Boy Who Dared, The

In Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler's Shadow, Bartoletti included a portrait of Helmuth Hubener, a German teenager executed for his resistance to the Nazis. In this fictionalized biography, she imagines his story, as he sits in prison awaiting execution in 1942 and remembers his childhood in Hamburg during Hitler's rise to power. Beaten and tortured to name his friends, he remembers how he started off an ardent Nazi follower and then began to question his patriotism, secretly listened to BBC radio broadcasts, and finally dared to write and distribute pamphlets calling for resistance. The teen's perspective makes this a particularly gripping way to personalize the history, and even those unfamiliar with the background Bartoletti weave in here-the German bitterness after World War I, the burning of the books, the raging anti-Semitism--will be held by story of one boy's heroic resistance in the worst of times. A lengthy author's note distinguishes fact from fiction, and Bartoletti provides a detailed chronology, a bibliography, and many black-and-white photos of Helmuth with friends, family and members of his Mormon church. This is an important title for the Holocaust curriculum.. Size 0.8" H x 8.52" L x 5.78" W, 202 pages