SuitabookWhat World is Left
Monique Polak
- Reading
- Consider reading together or checking in after sections about camp conditions and loss. Let the young reader set the pace, and make room for questions about the historical setting or Anneke’s moral uncertainty.
- Themes
- Art under coercion: Anneke’s father is forced to contribute to the staged presentation of Theresienstadt, while artists also make clandestine drawings of the camp’s true conditions. The novel presents a tension between complicity under coercion and efforts to document the truth; Anneke questions the moral choices involved.
- The staged image of camp life: The Nazis try to present Theresienstadt as an idyllic model settlement, including through an elaborate staged presentation. The contrast between the camp’s appalling conditions and the false image makes the propaganda’s deception explicit.
- Worth knowing
- The novel includes concentration-camp conditions: scarce food, bedbugs, forced labour and little privacy. It also refers to people being transported to death camps and to the deaths of Anneke’s friend and a boy she loves.