Alias Anna by Susan Hood and Greg Dawson

In free verse, Alias Anna tells the story of surviving the Holocaust in Ukraine by hiding in plain sight.

Alias Anna: A True Story of Outwitting the Nazis by Susan Hood with Greg Dawson. HarperCollins, 2022, 310 pages

Reading Level: Middle Grades, ages 10-12

Recommended for: ages 10-up

How do you remember the war, Grandma?

Dear Grandma, I am writing this letter for a school history project we are doing. The project is to find out as much as possible about our grandparents and what was going on when they were 13 years old. What are some major world events you remember around that time?

Zhanna Dmitrinov Arshanskaya was her given name, born in the region known as “the Ukraine” and claimed by the Soviet Union at the time. Her parents, ethnically Jewish though not observant, were poor, but their lives were rich with love and music. Both Zhanna and her younger sister Frina were piano prodigies from an early. The girls gained a measure of fame in Kharkov (where their family moved to escape Stalin’s police) until Hitler broke his nonaggression pact with Stalin and invaded their country.

“Just live”

Hitler intended to pursue his “final solution” of exterminating Jews wherever he found them. Before long, Zhanna and her family were marching to a “labor camp,” but her father knew it the only thing they would do there was die. He persuaded a Ukrainian guard to look the other way while he whispered to Zhanna, “I don’t care what you do. Just live.” She jumped out of line and ran. Soon after, her sister joined her. What would they do? How would they hide? It would have to be in the open, under false identities, and thus Zhanna became Anna.

Most of her story is told in verse, a free-flowing, impressionistic narrative interspersed with Zhanna’s direct address to her granddaughter. How two girls, barely into their teens, managed to escape detection by the Nazis owed as much to the kindness of strangers and neighbors as their own quick wits. Providence plays an unspoken role, though the girls do not appear to be religious. Co-author Greg Dawson is Zhanna’s son; his daughter Aimeé wrote the original letter that inspired Zhanna to open up about her precarious and horrifying early life. The last ten years have seen plenty of true Holocaust stories written for children; this one stands out for style, format, and effectiveness.

Overall Rating: 4 (out of 5)

• Worldview/moral value: 3.5
• Artistic/literary value: 4.5

Read more about our ratings here.                 

Also at Redeemed Reader:

• Reviews: Krysia is another true account of a young girl held in a labor camp during WWII–not by Hitler, but by Stalin. It Rained Warm Bread tells a similar story using free verse.
• Review: The Endless Steppe is the classic account by Esther Hautzig of her confinement in Siberia.

We are participants in the Amazon LLC affiliate program; purchases you make through affiliate links like the one below may earn us a commission. Read more here.