MRS J about "Milkweed" by Jerry Spinelli

He has no name, no home, no family and no background. He steals food, sleeps in the street and survives by not getting caught. He is called a Jew, everyone calls him a filthy son of Abraham, a Gypsy, and he thinks his name is ‘Stop Thief’ as that is what everyone yells after him!

He sleeps in a cellar with a band of boys who are just like him, who steal to stay alive and do their best to go unnoticed by the Jackboots.

The Jackboots control Warsaw, Poland in 1939. They have power, uniforms that shine, and guns. It is not safe to be a Jew, a Gypsy or a homeless orphan. The best thing to be is invisible. He doesn’t know the jackboots are Nazis.

His new friend and protector Uri forces him to take the name Misha Pilsudski and to memorize a made-up story about his Gypsy background so that no one will mistake him for a Jew and kill him.
Misha, a very young boy, is slow to understand what's happening around him.
When he sees people running, he thinks it's a race.
When Misha sees a girl he knows, Janina, herded into the Warsaw ghetto with her family, he knows he must follow her.

People in the ghetto are starving – only the rats and crows flourish as they eat the dead bodies.
However Misha is small enough to sneak in and out of the ghetto through a hole left by a missing brick, and bring food for Janina's family and an orphanage.
Until the day that suddenly makes him change his mind...
And when the trains come to empty the Jews from the ghetto, he is a boy who realizes its safest of all to be nobody.

This book is set in one of the most devastating settings imaginable; Nazi-occupied Warsaw of World War II; and tells a tale of heartbreak, hope, and survival through the bright eyes of a young orphan.

Some of this book was painful to read, but I was ‘living’ the story as I read it and was engrossed. I read this book to a class of nine to eleven year olds in 2006. I have not forgotten it. I was pleased to be visited this week by Fleur, a student I had that year and who has moved on to another school now. She came to ask about Milkweed as she has not forgotten it either and wanted information about it so she could read it again…
As a teacher that is priceless.