(Escaping the Warsaw Ghetto to a life of danger and freedo...)
Escaping the Warsaw Ghetto to a life of danger and freedom as a partisan in the forest of Parczew, fourteen-year-old Misha Edelman learns a harsh lesson about survival that parallels the story of the mythical phoenix.
Christa Laird is an English author of historical fiction for young people. She has been consistently praised for writing moving, thought-provoking works that successfully blend real facts, people, and events with invented characters and situations.
Background
Christa Laird was born in December, 1944 in London, England, United Kingdom. She arrived in the world less than three months after the 1944 death of her father at the Battle of Arnhem, the first attempt by the Allies to free Holland from Nazi occupation. Laird's father was born in Cologne, Germany, to a successful Jewish architect and his gentile wife. Shortly after Hitler's rise to power, the couple left Germany, making their way to Holland. Laird's father obtained a law degree from Oxford University, then volunteered for the armed forces, which as an alien he was not required to do. Later, he joined a parachute regiment. That led to his involvement in the Battle of Arnhem, where he was killed at age twenty-four.
Devoted to her mother, a writer who published magazine articles and short stories (several of which were broadcast on BBC radio), five-year-old Christa was upset and resentful when her mother remarried.
Many of Laird's happiest childhood memories are associated with her maternal grandparents. Laird's grandfather took her to the London Zoo and played cards and board games with her, while her grandmother kept a jar of sweets in a secret place in the corner of her cupboard for Christa and her younger brother, Paul. When she was eight, Laird's grandparents booked expensive seats outside the Savoy Hotel for Coronation Day - the celebration of Queen Elizabeth II's ascension to the throne. Her grandparents also owned a cottage in North Devon on England's southwestern coast. On several occasions, Laird's mother took her and her brother to nearby Lundy Island. Laird has special memories of that lonely, windswept place.
Education
When Laird was about twelve, she was sent to the same boarding school her mother had attended. After a few days of homesickness, Laird adjusted well to her new school. At fifteen, she made what she described as "probably the first major mistake in my life." Although she was considered an apt pupil with a particular talent for languages, Laird decided that she did not want to go to college. Her mother and stepfather sent Laird to a school in Switzerland where she could study French and German seriously; her experience in Switzerland led her to change her mind about the university. Returning to England, Laird crammed two years of study into one year at a London tutorial college.
After passing her "A-level" exams, Laird was accepted by the University of Bristol. Before starting college, Laird went to the United States for five months to get to know her father's twin sisters who had emigrated there in 1947. Since her first visit, Laird has traveled elsewhere in America, including the Grand Canyon.
In 1963, Laird began her course work at the University of Bristol. She enjoyed her classes, had a rich social life, traveled extensively in France and Germany, and became one of the early members of Amnesty International. After graduation, Nigel Laird went to teach in Austria as preparation for a career as a specialist in modern languages, while Christa went to the University of Exeter in Devon - the county in which she had spent her blissful summer holidays - to earn her degree in social work.
She received her B.Litt (now changed to M.Litt) from Oxford in 1978.
After completing her degree, Laird became a child care officer, a social worker who worked with families and children. For her first post, she returned to Bristol. In 1968 she and her husband settled in Coventry.
In 1972, Nigel Laird was accepted as a schoolmaster at an independent school for boys in Oxford. She decided to return to her degree subject, German, to do literary research. Laird completed a thesis on fascist mentality in the works of German novelists Gunter Grass and Siegfried Lenz. She did some general literature teaching part-time and also returned to social work. However, while she was working on her research degree, Laird had come across a reference to Janusz Korczak, a heroic Polish Jew who was a pediatrician, writer, educator, broadcaster, and social worker. When the Nazis sealed off the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940, Korczak took two hundred children into its confines from an orphanage that he managed, and he tried to guarantee them safety as well as some quality of life. When the Nazis deported the children to the death camp of Treblinka, Korczak was offered the chance of a reprieve, but he is said to have replied, "Desertion is not in my vocabulary." Instead, he went with the children to his death. Laird realized that she needed to tell Korczak's story; in researching it, she discovered that "the sacrificial manner of Korczak's death was but an extension of his entire way of life."
Written while she worked full-time as a locum training officer. Laird's first book, Shadow of the Wall, was published in 1989. Shadow of the Wall was praised as a gripping, heart-rending book that reflects Laird's smooth, skillful interweaving of true story and fictional narrative. In 1992, Laird received the Janus Korczak Literary Award for Shadow of the Wall.
Laird followed the success of Shadow of the Wall with a second novel, The Forgotten Son. Published in 1990 and set in the twelfth century, this work features Peter Astrolabe, the fourteen-year-old son of the famous French scholars Abelard and Heloise.
After completing The Forgotten Son, Laird began writing a novel for adults about Misha, the protagonist of her first book. Shadow of the Wall. This sequel featured the character as a grown-up, and it contained little reference to its predecessor, except, the author wrote in SAAS, "through a few flashbacks, to his experiences after escaping from the ghetto."
However, her publisher demanded a rewrite, so Laird focused on Misha's life after he left the Warsaw Ghetto. The result was But Can the Phoenix Sing?, a story for young people published in 1993.
Achievements
Although she has written only three books, Laird is considered one of the most promising creators of young adult literature. Recognized for her thorough research, Laird is noted for including an abundance of accurate information about the periods she depicts as well as prefaces and postscripts that provide further resources. Although her books contain war, death, cruelty, abandonment, and other difficult issues, Laird is also acknowledged for underscoring the humanity and universality of the situations she describes, and her books are often viewed as testimonies to the indomitability of the human spirit.
In 1992, Laird received the Janus Korczak Literary Award for Shadow of the Wall.
