Lisa Tetzner’s great “odyssey of a youth” begins in 1931 with the children of a large Berlin apartment block who are as thick as thieves - even when they quarrel, and they love to play practical jokes. Leading the gang are Erwin Brackman, known as “Starface” because of the freckles all over his nose, and his friends Paul and Miriam. Their first adventures can be read in volume 1 of “The Children From No. 67”.
This next volume tells of how Erwin and his father flee from the Nazis to France, where he is deported, and can then finally travel “legally” to Sweden. Miriam travels on a ship which should bring many homeless emigrants to South America. But no country will take them in. After a shipwreck seven children make it safely to an island.
“The only contemporary, realistic and deeply pacifistically spirited depiction of historic events in a children’s book written in the Third Reich.” Die Zeit
