Review: Hidden Yellow Stars
Today, I’m sharing a book review for Hidden Yellow Stars, a World War II historical novel by Rebecca Connolly.
Disclosure: I voluntarily received a complimentary copy from the author as part of Austenprose PR publicity tours. All views expressed are my own. This post includes Amazon affiliate links.
My Review
Hidden Yellow Stars is a riveting novel based on real people who worked to save children from the Nazis in Belgium during World War II. Many Jewish families voluntarily surrendered their children to the resistance organization to be hidden in safety for the duration. The novel follows two young women who clandestinely picked up the children from their parents and then transported them to their foster homes–usually with a sympathetic non-Jewish family out in the country or with nuns in a Catholic boarding school at a convent.
This was a hard story to read simply because it was such a tragic time in history. I have a difficult time wrapping my mind around how heart-breaking it must have been for the mothers to trustingly place their children in the care of strangers. However, it really did happen, and sometimes we need to be reminded of the atrocities of the past lest we allow them to happen again.
Hidden Yellow Stars is well-researched and well-written. It kept me turning the pages. I highly recommend!
From the Publisher
Young schoolteacher Andrée Geulen secretly defies the Nazis in Belgium, who are forcing Jews to wear a yellow Star of David. Andrée is not Jewish, but she feels a maternal connection to her students, who are living in constant fear, and decides to take action. No child should have to suffer under such persecution. But what can one woman do against an entire army?
Ida Sterno is a Jewish woman who works with the Committee for the Defense of Jews in Belgium, a clandestine resistance group tasked with hiding children from the Gestapo. She wants to recruit Andrée because her Aryan appearance can provide crucial security measures for their efforts. Andrée agrees to join and begins work immediately by adopting a code name: Claude Fournier.
Together, Andrée and Ida, and their undercover operatives, work around the clock to move Jewish children from their families and smuggle them to safety through the secret channels established by the resistance. As each child is hidden, Andrée commits to memory their true name and history. Someday, she vows, she will help reunite as many of these families as she can.
But with the Gestapo closing in and the traitorous Fat Jacques who has turned from ally to enemy and is threatening to identify and expose any Jew he meets, Andrée and Ida must work even harder against increasingly impossible odds to save as many children as possible and keep them safely hidden—even if it might cost them their own lives.
About the Author
Rebecca Connolly is the author of more than two dozen novels. She calls herself a Midwest girl, having lived in Ohio and Indiana. She’s always been a bookworm, and her grandma would send her books almost every month so she would never run out. Book Fairs were her carnival, and libraries are her happy place. She received a master’s degree from West Virginia University.
While doing research for this book, she discovered information about her own family history, including the fates of several unknown family members who perished in the concentration camps of World War II.
