Hana's Suitcase

Hana Brady was born in 1931 in the small town of Nove Mesto, Czechoslovakia. She lived with her parents and her brother George, older by three years, in a handsome white house on the Main Street. Her father ran the General Store on the ground floor and the family occupied the upper floor. Before the Nazi occupation, George and Hana lived a normal family life, skiing in the winter time, swimming in the summer time, going to school, making friends, and helping out in the store. But when the Nazis came, life changed. More and more restrictions were placed on Jewish families. Then their parents were both taken by the Nazis to concentration camps, places where the Jews were imprisoned and eventually killed. After that, George and Hana were looked after by relatives for a short while, but in 1942, both children were deported to Theresienstadt, a concentration camp set up by the Nazis in an old fortress town. Hana was 10 and George 13. Later the two children were transported to Auschwitz, a death camp, now located in Poland. George swore to Hana that he would look after her no matter what, but he never saw her again. Both Hana and her parents perished.Fumiko Ishioka of the Japanese NPO, the Tokyo Holocaust Educational Resource Center, exhibited Hana's trunk in 2000 as a relic of the concentration camp. She later became known for teaching materials based on the process of tracing Hana's life and seeking out her surviving family in Canada. Hana's story became known through children's radio programs and written material in both Canada and Japan, as Hana's Suitcase, and with the help of Ms. Ishioka and Hana's brother George, it was published as Hana's Suitcase, 2002 by Karen Levine. The book became a bestseller and received the Bank Street College of Education Flora Stieglitz Straus Award for non-fiction, the National Jewish Book Award, and has won most of the Canadian awards for children's literature. The book has been a Governor General's Award nominee, and was selected as a final award candidate for the Norma Fleck award. It has since been translated and published around the world, and occupies a place similar to the Diary of Anne Frank.