K. R. Gaddy

★"This matter-of-fact narrative shows how youth can stand against an overwhelming tide of fascism. It implicatively asks readers, 'what would you do?' while highlighting the actions of young people who refused to be complacent—and the consequences they suffered for it. It challenges common narratives that reserve praise for resistance for the politically centrist middle and upper classes. An eye-opening account of tenacity that brings the efforts of young anti-Nazi activists vividly to life."—Kirkus Reviews, starred review.… (mer)

What a nice thing to see in the year of our lord 2020: a Nazi getting punched in the nose on the cover of a young adult book.

If Nazis getting their asses handed to them appeals to you (it should), rest assured that this book delivers. Gaddy clearly admires the young people she writes about; she goes to bat for them again and again. They caused trouble, they broke the law – so what? The law was unjust, so trouble was necessary. As she notes, these teens were too young and too scattered to have developed a single coherent political ideology, but they maintained a sense of empathy and humanity that was political in itself. History has ignored and even maligned them because they were largely leftist – many of them were socialists, communists, or had family members jailed or killed for being socialists or communists – but Gaddy reveals them for what they are: kids who should not have had to be heroes but who stepped up anyway, because it was the right thing to do.

Does this review come off as more about the pirates than about the book itself? I can’t help it. Gaddy has me convinced. She’s clearly done a tremendous amount of research; this is both an in-depth look at the motivations and actions of a collection of young individuals and an attempt to place those actions within a broader context: not just World War II but the study of history as a whole, the way dominant society chooses who’s a hero and who’s a villain or a nobody. And even as she argues that the Edelweiss pirates were the former, she refuses to flatten them into two-dimensional demigods. A whole section of the back matter is about the teens’ cultural blindspots, particularly when it came to perpetuating stereotypes of Native people (one of the pirate groups was called the Navajos). Gaddy notes that those blindspots still exist today, and that they’re worth acknowledging even and especially in the people and media we admire.

I’m really, really glad this book exists. I’m glad people will get to read it. I’m glad there will always be people who punch Nazis, because punching Nazis is the right thing to do.… (mer)