Greater Than Angels

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Summary: Greater than Angels
Review: "Promise Me." This quote, from the book Greater than Angels by Carol Matas, is exactly what Mother said when this horrible nightmare started. The books starts out in October 1940, in Mannheim, Germany, where Anna Hirsch and her family are taken from their home by Nazi soldiers, only to find out that they were going to a concentration camp where a few of them would spend their last few months of life. Anna's best friend, Klara has a brother who writes false papers for Jews trying to escape to Switzerland, Anna is asked to help, and soon she'll be asked if she wants false papers too. Many would say that Anna and Klara's brother, Peter, are rescuers, many would say they're not, but do you think Anna and Peter would consider themselves rescuers? Rescuers aren't the kind of people who consider themselves to be rescuers. They are the type of people who do what they feel is right, and that will help others. When Anna and Peter were asked to help write false papers for Jews to get into Switzerland, they accepted willingly, they didn't think about what would happen afterwards. Greater than Angels really gives the reader an understanding of what happened in the Holocaust. It takes you from when the Jews were taken from their home all the way to those who survived the concentration camps. I would diffidently recommend this book to others. It is a very captivating book that can inspire even you to be a rescuer.

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Summary: Best book I have ever read!
Review: Anna is being kicked out of her home by the Nazis because she and her family are jews. Anna is sent to a refugee camp in Gurs, she stays there for a while; but then all the young people must go to a red cross home is Le Chambon. Anna and her friends Rudi and Klara go to the swiss red cross home. There, they go to school and eat normal food. Rudi figures out a way to send Anna and Klara to Switzerland. Right when they are about to leave, Rudi and Anna find out they have feelings for eachother. I recommend this book to people who like to read about the old days, I cried, and I laughed in this book. I hope you like it too!

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Summary: Greater than Angels a great book!
Review: Greater than Angels is a great book especially if you like romance/adventures. It is about a young Jewish girl that gets taken away from her family during the holocaust. She is taken to some place in France where they serve watery soup and stale bread. She is then taken to LeChambon to a farm where she takes refuge. Soon the Gestapos find out she is there and she flees for her life. Luckily the Gestapos fall in a manure pit and she gets away. I'm not going to tell you what happens next because it is such a good book you are just going to have find out for yourself. This book is great I even cried a little and it is just so touching. It kind of slaps you in the face with the truth of the holocaust and that is why I liked this book.

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Summary: Greater Than Angels
Review: Greater Than Angels is a great book.It takes place during the fall of 1940.Anna Hirsch and her family and friends are Jews and they get deported from Germany to France by the Nazis.They are put in a refugee camp in Gurs.Anna and other younger children are aranged to go to Le Chambon.Rudi and Klara which are two of Anna friends live with her at a Swiss Red Cross home.Rudi gets it arraged for Klara and Anna to go to Switzerland .When Anna and Klara are getting on the train.Anna and Rudi realize they have feelings for each other.This is a powerful book that is very sad but also very funny.I hope you like it.

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Summary: Greater Than Angels: a Story of Faith, Friends, and Courage
Review: Greater Than Angels is a heartwarming story of friendship, faith, and courage. Anna is a sassy, opinionated, young woman who is sent along with her family to Gurs by the Nazis. Gurs is a French "refugee" camp that has terrible conditions. After many long months the Swiss Red Cross arranges for Anna, and her friends Klara, and Peter, along with other young Jews to stay in Le Chambon. This French town offers to hide the Jews. But Anna knows that this can't go on forever. With the war seeming that it had no end, Anna and her friends must experience an adventure that will change their lives dramatically.
I highly recommend this book to readers who have a hunger for a roller coasters of a book. This story is a different angle from most Holocaust books because it is a story of survival. It had diverse characters unlike most Holocaust tales where all the characters seem the same. Read Greater than Angels and I'm sure it'll take you on an adventure of your own.

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Summary: A Jew Running from War
Review: Greater than Angels is a suspenseful and inspiring book about a Jewish girl's survival during World War II and about resistance to the war. When Nazis send Anna, grandma Oma, her mom, and her Aunt Mina to a refugee camp in France, Anna's adventure begins. When Anna and other children get taken to live at a Swiss Red Cross house, Hannah and her friend's brother Rudi start some kind of resistance by handing out false papers for people that want to get out of France. Even though they are protected by the Red Cross, they still have to hide from Nazis because as the war gets more serious the Nazis want to collect Jews put them in concentration camps.
I love the way that this book is written because when you think everything is all right, something else happens. This book is such a thriller to read, I couldn't put it down! It is written in first person, so I always knew Anna's feeling about what was happening. It really gave me a different view of the war because this book didn't take place in a concentration camp.
My favorite part was when the kids would have conversations about God. I like to know all of the different perspectives on God. Some were saying, "If there is a God, why is this happening?" I bet that's what a lot of the Jews thought. However, that is not Anna's view. She basically says, "We all have the power to do good and evil; the people doing this to us have chosen evil." That is kind of how I feel about God, too, so I can relate to how Anna feels. This tells me that Anna is smart and devoted to God.
Mostly, this was a very good book. I liked reading about her experiences in the refuge camp, and it was exciting when they were hiding from the Germans, but sometimes I thought it was a little unrealistic, or slow. I thought there should have been a little more trouble or drama just to add to the problems many Jews faced during WWII. They get out of trouble all too easily for me to believe. Did all Jews get away form the Germans that easily? I don't think so, and that is why I think it should have more drama in places so that the book could relate more to all Jews hiding from the Germans.
I have read a few books about Jews during World War II, and I'm not saying this was the best, but it gave me a new perspective on the war. Mostly books about WWII are how the Jews suffered in concentration camps. This book show that not all people hated the Jews, and that many were actually doing something to help the Jews hide. It also teaches the importance of resistance, and how just by doing small things many Jews were saved from going to a concentration.
This relates to what I think one of the main themes is in this book: Helping is helping, no mater how much you think you helped. Rudi and Anna were passing out false papers, and it may seem that that wouldn't help much, but they did help a lot of people escape to safe places. This prevented them from going to a concentration camp, which was a huge deal. So, read this book, and relate it to your own life. Doing small acts of kindness to help can make a huge difference to somebody.

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Summary: A Jew Running from War
Review: Greater Than Angels is about a girl named Anna Hirsch. It is about how she and her family get sent to a refugee camp. During their time in the camp Anna tries to get everyone involved in things. She has plays and music going on so people don't think about what is happening to them. During her stay at this refugee camp her grandmother dies. This becomes very hard on Anna because her grandmother was the only person who understood her passion to act. After a couple years Anna and a couple other kids in the camp get sent to Le Chambon. They go to Le Chambon for protection and to start a normal life. While she is staying there she goes to visit her mother. She finds out that her mother is getting shipped to a death camp and she will never see her again. When she goes back to Le Chambon she tries to tell her friends about their families but they don't understand very well. The Nazis started to invade Le Chambon after a couple years of being there. The kids become scared but Anna still stays strong for everyone. In the end Anna finds her own freedom.
Greather Than Angels is a very good book. Carol Matas does a great job at describing what happened during the Holocaust, and how the people handled it. Creating Anna's sense of humor made the book very worthwhile. The way she writes the characters shows that throughout the Holocaust the Jews still had hope of being free. The book is very sad but also very funny. I loved the way she made Anna, after everything she went through, still be herself and that nothing changed her. The way she handles herself whenever she hears bad news is very good. I recommend that everyone read this book because it is very emotional, and I like it very much.

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Summary: Greater Than Angels
Review: Greater Than Angels is about a girl named Anna Hirsch. It is about how she and her family get sent to a refugee camp. During their time in the camp Anna tries to get everyone involved in things. She has plays and music going on so people don't think about what is happening to them. During her stay at this refugee camp her grandmother dies. This becomes very hard on Anna because her grandmother was the only person who understood her passion to act. After a couple years Anna and a couple other kids in the camp get sent to Le Chambon. They go to Le Chambon for protection and to start a normal life. While she is staying there she goes to visit her mother. She finds out that her mother is getting shipped to a death camp and she will never see her again. When she goes back to Le Chambon she tries to tell her friends about their families but they don't understand very well. The Nazis started to invade Le Chambon after a couple years of being there. The kids become scared but Anna still stays strong for everyone. In the end Anna finds her own freedom.
Greather Than Angels is a very good book. Carol Matas does a great job at describing what happened during the Holocaust, and how the people handled it. Creating Anna's sense of humor made the book very worthwhile. The way she writes the characters shows that throughout the Holocaust the Jews still had hope of being free. The book is very sad but also very funny. I loved the way she made Anna, after everything she went through, still be herself and that nothing changed her. The way she handles herself whenever she hears bad news is very good. I recommend that everyone read this book because it is very emotional, and I like it very much.

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Summary: A suspenceful book about courage
Review: Greater than Angels was a suspenseful, yet quick book about a young girl named Anna and her story during World War II. She lives a normal life in Germany until her she, mom, her aunt, her grandma, and many other Jewish families are sent to France to a small camp called Gurs. She tries to brighten people's lives while they're in the camp and it works for most of them, except her mother. Her mother never understands how her daughter can behave this way at such a terrible time in her life. Completing an old, torn friendship with her friend Klara is one of her large missions in this story, but even larger, is to find courage in all of her journeys and terrible experiences. After staying for a couple months in Gurs, she, and some other children are invited to stay in Le Chambon at the Red Cross Home. To help Rudi, Klara's brother, and to keep herself occupied at night, she delivered fake papers to many families in the city. This brought her closer to a lot of the families in Le Chambon and closer to Rudi. She visits her family back in Gurs to see how they are doing, while Rudi tries to find a sager place for the children staying at the Red Cross Home.
My favorite part of this story was when Anna sang and danced at the concerts that the people at Gurs put together. She kept herself entertained with the concerts and could forget the struggles she was facing at the camp. Everyone would cheer and clap and finally her mother saw the true character in Anna. She accepted her daughter for who she was and her special talents. I also liked when she described her experience hiding in the woodpile with Klara while the German's searched the house she was staying at. The author put a lot of detail into this and described Anna's feelings very well. "My heart is pounding; I'm in a cold sweat. I can here Klara's breath: short, panicky." I think that this sentence was simple yet very affective during this part of the story.
One thing that I noticed while I was reading the book, was that the author writes the story in both past tense and present tense. When she is telling about hiding in the woodpile throughout the book, it is in present tense, but when she is talking about Gurs and Le Chambon the story is in past tense. This made the book very confusing for me and often got on my nerves. I did like how the author didn't spend a lot of time talking about scenes in the story that weren't too important, though
I think the main message in this book is to always have courage. A theme that I would put with this book is "Even though life can be extremely confusing and surprising at times, you should always make the best of it." Anna lives out this saying by telling jokes and trying to forget about the sad and frustrating times in her life. She performs concerts and sings to try and loosen things up. I think everyone should try to be more like Anna and how she lives life in this book.

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Summary: Greater Than Angels
Review: Greater Than Angels was a very nice book. I didn’t at first think that I’d enjoy reading about the Holocaust, but actually I enjoyed it. The book was about a girl named Anna, her family and friends that have been taken away to a refugee camps called Gurs because they were Jews. The Gestapo came to their house and ordered them to pack what they could and come with them. They were put on a train along with hundreds of other Jews.
They arrived at the barracks where there were no beds, bunks, windows, nothing. They were prisoners. The barracks were very crowded, there were sixty women to each. They were given tea in old tin cans and watery soup. Anna`s brother had gone to another barracks and so had her friend, Klara`s. When their luggage arrived it was just dumped out in the mud. People got their belongings stolen and damaged. They little they had left was now in ruins.
Anna told jokes, sang songs and recited poems to try and get her mind off of what really is happening. A few days later Oma died. After a year of being in Gurs, the Swiss Red Cross opened some children`s homes in Le Chambon~sur~Lignon and Anna and six others were were sent there.
They had a far better life in Le Chambon than in Gurs. They were fed actual meals and attended school. Anna and Klara`s brother Rudi made false identification papers for other Jews so that they could leave the country and escape the Gestapo. They helped many other Jews and eventually they were all saved. All of the adults were sent to a Nazi death camp, but Anna and the others were freed. At the end, Anna, Klara and their friend, Peter had escaped and were safe. They didn`t tell what happened to the others. I`m just glad Klara and the others made it out safely.