By SERGIO: Reading - Book Club

THE GHOSTS OF IZIEU 

 

My English teacher Maria, asked me to read a second book of Intermediate level to practice and to improve my reading. My second book choosen was: The ghosts of Izieu.

The plot is about a very sad story where the main characters were forty-four children that lived during the Second Word War (1939-45).

Elise went to a small village called Izieu with her father Steve and her stepmother Carol during holidays. They went here because Steve loved history and he knew that in this village occurred something terrible and he never wanted to forget the millions of people who died in wars.

One day, Elise woke up and she saw a mysterious image. She said it to Steve and Carol, but they didn’t believe her. Next day, Elise saw again the same image in her bedroom: she could see boys and girls in coats, they were carrying packages and some had bags over their shoulders, and there was an army lorry.

After that, she got up and she went to the village square, where she saw a small group of boys around a war memorial. There was a boy shouting to another. This boy was very nervous, and the rest of the boys left him. Then, Elise went with him and she started to speak. He looked afraid and in trouble, but Elise asked him some questions. She knew that his name was Stefan and he was working in a farm called Lolinoz. After that, he came back to Lolinoz and Elise was walking.

Elise saw the village’s church and she decided to go in. She was watching some pictures, beautiful windows and the Visitor’s Book, where she saw that the last sign was in 1944. Suddenly, she heard some steps. She turned back and saw an old woman who called her “Eloise”, and she said her: “You must not walk in the village. It is not safe.”. The old woman put a hand on her arm and Elise said her that she wasn’t Eloise, she was Elise.

Elise tried to pull away from the woman, but the woman was stronger. Elise asked her where they had gone, and she answered to Lolinoz. In that moment, Elise was less nervous because she thought that this way she would meet Stefan again.

Alter some minutes, they arrived to Lolinoz’s farm. The rooms were dark and the woman pushed Elise up the stairs. Then, they arrived to a room where there were a lot of children and a new woman called Sabina. She was the person who looked after these children, and she asked Elise why she had escaped. Elise answered that it was a mistake, that she was Elise, not Eloise. Sabina continued speaking and saying that it was very dangerous to go out because the Gestapo (Germany’s secret police in the Second World War) was near the farm. When Elise listened this, she started to understand all.

Later, a boy came towards her. He said her that his name was Stefan, then, she recognized him: he was the same boy who was speaking with her around the war memorial in the village square, but now he was younger, he was a child.

Both were speaking and Elise definetly understood all: they were in a past time, exactly during the Second World War in 1944. While they were speaking, Stefan realized that Elise knew things that would pass in the future.

Then, he started to do some questions about it, and Elise wouldn’t want to answer too much, but in some of them, she said “trains”, “lorries” and “concentration camps”, and Stefan understood all. After that, Stefan was very sad and Elise was sorry because she had said those things.

That night, Elise thought to exit of the Lolinoz to ask for help to her father, and later to rescue all the children. She jumped throught a window, but she hit the ground and she heard the crack! of her foot. In that moment she couldn’t walk, but she saw a fork that she used like a “leg”. During some minutes she was walking, up to she was very tired and she fell on to soft earth.

It was early morning when Elise woke up and the pain was the same. Suddenly, there were sounds from the village, the sounds of lorries! Elise saw the lorries leaving the road and stopping in the yard of Lolinoz’s farm.

Soldiers of the Gestapo brought down all the children, some of them were only half-dressed, and they were picked up in the lorries and the soldiers shut and locked the gates of the lorries. The foot of Elise didn’t hurt now, only an ache: an ache in her heart.

There weren’t people in the farm, but Elise will tell the story of the children of Lolinoz, the ghosts of Izieu.

Later, she met her father and she asked him if he knew about that place before they came, and they went to the metal plate of the war memorial, where her father read the story of forty-four children taken from their hiding place in the village by the Gestapo. There were tears in their eyes.

Finally, they came back to their holiday home, but before of this, Elise put down some wild flowers next to the war memorial while she said: “Flowers will never be enough.”

 

The writer of The ghosts of Izieu is James Watson. He is a very successful writer who has written plays for radio, but most of his books are for younger people. This story was written specially for Penguin Readers, but he has written a lot of books more.

He had a wife, Kitty, who died in 1998, and she was a very important person for him. Nowadays, he has three daughters and two granddaughters. He enjoys swimming and the successes of Blackburn Rovers football team, too.

 

Finally and in my opinion, The ghosts of Izieu is a good book but very sad. I think that this kind of books are important to read, because in this way you know better the History and you can feel the fear that some people suffered in the past.

I recommend this book because you can think about all these people who were good people but they suffered a lot. To read “their” books is a little homage.