Irena Sendler (not named in the book), was a young woman in Poland who dedicated her life to helping to save Jewish children from the Nazis. Her fictional persona is Jolanta in “The Safest Lie.”

Anna Bauman, living with her family in a Warsaw ghetto, is one of those children. As hard as it was for Anna to leave her family, she was taken to a Catholic orphanage. Under Jolanta’s tutelage, she learned how to be Catholic, learned a new name for herself and her family, and in essence, learned to be a Catholic girl. Her parents warned her never to tell anyone she was Jewish, but never to forget it either.

She accomplishes everything, and ends up with an adopted family. The structure to the book lends itself to very easy reading because of short chapters, but very exquisitely teaches us of yet another aspect of the tribulations of the Holocaust. With heartfelt guilt, Anna moves between her real life as a Catholic girl, and her dream life as a Jewish girl.

A wonderful read. Anna is reunited with other Jewish children from a ghetto after the liberation. But the book didn’t give me closure. I would have liked an epilogue of Anna’s adult life. As a teacher, I would assign this book and ask the children to write an ending.

- Cookie M. ( )

Good read, but ending left us hanging. ( )