Courage To Dream: Tales of Hope in the Holocaust by Neal Shusterman

In Courage to Dream, five historical fantasy stories are presented. 

In He Opens A Window, three sisters, Anna, Gretchen and Katja are in hiding in an upper room in Frau Muller's house. The secret room is hidden behind a bookcase and Frau Muller keeps the door locked. Every day a delivery book brings food which she brings to the girls. One day the delivery boy is late, held up by a parade of German soldiers of to the battlefront. After making his delivery to Frau Muller, he notices that the upper middle window of her house is missing!

That night when Anna wakes up and opens the curtains she sees an amazing sight: a brilliant sky filled with stars and suns. The next day the delivery boy brings more food from Herr Baumann, the grocer, to Frau Muller. However, Baumann has seen him stealing chocolate bars. Enraged, Baumann who promised the boy's parents to care for him, refuses to pay him and tells him he will be joining the Hitler Youth.

Meanwhile, the three girls eat the chocolate bars in their secret room. They tell Anna they also have seen the strange sights out the window. When Anna opens the curtains, this time they see islands floating in the sky above Hamburg. Anna tells them they cannot tell anyone and that the curtains must stay closed. 

Disaster strikes when Frau Muller picks up papers approved by Consul Ho for Shanghai but is hit by a truck on her way home. The girls' only connection to the outside world is lost and locked in their room upstairs they begin to starve. When they open the curtain, they see a devastated city of Hamburg. 

The delivery boy, now in the Hitler Youth, is questioned and pressured by the Gestapo to reveal who he's been supplying food . He is tricked into revealing the house and the soldiers break into Frau Muller's home. When Anna hears the soldiers climbing the stairs, she devises a plan to protect the girls using the magic window. 

In Legend Speaks of a Hero: The Golem of Auschwitz, the Jewish myth of the Golem comes to life.  The Golem was "a man formed from clay, infused with the name of God and inscribed with a brand of truth", called to life in the 16th century by Rabbi Judah Loew Ben Bezalel. The Golem came to the rescue of Jews in the city of Prague. Legend is that he either ran away or crumbled into earth once the special attributes given to him by the Rabbi were removed.

Duvid had heard about the Golem but a blow to his head had hurt his memories and thoughts. In Auschwitz some of the prisoners have heard the Golem came to Treblinka and despite the Nazis attempting to gas him and burn him, he survived and feed everyone. However, others believe this is a lie. The Rabbi believes that it is good to have hope, even if it is false hope. 

Trains arrived daily, packed to bursting with most people who were made to walk to the Birkenau two miles behind Auschwitz, to their deaths. One day a prisoner named Ben attacks a guard who had just beaten another prisoner. Ben is shot in the head in front of everyone. At night, Duvid is awakened to see something punching its way into the Nazi soldiers barracks. Duvid is awoken by the Rabbi who tells him to get back inside. At dawn, all the prisoners are lined up and told that an officer is missing. Duvid tells the Nazis that the Golem is responsible but they think he is joking.

When the prisoners are lined up for inspection to be send to Birkenau, to the gas chambers, Duvid learns his true identity and acts to free some of the prisoners.

In Spirits of Resistance, Baba and Izbushka watch as intruders invade their forest: a boy, Yosef and a girl, Hannah are being pursued by Nazi soldiers. They are found by Abe, a soldier of the Resistance who takes them to his camp deep in the forest. Yosef and Hannah escaped a transport to a death camp.

In the camp, Hannah tells Yosef she saw a house moving through the woods, and an old woman flying in a bowl. A resistance fighter tells her that was Baba Yaga who roams the forests of Eastern Europe, and eats little children. During the night, Yosef and Hannah are awoken to see the Fools of Chelm capturing the moon in a barrel.

The next day the Resistance plans to attack a train travelling to Treblinka, to save as many people as possible. Baba and Izbushka watch the attack and then confront Yosef and Hannah back in the resistance camp. Hannah tells Baba they want her help to fight the Nazis. After giving the children a piece of meat from Ibushka's left leg, Baba visits the resistance camp later that night and tells them she will help them. To aid her efforts, she enlists the help of the Chelmites.

Meanwhile, the Nazis are preparing to lead a major offensive against the resistance fighters in the forest. But with the help of Baba, Ziz, Isbushka and the Chelmites, the Nazis have little chance.

An old family heirloom saves lives in Exodus. Jory Svedberg and Soren are friends even though Jory is Jewish and Soren is Lutheran. They simply consider themselves Danes. Denmark is under Nazi occupation but it wasn't until the summer of 1943 that they began to plan to deport Danish Jews to camps.

One night when Soren stays for dinner at Jory's home, Jory's mother complains about how the curtain rod is always tearing their curtains. But Mr. Svedberg tells her it is a family heirloom, the staff of Moses. Jory reminds his mother it brings plagues and doesn't clean his room!

As the German army floods more soldiers into Denmark, the peaceful occupation ends. On August 29, 1943, the Danish government resigns as rumors suggest that the Danish Jews would be deported to concentration camps. Jews in Copenhagen began to flee or go into hiding. Then the Nazis come for Jory's family. But Jory has no intention of going with them. Picking up the rod, he quickly knocks out all three Nazi soldiers. But this is just beginning as Jory uses the rod to save Copenhagen's Jews and get them to safety across the Oresund Sound, separating Denmark and Sweden.

The Untold is a story of lives and a world that could have been. Caitlin's Grandmother Ida is dying. Caitlin loves her grandmother but is scared to see her because it means confronting death. Her grandmother tells her there are many stories that remain untold. She gives Caitlin a box and tells her to open it when she is feeling strong and when her heart is ready. After this, Caitlin's grandmother dies.

Puzzled and driven by curiosity about the unique gift, Caitlin finally opens the box weeks later. Inside, she finds a crystalline seashell. When Caitlin places the shell to her ear she hears hundreds of voices. When she goes downstairs for dinner, Caitlin is shocked to see a much larger dining room table and sees two strange boys in the living room. Caitlin is told they are Grandma Ida's grandnephews. Her mother tells her she should know this based on the family tree she did last year. But when Caitlin pulls out the family tree from her desk, she sees that is has many more branches than what she remembers.  When she lifts the crystalline shell to her ear again, she hears silence. 

Upon returning to the dining room, Caitlin finds everything as she expects with just herself, her brother and mother. And the family tree is as she remembers. The next day sees her not only experience a different home but also school is different. There are new kids she doesn't know and her history book states that World War II ended in 1942 with Germany not even in the war. When she shows her best friend Adam the shell, he disappears. Putting the shell back to her ear, Caitlin again hears the voices and she is back into the altered time line when she arrives home. There she learns that a brick has been thrown through a window in their house, and that anti-Semitism is on the rise in America. Her large family talks about emigrating to Palestine, and Israel doesn't yet exist. Not being able to deal with this Caitlin puts the seashell to her ear and she is back in her own timeline. She promises herself to leave it there until the 4th of July celebrations when she finds she is missing the large family in the alternate timeline. 

Using the seashell again, Caitlin returns to that timeline, a house filled with many family, "to be surrounded by a family you never had." But talk is about a book written by a congressman, on the front cover the Nazi symbol on the American flag. Horrified, Caitlin encounters her grandmother who explains what has happened and why she gave her the crystalline seashell.

Discussion

Courage To Dream is another very unique book by author Neal Shusterman. In this graphic novel, Shusterman who is an American Jew, has written "fantasy stories with a Holocaust theme". Most of the stories are a mashup of Jewish history during the Holocaust and Jewish folklore. In his Imagination and the Unimaginable note at the back of the novel, Shusterman mentions that writing from this perspective was both exciting but uncomfortable and asks, "Where is the intersection of fantasy and the grim reality of murdered millions?"

As the author notes, "These are stories of wish fulfillment where the tragedy lies in the fact that they can never be fulfilled." How many Jewish men, women and children imagined the Golem or some other hero coming to their rescue in the death camps? How many hidden Jews wished to fly out the window of their secret hideaway to a glorious world of freedom and safety? How many survivors of the Holocaust wondered what might have been had parents and siblings, aunts and uncles, cousins and friends, husbands and wives survived? 

As he wrote his stories, Shusterman began to realize the stories were "..a unique way of addressing the Holocaust and perhaps engaging readers who might not otherwise go there."

In the last story, The Untold, Shusterman tackles the idea of a world where the Holocaust never happened in the 1940's but instead could possibly happen in the twenty-first century. In the Untold, the main character, Caitlin discovers a huge family in an alternate timeline because World War II ended in 1942, before the implementation of Hitler's "Final Solution" - the systematic murder of European Jews. Her huge family is the result of people living to produce the succeeding generations. 

In that alternate timeline Caitlin wanted to believe that a world without the Holocaust was a better one, but instead she finds it is just as flawed as her own time, maybe even worse. When she confronts her Grandmother Ida in that timeline she tells her granddaughter, "The world that might have been always looks glorious at first but there are twists and turns in its spiral and depths that no one can see." Caitlin realizes that her grandmother gave her not the choice to live in an alternate world but a vision, enabling her to understand who she is mourning, when she remembers the Holocaust. 

The unique stores are told primarily by the wonderful artwork of illustrator Andres Vera Martinez who researched historical photographs so he could "...accurately depict clothing, architecture, uniforms, and even landscapes of the time." He also did considerable art history research into the various aspects of Jewish folklore/  The panels are set in a somber tan tone. Many of the illustrations are rich with detail and capture the fantastical element of the stories being told while also portraying historical events.

Shusterman has also included an extensive Bibliography and a Note about the Hebrew Letters In This Book. The first five letters of the Hebrew alphabet appear at the beginning of each story and are relevant to the story.

Courage To Dream is a book that twelve years in the making, but rich in themes for readers and students to explore.

Book Details:

Courage To Dream: Tales of Hope In The Holocaust by Neal Shusterman
New York: Graphix, an Imprint of Scholastic Inc.  2023