Review of 'The Silver Sword' by Ian Serrailier

I didn't read this book as a child. I think my youngest son read it, but at a stage after he'd started reading for himself, so I didn't read it to him. It's about a group of Polish children who cross Europe in the very last days of the war, and the immediate aftermath, to find their parents; their mother is Swiss and their father has managed to escape from a concentration camp and make his way to Switzerland.

It's beautifully written, simple but engaging. The characters are vivid and differentiated without being caricatures. It's not at all a Holocaust story, though there is some mention of Jews hiding in the woods around Warsaw, where the children go before the Warsaw uprising of 1944.

It rather reminded me of I F Stone's "Underground to Palestine" which I read quite recently - particularly in the way that so much depends on the people who are kind to the refugees as they travel across Europe, and also in the sympathetic descriptions of the Russians and the Red Army - in contrast to the way that they are described in more recent books.

In the afterword Ian's daughter, my dear friend Jane, writes that some adults criticized the book as being to horrific to give to children to read; it's hard to get such things right. I rather think it's not horrific enough - almost all of the people that the children meet along the way are either kind to them or not-so-kind for well-meaning bureaucratic reasons, like the Burgomaster who wants to send them back to Poland because that's where refugees must go. The most frightening things in the book are two episodes on water, where the risk is natural disaster rather than human agency - almost like something out of Swallows and Amazons.

But it's a very good book, and one that I'd happily give to any thoughtful children who liked reading.