There is a growing genre of children's fiction about the Holocaust. In the past 10 years or so, we have had huge best-sellers like Markus Zusak's The Book Thief and John Boyne's The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. Now we have Jim Shepard's The Book of Aron (Quercus, £18.99).
Aron Rozycki is not especially good or heroic; right from the opening paragraph we are told how he always gets into trouble. Born near the Lithuanian border in 1936, he moves with his family to Warsaw, where his father scrapes a living and his mother washes other people's floors. "Years went by," he says, "like one unhappy day."
Then the Germans invade Warsaw and Aron ends up in the ghetto with his family. He forms a gang with some other boys and two girls, Zofia and Adina, smuggling food into the ghetto to feed his family or sell on the black market.
Two adults start to loom large in Aron's story. There is Lajkin, the Jewish policeman, a figure of compromise, who looks after number one and offers Aron the chance to work with the ghetto police. There is also the legendary Janusz Korczak, "with his bald head and yellowish goatee, "a saintly man who directed a children's orphanage in the ghetto. If Lajkin is the voice of compromise, Korczak is the embodiment of uncompromising moral integrity. Which way will Aron turn?
