Ian Serraillier · 1956 · survival

Ian Serraillier's 1956 children's novel, written from his own experience of postwar refugees. Three Polish children survive five years in the ruins of Warsaw after both parents are taken, and then walk and beg and steal their way across occupied Germany to Switzerland on the strength of a message and a paper knife shaped like a sword.

1. 1
   Warsaw

   1940, and the Nazis take Joseph Balicki away and deport his wife - leaving Ruth, Edek and Bronia to blow up their own house and live in the cellars and bombed streets of the city for the rest of the war.

2. 2
   Poznan

   Their father escapes from Zakyna and walks back to a Warsaw that no longer has a house in it - and finds the paper knife shaped like a silver sword, and leaves word with a boy called Jan to tell the children to go to Switzerland.

3. 3
   Berlin

   West across a ruined Germany in the summer of 1945, four children and a canoe, riding on Russian lorries and hiding in the wreck of the capital - Serraillier wrote it out of his own work with refugees, and it shows.

4. 4
   Bavaria

   Down through the American zone by farm cart and on foot, stealing and begging, with Edek coughing tuberculosis and Jan refusing to give up a cockerel he has stolen - the long middle where the escape becomes a slog.

5. 5
   Lake Constance

   The Bodensee and the border, and the storm on the lake that nearly finishes them in a small boat - and the Swiss shore on the far side, which is the whole object of a five-year journey.

6. 6
   Appelldorf

   An Appenzell village and a farm run by the International Red Cross, where the family is put back together - and Jan, who has no family at all, is taken in by them, which is the ending Serraillier wanted.