What the Night Sings

by Vesper Stamper

Overview

For fans of The Book Thief and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas comes a lushly illustrated novel about a teen Holocaust survivor, who must come to terms with who she is and how to rebuild her life.

After losing her family and everything she knew in the Nazi concentration camps, Gerta is finally liberated, only to find herself completely alone. Without her Papa, her music, or even her true identity, she must move past the task of surviving and onto living her life. In the displaced persons camp where she is staying, Gerta meets Lev, a fellow teen survivor who she just might be falling for, despite her feelings for someone else. With a newfound Jewish identity she never knew she had, and a return to the life of music she thought she lost forever, Gerta must choose how to build a new future.

"A tour de force. This powerful story of love, loss, and survival is not to be missed." — Kristin Hannah, #1 New York Times Bestselling author of The Nightingale

"What the Night Sings is a book from the heart, of the heart, and to the heart. Vesper Stamper's Gerta will stay with you long after you turn the last page. Her story is one of hope and redemption and life — a blessing to the world." — Deborah Heiligman, award-winning author of Charles and Emma and Vincent and Theo

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781524700386
Publisher:	Random House Children's Books
Publication date:	02/20/2018
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	153,359
Product dimensions:	7.38(w) x 9.31(h) x 1.20(d)
Age Range:	12 Years

About the Author

Vesper Stamper is an author/illustrator living in the Northeast with her husband, filmmaker Ben Stamper and her two children. She has an MFA in Illustration as Visual Essay from School of Visual Arts, NYC. Follow her on Instagram and Facebook @vesperillustration, and learn more at vesperillustration.com.

Editorial Reviews

★ 11/20/2017
Stamper’s exceptionally moving debut goes beyond recounting the suffering inflicted on Jews during the Holocaust to explore a young woman’s conflict between love and artistic ambition. Fourteen-year-old Gerta Richter, a talented singer and daughter of a violist in the Würzburg Orchestra, learned that she is actually Gerta Rausch, a Jew, when she and her father were forcibly removed from Würzburg by the Nazis one night in June 1944. The novel opens with the British liberation of German concentration camps in 1945 and moves smoothly among Gerta’s prewar life, her stay in concentration camps and the Bergen-Belsen Displaced Persons camp, and her postwar flight to Palestine. Focusing on Gerta’s transitional time as a displaced person, Stamper delves into her fight to regain her musical gift, her deepening relationship with a fellow survivor, her growing identity as a Jew, and her struggle to make decisions about her future. Generously illustrated with Stamper’s haunting spot images and larger scenes, all in deep brown hues that evoke profound emotion, the book is a strong addition to the bookshelf of Holocaust fiction. Ages 12–up. Agent: Lori Kilkelly, Rodeen Literary Management. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

Sixteen-year-old Gerta Rausch holds dying bunkmate Rivkah in her arms in a Nazi concentration camp when British soldiers arrive to set the prisoners free. Gerta was a music student on the verge of her first performance when she and her beloved father were betrayed, perhaps by her stepmother. Now, Gerta has survived and must learn to cope with the horrors she has experienced, to lead some sort of a life. She is drawn to two fellow survivors: smooth Michah, Rivkah’s son, and Lev, so devoted to his faith that he cannot even hold Gerta’s hand. Gerta wants to pursue her music again—she survived the concentration camp by being selected to play the viola—but have the atrocities of her life in the camp stolen her abilities? Stamper portrays the complexities of life in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. Gerta wades through her own trauma and the uncertainty of moving forward. It feels a little jarring to have a romantic triangle in such a setting, even though it is used primarily to depict Gerta’s journey to the rest of her life. Stamper does not shy from the tragic details—a fellow prisoner makes clear the fate of Gerta’s beloved father, and Nazi soldiers throw a baby against a train—but she does not overwhelm the reader unnecessarily. Most affecting is a former rival urging Gerta to sing again: “It’s not gone. It’s just different.” This is a story of survival, about creating respite in the middle of the unbearable. Reviewer: Matthew Weaver; Ages 11 to 18.

VOYA, December 2017 (Vol. 40, No. 5) - Matthew Weaver

★ 2017-10-28
Gerta didn't know she was Jewish until she and her father were taken for transport by the Nazis.When Bergen-Belsen is liberated, Gerta and the other survivors are ill, skeletal, dying, or sunk in madness, and they have no homes to which they can return. Relating the events that led her there, she tells of a seemingly carefree life in Würzburg with her musician father and German gentile stepmother, an opera singer who is also Gerta's voice teacher. But they were living with false identification papers, and their lives become ever more withdrawn. She has fleeting visions of her early childhood in Köln, of her mother, and of Kristallnacht. The cattle-car journey to Theresienstadt is only the beginning of days, weeks, months, years filled with unspeakable horrors in the "intricacies of the Nazi web…the animalization of human souls." Then comes Auschwitz, where her father is gassed, then Bergen-Belsen, typhus, and, finally, a kind of awakening to her own humanity. Later she covertly enters British-occupied Palestine, Eratz Yisrael, and builds a life there. Stamper spares readers nothing. Everything that Gerta witnesses or experiences really happened in the hell that was the Holocaust, including the further humiliations in its aftermath, a rarely told part of the story. The text is on pale, sepia-toned paper with dark, eerie illustrations in the same tones, reminiscent of real drawings produced by camp inmates.Evil that is impossibly difficult to comprehend and filled with word-images that will leave readers gasping. The author's dedication says it all, in both Hebrew and English: "Remember." (author's note, map, glossary, resources, acknowledgments; not seen) (Historical fiction. 14-adult)

Kirkus Reviews

"...will leave readers gasping."—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"Generously illustrated with Stamper’s haunting spot images and larger scenes, all in deep brown hues that evoke profound emotion, the book is a strong addition to the bookshelf of Holocaust fiction."—Publishers Weekly, starred review

From the Publisher