The Brushmaker’s Daughter

How does one describe the Holocaust? The worst crime in history? The crime of the century? A world gripped by insanity?

Since the end of World War II, historians have been trying to categorize and explain that nightmare, with writers such as Kathy Kacer making it their mission to represent the lives of those who were persecuted and murdered only because of their origins, political leanings, physical challenges or sexual orientation. The numbers have been estimated to be at least 6 million Jews and between 1-2 million people who fell into the other categories the Nazis deemed “untermenschen” or subhuman.

Kacer’s writing is an important contribution to children’s literature, to education and to history. Her first book, The Secret of Gabi’s Dresser, ( www.cmreviews.ca/cm/vol8/no1/secretofgabis.html ) is based on her mother’s survival in the Holocaust. Since then, Kacer has penned twenty fiction and non-fiction books about children caught up in that maelstrom, some who escaped and some who perished. They are all powerful statements about the consequences of allowing racism and fascism to infect society’s consciousness and turn the world upside down.

The Brushmaker’s Daughter is the latest example of a fictional adaptation of a true story. Otto Weidt, a brush manufacturer in Berlin who was blind, made brushes bought by the Third Reich for their troops. Weidt deliberately hired blind and deaf Jews to work in his factory as a way of saving them from arrest and deportation. He organized safe places for them to live and constructed a hiding place in his plant for the workers to secret themselves when the Gestapo made periodic raids.

Kacer puts fictional 12-year-old Lillian Frey into this setting. Lillian’s life has been upended by her mother’s early death and then her father’s taking her into hiding at Weidt’s factory. There, she meets characters based on real-life people who worked for Weidt. Their true stories, and what happened to them, are appended.

Lillian experiences waves of emotions - fear of discovery for her and her father, pain at the losses of her mother, her friends and her education, dread about whether or not she will have a future, amazement and love for the people who defy their own dangers to offer her kindness. She and her father have close calls with the Gestapo, reminding them that they are never really safe. Nightmares dog her. The narrative reflects her state of constant turmoil and worry.

Someone was shouting at me to move forward as quickly as I could. Don’t stop! Don’t look back! … Where was Papa? Where was Herr Weidt and the other workers? A choked cry rose up in my throat along with a bitter taste of bile … I heard loud, angry voices and saw the glint of a soldier’s rifle behind me.

As with the Holocaust, there is no happy ending. The blind workers are arrested in a Gestapo raid and, in the bizarre world that existed, were marched, hand-on-shoulder through the streets to be loaded on a train to a concentration camp.

But life and death were serendipitous; there are many stories of how lives were saved or lost according to the whim or mood of an individual with the power of decision. Weidt is able to bribe the resistant officer (“You can get more Jews.”) with perfume and the promise of a crate of champagne to get them released.

Kacer captures Lillian’s fraught situation with accuracy - the deep cold, the hunger, the fears, but also the moments of happiness, which give Lillian - and the young reader - hope for a better tomorrow.

The Brushmaker’s Daughter can be used in a teaching unit about the Holocaust, and it would be an suitable accompaniment to her excellent nonfiction books, among them The Underground Reporters ( https://umanitoba.ca/outreach/cm/vol11/no8/theundergroundreporters.html )
and Hiding Edith. ( http://www.umanitoba.ca/outreach/cm/vol12/no21/hidingedith.html )

Kacer, also a playwright, co-wrote an important book about the Canadian residential school system with Jenny Kay Dupuis, demonstrating her concern for others whose human rights have been violated. All of her books can help children learn to empathize. At this important time in history, empathy should be a critical element in children’s education.