Cover Page Table of Contents Teaching Rationale Excerpts AUTHOR’S PREFACE       The circumstances of my collaboration with Ruth Kapp Hartz are themselves a story, one that transformed both our lives. [. . .]       Ruth Hartz was my high school French teacher at Springside School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I knew her then as “Madame Renée Hartz.” As a teacher, “Madame” was both challenging and warm, sensitive yet demanding, and she had a quiet dignity and grace about her which to this day commands respect. [. . .]       The first questions Ruth asked me were: “Why do you want to write about this subject? Why is it important to you?” It was my turn to confide in Ruth that, as a fifth-grader, I had heard the personal account of a Catholic woman who had sheltered Jewish families during the early years of the war. She and her husband had smuggled many families to “safe houses,” and eventually attracted the attention of Gestapo agents. The woman had been tortured by the Nazis in an effort to force her to disclose the whereabouts of her husband. Her fingernails wee torn out, one by one, [. . .] but the woman never confessed. Unfortunately, her husband was eventually captured and murdered by the Nazis. The woman [. . .] made her way to Paris, where she was taken in by a Catholic religious order. Eventually, she became a nun, and lived and worked in the convent. She was transferred to the United States in the sixties and was a staff member at my school in Philadelphia. That was how I came to hear her story. [. . .]       Ruth revealed to me that she, herself, had been left at a Catholic convent in southern France, not knowing whether her parents were alive or dead. She began to cry as she told me, “I was left in the street. I was told I was ‘an orphan of the war.’” To this day, I believe I was one of the first individuals, outside of her immediate family, with whom Ruth shared this painful aspect of her early childhood. [. . .]       As a writer, I was determined to capture the incredible experiences of this young child and her family in the voice of a child. I traveled to France alone and retraced the steps of Ruth and her parents while in hiding. [. . .] I was able to interview Ruth’s parents, as well as relatives of rescuers who had sheltered Ruth and her family. I interviewed French Catholic clergy and religious, [. . .] asked them why they chose to help the Jewish people, knowing that they risked capture by the Nazis, and possibly death. I retrieved Ruth’s file at the Œuvre de secours aux enfants (OSE), an organization that, during the war, placed many Jewish children in non-Jewish homes for their protection and ultimately tried to smuggle them to Switzerland and, eventually, to the United States. [. . .]       [Ruth and I] have been awed by the power of this story to transform its readers, and by the power of our story of friendship and collaboration to convince children and young people that they can make a difference. [. . .] continue to be moved by the idea that a teacher’s life could be immortalized by the student with whom she had the courage to share her story. I can honestly say that writing this book was a labor of love and respect for my teacher, whose personal experiences forever changed the way I look at the world.       It has often been said that writers do not actually seek their material, their material finds them. The privilege of writing this manuscript is part of my story as an evolving writer and human being. What greater gift could a teacher give her student? Stacy Cretzmeyer July 1, 1998