Independent Reading Level: 4-6
Awards: John Newbery Medal (1973)

Memoir by a young Jewish girl of being hidden from the Nazis during World War II. The more I read the more I appreciated this story, and felt it should be required reading by adolescents. Nothing graphic, but violence is mentioned in passing, such as knowing that relatives getting on the trains to work camps will never come back. ( )

From the first time I read the book (and I’ve read it many times), I bonded closely with Annie, the first person narrator. The story begins in 1938 when the protagonist Annie de Leeuw (Johanna’s name as a child) is six years old and just beginning to hear about the problems that Hitler is bringing to her world.

Four years later, in late summer 1942, Annie and her older sister Sini go into hiding with a non-Jewish Dutch family, the Oostervelds. Annie and Sini are cared for by Dientje, Opoe, and particularly by Johan Oosterveld, who is a loving man of strong character. Their father and oldest sister Rachel hide elsewhere during the war. Their mother died in the hospital of kidney disease just after they went into hiding.

The girls live in an upstairs room (hence, the title), but they have to crawl into the back of a closet when anyone else comes near the house. Imagine what happens when the Nazis decide to make the house their headquarters . . . .

This book is for 5th to 8th graders, but a good reader that is mature could read it when a little younger. And you can’t be too old for this book.
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This is a true story about a eight year old little girl named Annie de Leeuw who's Jewish and has to hid from the German army. She has to leave her mother and father to hid at a farm house in the upstairs room. This book looks in to the life of a eight year old, what she wonder and experience at the time. This book might touch the lives of other children they may not be going through what she went through but may find a connection in a way. This book is a great science concept that can show recording things could make a big difference and how discoveries are made. ( )

Still think about this book. ( )