Sparrow Makes Her Way

“May you find your own way just like this ‘sparrow,’ dear Evi, wishes your Aunt Becker. Cologne on the Rhine, on Rosh Hashanah 5699 (September 1, 1938),” reads the inscription inside this slim volume.

The “sparrow” refers to the title character of Spatz macht sich (Sparrow Makes Her Way), a children’s novel by Meta Samson. The story follows a nine-year-old Jewish girl nicknamed Sparrow, who lives in Berlin with her mother after her older siblings have left. As the family’s world narrows under increasingly restrictive Nazi laws, Sparrow’s daily life becomes a quiet act of endurance. Published in 1938, Spatz macht sich was one of the last Jewish children’s books released under Nazi rule.

The book’s inscription shows that it was given to another young girl named Evi in Cologne on Rosh Hashanah 1938, only weeks before Kristallnacht. The timing is haunting: a moment of celebration and hope, shadowed by the gathering storm of persecution.

Written before the November pogroms, when Nazi policy still focused primarily on forced emigration rather than systematic annihilation, the book works on two levels. On the surface it tells the ordinary story of a child’s growth and resilience. Beneath that, however, it carries a subtext that a Jewish reader in 1938, and an informed reader today, would recognize, an awareness of escalating exclusion, fear, and the threat of what was to come.

The book was among the final titles published by Philo, the publishing arm of the Centralverein, one of Germany’s major Jewish organizations. Printed in the fall of 1938, it never reached a broader audience because the Gestapo closed the publishing house in November. Meta Samson and her fourteen-year-old daughter, Marlene, who inspired the story, were murdered in Auschwitz in 1942.

Through the inscription, we catch a brief glimpse of Evi’s life, receiving this book as a gift at a time of mounting peril. Somehow, this copy survived, eventually making its way to Vermont, where the Friends of the Brooks Memorial Library recognized its historical significance and sent it to the Leo Baeck Institute Library. In 1990, the book was reprinted by Altberliner Verlag, one of the few private children’s and youth publishers in the former GDR.

Through one inscription in one book, we glimpse children's lives at a moment of profound historical rupture, and the long journey of a book that carries their story.