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Books for Secondary students - Malka by Mirjam Pressler
Malka – By Mirjam Pressler, translated Brian Murdoch
ISBN 0 330 41550 6 (Picador)
Malka cannot understand what is happening. Her home is no longer safe. Children won’t play with her, even though they were once her friends. Jews are no longer welcome in Lawoczne and people are disappearing after Nazi round-ups.
Malka does not remember her father. He lives in another country. Malka’s mother, a doctor, thinks that the Nazis will not harm her family because she has treated and healed German patients. She almost leaves it too late to escape. By the time she realises how dangerous life for Jews is becoming the only choice she has left is to take her two daughters away from Poland by crossing the mountain border into Hungary.
On the journey seven year old Malka is taken ill and is too weak to travel further. Separated from her mother and sister, she learns to survive alone.
The author, Mirjam Pressler, met the real Malka Mai in Israel in 1996. Malka recounted some of her fragmented memories and Mirjam used them to write this fictional account of a lost child and a mother’s frantic search for a loved one left behind.
- Malka_MirjamPressler (pdf)
