 9+ and willeducate and inspire children with the powerful real-life account of two brothers’ experiences during theHolocaust. In an introduction, the author sets the story of Fritz and Kurt in its historical context, explaining what the Holocaust was, how it came about and who was affected. There are also notes for parents, guardians and teachers who may wish to understand how the story is being presented.

My Conversation with Jeremy Dronfield — Just Imagine

Fritz is taken to a concentration camp along with his father. When his father is sent to Auschwitz, he has a choice to follow his father and risk his life or stay in his position and continue his peace. When he follows his father he has no choice but to escape from the carriage. Before and during the Second World War in the middle of the 20 th century, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler formulated a plan to get rid of people who were ‘different’. Fritz chooses to join his father, Gustav, when he is taken to a work camp, as he can’t bear to be parted from him. The story moves between the tale of their lives in various concentration camps and that of Kurt, the younger son, who was transported to America to start a new life. Jeremy embarked on a mission to write a different version. Readers of the original wanted to share the story with their children. A version written in a way children will be able to “relate to and understand”. But what is it we are asking children to understand when it comes to the Holocaust? This story is “about children”, and Jeremy mentions that a child’s experience is often overlooked. Other books might only give a “small narrow window” into their lives in the Holocaust. In Fritz and Kurt, we have the experiences of a concentration camp and being a refugee. These can provide the reader with a “deeper and broader insight into what children experienced”. Jeremy would like children to understand that because “it’s so beyond what children can imagine from their own experience”. And not just how it happened but why it happened too. He came to writing via a circuitous route. His first serious stopover in life was as an archaeologist. After a few years in rescue excavation, he did his doctoral research at Cambridge University, on the subject of art and religion in prehistoric Ireland. His thesis was published as a series of papers in international journals including Antiquity and Current Anthropology.

At the end of last year, I was invited by the Holocaust Education Trust to a series of seminars about the Holocaust, which included a trip to Auschwitz and Auschwitz- Birkenau. Following this educational experience and the visit, I made a promise to myself that I would continue to educate myself and those around me on the horrific events that happened during the Holocaust and inhumanly treatment of Jewish community. Mauthausen was the destination towards which father and son were going when Gustav persuaded his son to leap from a speeding train of starving men and corpses, out into a snowdrift. If there are moments when Dronfield’s extraordinary book sounds more like a peculiarly gruesome thriller, readers should remind themselves that none of this is fiction. These horrors happened. Witnesses such as Gustav and Fritz survived and told their tales to ensure that their past should never be repeated. The rest is up to us. The rest of the Kleinmann family in Vienna, meanwhile, were arranging their own survival. Kurt's oldest sister, Edith, fled to England in 1939 to work as a maid, while their mother, Tini, had managed, via a well-connected associate, to acquire a permit for Kurt to escape to the US. The arrangement couldn't have happened at a better time.

Fritz and Kurt — Just Imagine Fritz and Kurt — Just Imagine

Author Luke Palmer introduces his new book, Play (Firefly Press) about four boys growing up together, the challenges, the friendships, and what hap... When his father is sent to a certain death, Fritz can't face losing his beloved Papa. He chooses to go with him and fight for survival. Meanwhile, Kurt must go on a frightening journey, all alone, to seek safety on the far side of the world. In this extraordinary true story, Fritz and Kurt must face unimaginable hardships, and the two brothers wonder if they will ever return home . . . The ironies continue. Gustav’s new ally at Monowitz was an ex-soldier and co-worker who simply couldn’t credit that Hitler would imprison Jews without cause. But neither could Gustav credit the number of closed trains he saw carrying thousands of Hungarian Jews to their deaths. “And all this in the 20th century,” he wrote with disbelief. A year later, starving at Mauthausen, a camp in Upper Austria, Gustav barely escaped being massacred by ferociously antisemitic Hungarian guards. (The Russians, by contrast, treated all camp inmates with respect.) Since the events of the book really did happen to a child, it’s right that children should be able to read about them — though nine is too young. Brothers Fritz and Kurt Kleinmann were fifteen and eight respectively when Nazi Germany invaded Austria. In a very short time, the life they had known in Vienna, the ‘before Hitler came’ in Kurt’s words, was destroyed. With so many of their Jewish neighbours, Fritz and his father were taken prisoner and transported to Nazi prison camps, first Buchenwald, then Auschwitz. The family managed to send two of their children abroad – Edith went to England, and Kurt to America, making the long, dangerous journey on his own aged just ten. The greater part of the book however describes what happened to Fritz and his papa, who managed to stay together, Fritz choosing to go with his father to Auschwitz even when he could have stayed in the relatively safer Buchenwald.Buy from our bookstore and 25% of the cover price will be given to a school of your choice to buy more books. *15% of eBooks. Home > The story begins in Vienna just before the German invasion, and soon takes young Kurt out of the country, alone, to America. With only a few chapters of his story once he reaches a new home, it mainly then pushes the reader on to concentration camps with the older Fritz and his father, arrested for nothing more than their Judaism. It explains well what the Nazis thought of Jews, and allows readers to see for themselves the inhumanity inflicted on so many.

Fritz and Kurt by Jeremy Dronfield and David Ziggy Greene Fritz and Kurt by Jeremy Dronfield and David Ziggy Greene

Holocaust memoirs are many. Kurt Kleinmann makes it his business to lay his hands on every last one of them: “I have a need to not forget,” he states firmly. Although when my father’s diaries were published and then translated into English, that hit me very strongly, realising the many times they both nearly died.”

The impact of the illustrations certainly contributes to the effectiveness of the storytelling in what deserves to become as much of a classic as Ann Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl. The Kleinmann family in 1938 featuring Gustav (second left) and Fritz (fourth left). Photograph: Peter Patten The winners of The Farshore Reading for Pleasure Teacher Awards 2023, highlighting the work schools are doing to encourage a love of reading, have...