48 pages • 1-hour read
The Island on Bird Street
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Background
Historical Context: The Nazi Occupation of Poland
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of religious discrimination, graphic violence, and death.
Nazi Germany under dictator Adolf Hitler launched a surprise attack and invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. Previously, Hitler annexed Czechoslovakia, Austria, and the Sudetenland, but he wanted even more territorial expansion for his goal of more “living space” for Germans, whom he considered superior to other ethnicities and groups. This event, along with Great Britain and France’s declaration of war against Germany on September 3, 1939, is considered the start of World War II in Europe. German and Soviet forces defeated Poland within the month, and the country was subsequently not just occupied by Germany but divided. The western part of Poland became part of the Greater German Reich. The eastern part went to the control of the Soviet Union. The Nazis then subjected Polish citizens—whether Jewish or not—to horrifying and brutal attacks in efforts to remove or oppress all Polish people and rid the land of Polish culture.
German and Soviet forces murdered Polish leaders, including military officers, teachers, priests, and academics. They sought out and destroyed Polish underground and resistance members. German policy, in particular, established that Polish people should serve as peasant farmers and workers for the Germans who came to resettle there. The “Germanization” of Poland included moving tens of thousands of citizens to concentration or work camps and taking at least 4,000 young Polish children away from their families and raising them as Germans. Countless Polish citizens were deported or imprisoned throughout the war: “It is estimated that the Germans killed between 1.8 and 1.9 million non-Jewish Polish civilians during World War II. In addition, the Germans murdered at least 3 million Jewish citizens of Poland” (“Polish Victims.” Holocaust Encyclopedia).
In The Island on Bird Street, protagonist Alex lives in an unnamed city of occupied Poland in 1943-44. Uri Orlev depicts Nazi oppression of the Jewish people in the setting of the ghetto, the “selection” of workers, and the transports out of town for those deemed ineffective for work (children, the elderly, women, and anyone else they want to send away). In the Polish quarter outside the ghetto wall, Bolek, the doctor, and non-Jewish helpers who want to aid the Jewish resistance in the ghettos represent the fierce Polish underground. Orlev demonstrates the brutal treatment of these helpers at the hands of the Nazis when the Gestapo (German secret police) take away the doctor; Alex never sees him again.
Other children’s or middle-grade literature that deals with the topic of occupied countries during World War II includes Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars (1989), set in occupied Denmark; R.J. Palacio’s White Bird (2019), set in occupied France; Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl (1947), which reveals Anne’s family’s attempt to hide from Nazi forces in Amsterdam; and a dramatized version of Anne Frank’s experiences in hiding called The Diary of Anne Frank (1955) by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett.
Socio-Historical Context: Life in the Ghettos
Even as the Nazis sought to “Germanize” Poland by oppressing or annihilating the Polish people, they also increasingly targeted the Jewish people across Poland and other parts of their occupied territory. There are many horrors of the Holocaust; one of them is the use of ghettos to imprison and dispirit the Jewish people. Forced to live behind guarded walls and cut off from basic supplies and any outside communities (including other Jewish communities), the Jewish people in ghettos struggled to survive.
The idea of ghettos was centuries old by the time the Nazis employed them in their plan to eradicate the Jewish people. From the 15th to the 17th centuries, Jewish ghettos existed in Venice, Prague, and other European cities. As a tool for Jewish oppression, ghettos during the Holocaust were meant to be temporary; the goal was always to concentrate Jewish people into the ghettos as a “first step” and then “liquidate” (empty) the ghetto by sending all those inside to work camps or death camps. Many ghettos existed in Poland, but they were also used in other occupied areas of Europe and in the Soviet Union (“Nazi Germany and the Establishment of Ghettos.” The National WWII Museum, 19 Oct. 2023). Ghetto conditions were deplorable; overcrowding and insufficient supplies led to starvation, unrest, and disease. Violent uprisings sometimes occurred; the Warsaw ghetto saw the largest of these in 1943, an event Alex’s father mentions in the novel.
Alex and his family moved to a section of his unnamed city’s ghetto (Ghetto C) in the backstory of the novel. Throughout the story, Alex refers to the bunkers and hideouts the Jewish people attempted to use—sometimes within or beneath the buildings in which they were expected to live—and the food stashes they tried to keep. Later, Alex hears the liquidation of the neighboring ghetto, Ghetto A, and an uprising he wants to join.
Other works of literature concerning World War II ghettos include Jennifer Roy’s Jars of Hope (2015), a nonfiction work about Irena Sendler, a woman who saved children from the Warsaw ghetto; Angela Cerrito’s The Safest Lie (2015), a middle-grade historical fiction about a girl who hides her identity to escape a ghetto; and Yellow Star (2006), the true story of Syvia Perlmutter, a young girl who survived the Lodz ghetto until the end of the war. Orlev also wrote Run, Boy, Run (2001), a story of the Warsaw ghetto.
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