Arizona students learn about the Holocaust from a
‘Hidden Pearl’
By Shannon Levitt
JUDY EGETT LAUFER
I
t might not seem likely that ninth graders in Mesa, Arizona could see themselves reflected in the life of a 10-year-old girl trying to hide from Nazis in 1940s Poland, but Tate Lamoreaux, an English teacher at Mesa’s Dobson High School, helped his students do just that by finding what he calls “mirror moments” in “Hidden Pearl,” J.E. ( Judy Egett) Laufer’s young adult novel about a young girl surviving the Holocaust. Lamoreaux said it’s much easier for his students to find “window moments,” or times in the novel that diverge from their own lives: “I am not a girl; I am not a Jew; I did not live through the Holocaust; etc.” Still, when they put a lot of thought into how Pearl’s life mirrored their own, “their good answers were great: I also have to work to help my family; I 44
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don’t think my parents [or the people I live with] like me very much either; sometimes I also have to hide parts of myself.” The book recounts the lives of Pearl and her family who have been forced into hiding by the advance of the Nazis into Poland. A friend of the family finds a farm where Pearl can live and work. The catch is that she has to hide her Jewish identity and pretend to be a Catholic orphan. She also cannot know with any certainty the fates of her parents and siblings. She experiences a difficult life at the hands of the farm’s owner, a woman who verbally and physically abuses her over the course of her tenure. Moreover, the woman often derides Jews and questions their humanity, leaving Pearl in no doubt what would happen to her should her true identity be revealed. At the end of the story, Pearl is reunited with her
