"The story of the Oneg Shabbat/Ringelblum Archive is one that I came to learn relatively recently, in middle age. It has affected me profoundly, and I now teach it (in courses on Holocaust Literature and Jewish Life Writing) to college students. For that purpose, I rely largely on Samuel Kassow's essential scholarship; online resources from institutions including Yad Vashem and the Jewish Historical Institute; and the remarkable film Who Will Write Our History? (available freely in an abbreviated educational version via Facing History and Ourselves, which incorporates the film as part of a unit for secondary students in grades 7-12).

How to tell this story in a picture book intended for significantly younger children, however, would be something beyond my capacities. I'm both immensely grateful and immensely impressed that author Elisa Boxer, illustrator Oksana Drachkovska, and Apples & Honey Press have taken up the challenge.

From my adult viewpoint, they've done an outstanding job. As with the film, they've relied on one of the members of Ringelblum's team—in this case, Hersh Wasser; in the film, Rachel Auerbach—to help anchor the story of the preservation of community experience and history. Wasser and Auerbach were two of the only three Oneg Shabbat members to survive the war, and the images here of the postwar recovery of (some) of the hidden materials hit my heart as powerfully as the newsreels and reenactment in the film.

This is a beautiful book. How it will land with the young children who are its ostensible audience, I cannot predict; once the book is published, I will be looking for "reports from the field," so to speak. In the meantime, I hope that every parent, educator, and caregiver with more direct experience in that realm will become aware of this book, and share it with younger readers as they deem appropriate."