"docudramas" and "docunovels"—possibly somewhat pejoratively—to describe Matas's World War II-based novels. Speaking aboutDaniel's Story in Something about the Author, Matas observed that the reviewers of Daniel's Story unfortunately reviewed the book as if it were no more than a novelization of the exhibit. (Scholastic's publicity department contributed to this misunderstanding by issuing press releases which seemed to confirm that fact.) In electronic correspondence with Jenkinson, Matas spoke about such terms as "docudrama," saying that she thinks it totally wrong to call any of her books "docu" anything, and asserting that they are fiction, first and foremost. She acknowledges being a fanatic about getting the facts right and making sure her books are based in truth, but the characters and the story are always hers.

The period of the Holocaust was one of unspeakable horrors when elements of mankind engaged in acts of enormous depravity and cruelty. Certainly there will be those adults who believe that middle-school readers should not be exposed to such subjects. In her interview with Nodelman, Matas acknowledges the possibility of such objections but says that, in her writing, it was her intention to be responsible to her material and her audience to the best of her ability. In order to do so, she has to be honest, acting as a mirror to society. As a consequence, some people may not like what they see.

In that same interview, Matas acknowledges engaging in some self-censorship. During her research for Daniel's Story, which Matas describes as "the most painful and difficult book I've ever had to research," she came upon an incident which she included in the book, but in a muted form. The incident involved German soldiers throwing babies out of hospital windows while their colleagues on the streets played the game of seeing how many they could catch on their bayonets. While the scene was included in Daniel's Story, Matas omitted the part about the bayonets, saying, "the image is too horrible for anyone, including children."

With regard to those people who fears their children would be somehow harmed by reading Daniel's Story, Matas also told Nodelman that reading about the devastation could possibly put children on their guard. Daniel's Story always provides readers with hope. At the outset of each of the four sections, Matas places Daniel on a train and has him reflecting on where he has just been. Because of this structural approach, readers understand that Daniel, at least, has survived to that point. Because the last section, "Pictures of Buchenwald," reveals that Daniel is on a passenger train that is going to Poland after the war's end, readers can celebrate that he is one of the Holocaust survivors.

Furthermore, even in the book's darkest moments, there are moments of joy, albeit brief, which remind both Daniel and readers of what "normal" life is like. After food is rationed in Frankfurt following the declaration of war, Daniel takes some of the flour ration to produce a "ghost face" to frighten his mother and sister. While they scold him, ". . . inside I enjoyed it. It felt good to be scolded about something ordinary like that—I think it made me feel that things were ordinary." In the Lodz ghetto, Daniel, now a teenager, meets Rosa in quite amusing circumstances for she walks in on him while he is removing lice from his clothing. "The shame was natural—not many fifteen- year-olds like to be caught in their underwear picking lice out of their clothes."

To a lesser extent, some readers may be concerned because, at times, the increasing atrocities being committed around Daniel cause him to question his faith in God. Following the deportation of twenty thousand people from the Lodz ghetto, Daniel observes that it is Rosh Hashanah "and for ten days people prayed to God. As for me, I had always believed in God, but at that point I didn't know what to believe. What kind of God could allow such things to happen?" In contrast, Daniel observes his father becoming more religious and asks himself the question, "Why would this experience, which would make any sane person not believe in God, do the opposite to him?"

In her autobiographical piece in Something about the Author, Matas described her own loss and rediscovery of faith. The beginning of her loss of faith, Matas said, occurred when she was a child and learned about the Holocaust. Distraught and upset at the cruelty, Matas wondered how, if there was a God, could that God permit such cruelty? She said from that point on, she basically tried to avoid the subject of the Holocaust because it was too upsetting. However, in researching and writing Daniel's Story, Matas has no choice but to confront all the cruelty she had been avoiding. During this reading and writing process, Matas becomes so depressed that she concludes that the human race, because of its capacity for committing so much evil, does not deserve to exist. However, in the middle of her terrible depression, Matas suddenly has another realization: who is she to make such a judgement? Is not her judgement similar to that made by the Nazis about the Jews, that the Jews did not deserve to exist? In effect, she found herself accepting the world as it is, a world populated with human beings, each one of whom is capable of good or evil. With that realization comes another realization: that, no matter what the circumstances, we always have choices, which include the choice to love or to hate. That realization, she concluded, was the beginning of her return to some kind of faith and belief in God. In retrospect, she can see how odd it was that her writing about the worst of mankind could, in fact, bring her back to her faith.

Many of Matas's books have dealt with the Jewish experience during World War II. Lisa also known as Lisa's War, and Jesper also known as Code Name Kris, focus on the experience of Jews in Denmark.

After the War and The Garden are postwar novels in terms of their time setting, but they both deal with the experiences of an adolescent survivor of the Holocaust who does not find the peace that the war's end is expected to bring.

Greater Than Angels and In My Enemy's House offer two other alternative experiences of European Jews during the war years. In the former, a number of Jewish adolescents are saved by the heroic actions of French Protestants. For readers who want to explore this topic further, Milton Meltzer's Rescue: The Story of How Gentiles Saved Jews in the Holocaust offers a variety of scenarios in which the lives of Jews are saved by the courageous selflessness of gentiles.

In In My Enemy's House, an adolescent Polish Jew passes herself off as a Christian and "hides" by working as a servant in the home of a high-ranking Nazi official. In Daniel's Story, Rosa, Daniel's girlfriend, also survives by hiding. As Daniel was the book's narrator, readers really do not have an opportunity to experience vicariously what such an ordeal could be like. One perspective can be found in Johanna Reiss's The Upstairs Room, an autobiographical novel about two Dutch-Jewish girls who hid for more than two years in the upstairs room of a gentile family. Hiding to Survive: Stories of Jewish Children Rescued from the Holocaust by Maxime B. Rosenberg, contains fourteen first-person accounts of Jewish children who are hidden from the Nazis.

The novel Friedrich by Hans Peter Richter also follows a young Jewish boy in Germany through the early 1930s and into the war years. Unlike Daniel, who survives the war, Friedrich is killed during an air raid when, because he is a Jew, he is not allowed to seek refuge in a bomb shelter. The true stories of other nonsurvivors, including Anne Frank, are contained in We Are Witnesses: Five Diaries of Teenagers Who Died in the Holocaust by Jacob Boas.

The Cage and To Life, autobiographical tales by Ruth Minsky Sender, deal with her adolescence when, as a Polish Jew living in the Lodz ghetto, she is sent to Auschwitz and other German labor camps. Like Daniel, Riva, the central character, survives and returns to Poland, searching for other family members who may still be alive. Older readers can also turn to adult autobiographies, such as Michel Mielnicki's Bialystok to Birkenau: The Holocaust Journal of Michel Mielnicki. In many ways, Mielnicki's experiences mirror those of Daniel, including working as an adolescent in Auchwitz-Birkenau and returning to Poland to see Jews still being killed by Christians.

During the trip from Lodz to Auschwitz, Daniel makes the observation, "A hundred people are packed into this closed freight car, and I know that many won't survive if this trip is a long one." Daniel does not elaborate about the ride in the freight car, but should readers wish to know more about how horrible those conditions actually were, then they can be directed to The Final Journey by Gudrun Pausewang. Alice Dubsky, an eleven-year-old Jewish girl, had spent two years hiding in a basement, but now she and her grandfather, plus almost fifty other people, are crammed into a cattle car on its way to Auschwitz.

"Carol Matas." In Children's Literature Review, vol. 52. Detroit: Gale, 1999. This extensive article provides a critical overview of Matas's literary corpus, including reproductions of reviews of Daniel's Story.

Jenkinson, Dave. "Portraits: Carol Matas." Emergency Librarian (May-June, 1989): 58-62. This interview with Matas early in her career explores how she came to writing and concludes with her entry into historical fiction.

"Matas, Carol: Autobiography Feature." In Something about the Author, vol. 112. Detroit: Gale, 2000. In this lengthy essay, Matas talks about growing up, her development as a writer, and how she came to write some of her books, including Daniel's Story.

"Matas, Carol." In Contemporary Authors, vol. 158. Detroit: Gale, 1998. This critical examination of Matas's writing through 1998 includes material on Daniel's Story.

"Matas, Carol." In Something about the Author. Detroit: Gale, 1997. This lengthy piece focuses on Matas's books through 1996.

"Matas, Carol." In Young Adult Writers. Detroit: Gale, 1999. Brief biographical information is complimented by a critical summary of Matas's writing for adolescents through 1997.

"Carol Matas: Writer for Children." Carol Matas http://home.earthlink.net/-carolmatas/index.html Accessed March 30,2002. Matas's thorough Web site provides extensive biographical comment by the author plus separate sections for each of the different writing genres in which she engages. In addition to providing plot summaries, in some instances Matas adds commentary which explains why she wrote a particular book.
"Carol Matas." The Writers' Union of Canada http://www.writersunion.ca/m/ matas.htm Accessed March 30,2002. This page in the Writers' Union of Canada Web site provides a four-line biographical statement, a selected bibliography plus an abbreviated list of awards Matas's books have won.