An Empty Suitcase, Full of Memories

By KATHY BLOOMFIELD

HANA'S SUITCASE
By Karen Levine.
112 pages. Albert Whitman & Company. $15.95/Book with CD $24.95.
Ages 10-13.

Part history and part mystery, Hana's Suitcase is a gently intriguing, true story. With Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) arriving on April 29, this is an excellent new book to introduce the Holocaust to children.

In 1998, Fumiko Ishioka began her job as the director of a small museum in Japan called the Tokyo Holocaust Center. To best help Japanese children understand what happened to the millions of Jewish people who perished in Europe over 50 years ago, Fumiko decided that the museum needed physical objects that the children could see and touch. After two years of persistent letter writing, she visited Auschwitz and met with the museum director. A few months later, she received a package containing "a child's sock and shoe, a child's sweater, a can of Zyklon B poisonous gas, and one suitcase–Hana's suitcase."

As the book describes it, the suitcase was "a little tattered around the edges, but in good condition. It's brown. It's big... In white paint, across the front, there is a girl's name: Hana Brady. A date of birth: May 16, 1931. And one other word: Waisenkind. That's the German word for orphan." The suitcase was completely empty, but it had the effect on the children that Fumiko intended, "to focus on this one little life that was lost." To answer the children's many questions–Who was Hana Brady? What happened to her?–Fumiko became a detective, searching for clues to Hana's life.

The book's chapters alternate between Fumiko's worldwide year-long investigation during 2000-2001 and Hana's life in 1930s Czechoslovakia. It is hard to know which is more intriguing: the life of the perfectly ordinary, wonderfully charming young Hana or the search for answers by the determined Fumiko.

Karen Levine tells these two stories in simple and powerful prose, drawing the reader into Hana's and Fumiko's worlds. As you read, you will fall in love with Hana and her family. When Hana and her brother line up to see "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" at the local movie theater, you will feel their shame and anger at the sight of "a sign that read 'No Jews Allowed.'" You will share their fear when the two children are sent to a Deportation Center after their parents' arrest.

Throughout Fumiko's journey, each little discovery can be a cause for joy. When she opens the package from the Jewish Museum in Prague, "she was so excited that her hands were shaking. There were photographs of five drawings...in the top right-hand corner of each of the drawings was the name 'Hana Brady.'" These revelations can also lead to moments of profound sorrow: when she learns that Hana died at Auschwitz, "Fumiko bowed her head and closed her eyes. She had already guessed the awful truth. But hearing it spoken, seeing it on paper, was still a blow." When Fumiko discovers that Hana's brother, George, not only survived the war but is alive in Canada, your joy will match hers.

After sharing these experiences with Fumiko and Hana, you'll agree that Hana's Suitcase is "a story of terrible sadness and great joy, a reminder of the brutality of the past and of hope for the future." When George Brady and his seventeen-year-old daughter, Lara Hana, visit Fumiko in Tokyo and see the suitcase for the first time in over 50 years, the story comes full circle–past and future meet with the purpose of insuring that this terrible episode in history never repeats itself.

Simple things hold incredible power to transform: a shoe, a sweater, a suitcase. I encourage you to read this gentle, yet transformative book with your children.

A note on the Book/CD package: Hana's Suitcase began as a radio documentary produced for the Canadian Broadcasting Company' Sunday Edition Show that aired on January 21, 2001. A recording of that broadcast is included in the Book/CD package. To hear the voices of Fumiko Ishioka and George Brady after reading Hana's Suitcase brings the book to life and doubles the emotions conveyed in its pages.