Stolen from her family by the Nazis, Nadia is a young girl who tries to make sense of her confusing memories and haunting dreams. Bit by bit she starts to uncover the truth―that the German family she grew up with, the woman who calls herself Nadia's mother, are not who they say they are. Beyond her privileged German childhood, Nadia unearths memories of a woman singing her a lullaby, while the taste of gingersnap cookies brings her back to a strangely familiar, yet unknown, past. Piece by piece, Nadia comes to realize who her real family was. But where are they now? What became of them? And what is her real name? This story of a Lebensborn girl―a child kidnapped for her "Aryan looks" by the Nazis in their frenzy to build a master race―reveals one child's fierce determination to uncover her past against incredible odds.
Marsha Skrypuch is an internationally bestselling children’s author whose books span a century of wars from a kid’s view, concentrating on those stories that have been erased by oppressive regimes. Her best-known book is Making Bombs for Hitler. Her most recent is the Kidnapped from Ukraine trilogy. She has received death threats and honors for her writing. Marsha lives in Brantford, Ontario, Canada and you can visit her online at calla.com
I LOVED this book. And it made my heart ache so much for all the injustices the Nazis committed, especially toward children. The story is told from the point of view of 12 year-old Nadia who arrives in Ontario, Canada in 1950 after the end of WWII from the Displaced Persons’ camp, where she has spent the last five years.
As she adjusts to a new country, new language and new parents who have risked their lives to save her, Nadia suffers nightmares and flashbacks of the things she has endured. She is confused about who she is. As her story unfolds, the pieces of the puzzle of her identity and how she ended up in the Displaced Persons' camp are put together, and we get the full picture of what actually happened to her and her family.
Author Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch has written a story that brings to life the lesser-known history of the Lebensborn Program. Hitler and the Nazis planned on expanding the “master race” of the Aryans whose destiny they believed was to rule the world. So they began stealing blond, blue-eyed Polish and Ukrainian children from their parents, an estimated 250 000 children. Can a mother endure something so horrific? I have a blond, blue-eyed child…
Although truthful about what occurred during WWII, the book is not filled with detailed violent scenes. However, I will wait before letting my daughter read it. It can be scary for children to realize that they can be stolen from their parents in the middle of the night in their own homes. Despite this, the story shows how courage and love can motivate people to help and risk their lives for one another during periods of extreme duress. It can also teach our children not to make fun of immigrant children because we have no idea what they may have suffered and escaped.
I would highly recommend this book for in class reading and discussion as part of learning history in the school curriculum. Readers are certain to find this book enlightening, intriguing, suspenseful and hopeful. For me it was also heartbreaking as I imagined the pain of thousands of parents who have lost their children under a cruel regime.
Neste livro seguimos a história de Nadia, uma menina sobrevivente da guerra que acaba de chegar ao Canada, mas que é assolada por memórias perturbadoras, terríveis pesadelos sobre uniformes nazis e imagens de uma outra família. Nadia não se recorda do seu passado, mas alguns dos seus sonhos parecem-lhe reais...
Um livrinho muito interessante sobre o Programa Lebensborn criado pelos nazis, que visava aumentar o número de crianças arianas e permitir que a raça superior povoasse mais territórios da Europa.
Ever since the war had ended, Ukrainian born Nadia Kravchuck and her adoptive mother Marusia have been living in a displaced persons camp in Europe. But now it's 1950 and 12-year-old Nadia has just arrived in Canada with her mother Marusia to join her adoptive father Ivan, already living in Brantford, Ontario. On her first night in her new home, several people come to visit and Nadia is introduced to Mychailo, a fellow Ukrainian immigrant with whom she will be attending school and receiving English lessons at a neighbor's house.
Unfortunately, Nadia is also plagued with nightmares and flashbacks, none of which make sense to her at first, although she feels that they have something to do with her past, a past she doesn't remember. She knows that although Ivan and Marusia aren't her real parents that they love her as if she were their own child. But who is she really? When Mychailo tells her that she doesn't sound Ukrainian and that she looks like a Nazi to him, Nadia worries that maybe that's who she really is. But Mychailo also seems like her, taking her to the library, and reminding her to call Ivan and Marusia mother and father, or the Canadian authorities will take her away.
Disturbed by that she might indeed be a Nazi, the nightmares and flashbacks increase, often triggered by what seem to be totally unrelated things, and finally Nadia remembers that her name used to be Gretchen Himmel and that she was a member of a Nazi family.
Later, on the first day of school, Marusia presents Nadia with a new ethnic-looking outfit that she had handmade her, despite working long, hard hours on her farm job. At school, the teacher is kind, but when a boy says she looks like a Nazi, she runs away in humiliation. Luckily, another new girl named Linda sits next to Nadia in class and the two become best friends.
Nadia eventually begins to adjust to her new life, but continues to be plagued by flashbacks to her past, causing her a great deal of confusion. Little by little, however, the puzzle pieces begin to fit together and form a picture of her life as Gretchen Himmel, daughter of a high ranking Nazi official, his cold, distance wife and his other daughter Eva. But the dreams and flashbacks continue, leading Nadia to believe that Gretchen Himmel is not her real identity. And gradually, more puzzle pieces fit together, finally falling into place through the most innocuous of triggers - a piece of candy.
Stolen Girl is one of the most emotionally draining books I've read, and knowing before hand who Nadia really is didn't lessen the tension one bit. The novel centers around Nadia's Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD and the way it manifests in her after her traumatic wartime experiences. It has to one of the hardest conditions to successfully write about in a young person for young readers to really understand, but Skrypuch has managed to do just that in the ways Nadia's past reveals itself to her through her dreams and flashbacks.
**Spoiler Alert** Stolen Girl is also one of the most compelling books I've read about the Lebornsborn Program. With her blond hair, blue eyes and young age, Nadia was a perfect Aryan-looking fit for this Nazi program designed to strengthen the Hitler's master race. Children like her were kidnapped, sent to Germany to be Germanized and than adopted by a Nazi family. Interestingly, other children who did not fit the Aryan picture were sent to labor camps, and Skrypuch gives hints about who Nadia/Gretchen really is when she sees a girl in an German labor camp of Ostarbeiters (workers from Eastern Europe) who looks just like her, and is in return noticed by the same girl.
If you read Making Bombs for Hitler, you already know some of Nadia"s story and why she was recognized by the young Ostarbeiter. You may recall from that book that in 1943, after the Nazis shot their mother and the Jews she had been hiding, Lida, 8, and her younger sister Larissa, 5, were kidnapped from their grandmother's home in the Ukraine and sent by cattle car to Germany, along with all the other Ukrainian children the Nazis took. Days later, arriving at a slave labor camp in Germany, Lida and Larissa were forcibly separated from one another, and from that point the story follows only Lida's life in the labor camp. If you haven't already read Making Bombs for Hitler, and the other companion book, The War Below), I highly recommend it. Stolen Girl, the companion to Lida's story, is the story of what happened to Larissa after being taken from her sister.
Stolen Girl is gripping novel that demonstrates how the trauma of war lives on long after the war has ended. It's a suspenseful, visceral journey that proves once again Skrypuch's talent for bringing difficult stories to life.
This book is recommended readers age 9+ This book was purchased for my personal library
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Just when I think I’ve read enough about Nazi Germany, I encounter something hauntingly different. This book has circulated around my child's 5th grade friends. After she read it, she really wanted me to read it too.
Stolen Girl is a story of a refugee girl trying to recover after years of living the horrors of war — wanting to forget when the nightmares persist.
For me, the author’s notes/end pages gave a brief, shocking education about the German Lebensborn program, including these startling statistics:
⁃ “. . . it’s hard to know how many [children with Aryan features] were stolen in this way, although it is estimated to be about 250,000 Polish and Ukrainian children alone. The Nazis were so successful with this program that after the war, most of the stolen children refused to leave their German parents, even if their birth parents were still alive and could be located” (Skrypuch 193).
⁃ “British intelligence reports indicate that the rate of deportation [of non-Aryan featured individuals used for slave laborers] from Soviet Ukraine at times approached 15,000 to 20,000 a day” (Skrypuch 191).
This was very well done Well written And well researched It brings some much needed attention to other parts of the nazi regime And it’s done tastefully (12-16 yrs)
“At the DP camps people could speak many languages, but no one spoke like me.” Nadia came from a death camp, but she didn’t know where she was from before that. Nadia is going on an adventure to find out were she came from and who her real parents were. Nadia is the main character in Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch’s book Stolen Child. Nadia came from a death camp with the person she was supposed to call mother. The person she was supposed to call father was in Brantford building a house for the family. I liked this story because the book had action, and it reminded me of the people who fought in the wars for us. What I did not like about this book was sometimes being confused about whether it was a flashback or if it actually just happened. I would give this book four out of five stars. If you like action, and really good descriptive writing, this is the book for you.
This was such a good book. I met the author at the MTL YA FEST 2019 event. She was really nice. This was such a compelling read. It was a fast read. This was a bittersweet story for it illustrated the life of the Nazi regime that is not so well known. This was such a powerful read. I felt so much emotion reading this. This was seen in the point of view of Nadia, a 12 year old. This made my heart ache so much for all the injustices. And it is important to point out that these were inspired by historical events. The story shows how courage and love can motivate people to help and risk their lives for one another during periods of extreme duress. Again, this was a powerful read that made me feel so much.
Possibly one of the best books I've ever read. Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch skilfully discussed a most interesting topic in a very clever way. I was gripped in from page one and literally before I knew it half way through! An excellent read, I would highly recommend.
This book I'm reading is called “Stolen Child” by Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch. This is the real story of two Ukrainian sisters who have been stolen from their families in the middle of the war. The story is about a young refugee who has troubling memories of what she may have been doing during the war. This time it is about Larissa, the young sister. Her older sister told her story called “making bombs for Hitler”. The author made a promise to her mother in law to write the book before she died. Her mother in law had lost half of her classmates to the Lebensborn program during the war. She felt very guilty for the rest of her life that she has lived while her friends didn’t. I knew very little about the Lebensborn Program, it was quite heartening to read what she had to go through at such a young age. Losing your family, then getting brainwashed to think she is someone else. Comparing today’s war between Russia and Ukraine is heartening because this story is very much similar to Hitler, where Putin is channeling Hitler doing the same program to kidnap Ukrainian children from their families, brainwashing them, and placing them in Russia homes.
I honestly don’t even know where to begin with this book. The truths about Ukrainians and what WW2 did to us as a culture is so absolutely horrific that I’m truly amazed we survived as a culture. Not to disrespect anything that the Jewish people went through, but Ukrainians were treated just as badly, enslaved, and also murdered during the war. We got it from both sides too. If we weren’t being murdered by Nazis we were being murdered by the Soviets (Russians). This book, along with its companion books, “Making Bombs for Hitler” and “Underground Soldier” have filled in many blanks about which my grandmothers would not speak. They said the memories were too horrific to talk about and now I understand why. Anyone who doesn’t understand why we must now fully support Ukraine in the illegal invasion with Russia needs to read these books. Losing this illegal invasion will mean the repeat of murder from WW2. We CANNOT let that happen again.
Stolen Child, written by Canadian author Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch, is a historical fiction novel whose target audience is children aged 9-12. Stolen Child tells the story of Nadia, a young girl who tries to connect her confusing memories and dreams and discover her real identity. Even though Nadia is safe in Canada, the memories of past traumatic events still haunt her. Through various memory triggers, Nadia gradually uncovers the truth about her identity, realising that the German family she grew up with and the Ukrainian family from her dreams are not the same people. Stolen Child is a story of a courageous and lost girl who, because of her determination, uncovers the truth about her past and finds her real self. Despite the length of this book, Skrypuch presents the dynamics of the Second World War and its aftermath to children in an accessible way. The story of Nadia is thought-provoking and helps young children understand how traumatic events can affect people’s lives. The book is written in a simple language, which makes it very easy to understand. The author presents the main protagonist in a way that is hard not to sympathise with her. This book is highly engaging which means children and older audiences alike will appreciate it.
I think the book was very good. I liked it a lot. Even though it was during WWII time period I still enjoyed it. I would really recommend this book. It's about these girls who don't really know what's going on and wants to get away from all the burning buildings and other things. They try to get through and survive it. They take in a girl and her name is Nadia she was adopted by a women named Marusia and Nadia has flash backs of everything. She is haunted by WWII. The family she's with now try to tell her about her original family and what happen to them. There is a lot of trauma in the book so if you don't like that I would not read it. Also, if you don't like books from older time periods.
If you want to go deep into a life of a girl who went through so much with WW2, recovering her past while living her present, this is the best book. I read it in 3rd grade and I can say since I got the book I have read it over and over about 5 times, this is still one of my most special books because of how much I was immersed into the story of Nadia. This is more of an elementary level book so if you're looking for an easy book to read that tells a good story this is for you.❤️
LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE THIS BOOK AND THE ENTIRE SERIES. This was the first one I read and yes I read them out of order. You’ll live. Anyway about the book, this is about the story of so many girls during world war 2, and the lesser known side of people during world war 2. Yea I don’t really have anything else to say except…… READ IT…….or else 😈😈😈😈😈
Amazing story. I loved being about to find out what happened to lidas sister. You are always left guessing during making bombs for Hitler and this answers so much. Hear braking, suspenseful and heart warming all wrapped together.
Reason for Reading: I enjoy historical fiction about WWII, especial from a child's point of view.
Comments: This is an extremely compelling story about a subject which I know very little about: The Lebensborn Program. I knew such things were done but haven't really read anything about it before. The story is of Nadia, who moves to Canada with a Ukranian man and woman who are not her parents after World War II. She must call them Mother and Father, though she knows they are not, but they are kind and loving. Nadia is in somewhat of a state of shock and really doesn't remember any of her past but this book is a slow unraveling of her past as she starts to have flashes of memories from her past that are haunting and confusing, making her question whether she is a Nazi. Her new "parents" assure her she is not and encourage her to keep on remembering, which she does. At the same time, Nadia must also deal with fitting into her new country and its customs which, unfortunately, a couple of children at school make very difficult.
This is a bittersweet story that brings to life an aspect of the Nazi regime that is perhaps not so well known. While not as physically horrifying as other acts the Nazis perpetrated , it is an awful "experiment" that tore families apart, and ruined the lives of hundreds of thousands of children. The book is a compelling read, and coupled with its shortness is a fast read. The book's brevity does not however affect the power of emotion contained within its pages nor the development of Nadia's character. The reader connects with Nadia as a person and feels great anguish with her as she also learns who she is and what has happened to her.
The book ends with an Author's Note which includes just enough historical background to place the story within context and to pique the reader's interest in the subject. I will certainly look twice if I find another book that deals with the same topic. I had never heard of Skrypuch before but after a quick look I see she has written quite a number of historical fiction which all seem to centre around either one of the World Wars and be set in Eastern Europe. I would most definitely read other of her books. Recommended.
Another great read from a fantastic author!! Really enjoyed this one, with a another unique perspective of WW2 about the Lebensborn program told through a series of flashbacks. The supporting characters in this one will capture your heart. Marusia and Ivan were so gentle with Nadia throughout the book, and the teachers and children in the story were portrayed in a way that rings true. The big drawback is that I can only find it on iBooks, unless I want to pay 51something on Amazon, which means I can't share it with my students. I did tell them where to find it, but a lot of my kids aren't able to buy books.
Companion novel to Making Boms for Hitler. Who is Nadia? How does she find herself living in Canada with a couple who are not her real parents five years after the end of World War II? Where is she originally from? Where are her parents? What happened to her and them during the War? Through flashbacks, Nadia and the reader will both discover the truth. Those who like Making Boms for Hitler or all stories related to World War II will want to read this one about Nadia.
This is a beautifully written fiction that compellingly shows a story from a different, lesser-known, Nazi atrocity. I really felt the trauma of Nadia's experience through her memory flashbacks and current fears, but there is nothing so graphic as to be inappropriate for a young audience.
This book was so fascinating that I could not put it down! It’s the continuing story of Lida and her sister Larissa. I’m not sure what order they should be read in, this one first or “Making Bombs for Hitler”. The way the author reveals bit by bit her memory of her time during the war is clever and fascinating! If “Making Bombs for Hitler” is too intense for your child (I pre-read this one for my 6th grader who loves WW2), this one would be a perfect fit! Not quite as intense but definitely just as interesting. Can’t wait to get the third book in the series to read! I’m not normally a historical fiction fan but this series is so fascinating!
I have been reading a bunch of young adults books about WWII. I have read about so many different things the Nazis did, it boggles the mind. This book talks about how the Nazis stole children who “looked like their perfect Aryan race” from their parents and brainwashed those children and gave them to German families. I have never heard of such terrible things during the war. The holocaust was bad enough but to learn about these other crimes is unbelievable. I look forward to reading and learning more with the rest of this series.
OH MY! Despite being one of my favorite books about historical fiction, I just could not do this. I even extended my library checkout, but gag me.. I just could not complete it. It was so bad!
I thought in my mind it was a great book! I would definitely read it again. I am really interested in the holocaust and history in general, so this was a great book in my opinion.
This was WWII as I had never read about it before. I loved the mystery element, and it raised a lot of good questions. Overall, it was short but meaningful and I would recommend!
Stolen Child by Marsha Skrypuch offers a unique perspective on war and trauma by showcasing them through the eyes of a young girl who has just left a displaced persons camp in search of a better life across the ocean. She has little recollection of her life during the Nazi occupation, as the few memories she does possess are blurry and scattered. The plot of the novel, while not very complex, is dynamic and immersive, allowing the reader to gradually discover the protagonist's lost memories as they resurface. Even though Skrypuch visibly intended to reach a younger audience, I would recommend Stolen Child to anyone who is interested in learning about the less discussed aspects of World War II.