Refugee

Josef’s father returns from a concentration camp traumatized. He tries to throw himself overboard in Havana Harbor and is taken to a Cuban hospital, never to see his family again. While many people die after being thrown into the water in the text, Josef is the only one who jumps. This indirectly conveys the horrors of the concentration camp without reproducing these horrors in the narrative. Josef’s mother gives up entirely after her husband is left behind in Cuba and detaches herself emotionally from the peril her family faces.

Josef’s little sister is only four years old when her brother sacrifices himself to save her from the Nazis. She grows up to become Ruth Rosenberg, who welcomes Mahmoud’s family to her home in Germany in 2015. She understands that she has a Moral Duty to Help Others because of her own experience as a refugee. Her ending conveys the message that acts of heroism and help are often paid forward.

Isabel is an 11-year-old girl living in Cuba during the 1990s. She’s painfully thin because of the food shortages afflicting her country. Isabel has two great loves in her life: music and her family. In order to keep her family together during their migration to America, she trades her beloved trumpet for enough gasoline to make the journey. Her trumpet represents her sense of identity, and trading it is another example in the text of choices that children have to make in a crisis.

Isabel possesses a fighting spirit and refuses to give up despite the horrifying obstacles that confront her friends and family as they journey to Miami. Despite the promise of a better life in America, Isabel worries that she will lose her identity as a Cuban. By the end of the story, she realizes that she carries Cuba in her heart, even if she does not remain in Havana.

Isabel’s father is forced to flee Cuba because the government wants to imprison him. Like all of the fathers in the text, he experiences persecution, underscoring the point that people will undergo The Journey to a Better Life when faced with danger. Isabel’s mother is pregnant and gives birth to Isabel’s little brother in their boat just as it reaches Miami. This forms part of the text’s dramatic climax, and it generates a sense of hope as new life emerges just as they land. However, it also conveys the plight of refugees who must undergo hardship such as birth without proper care.

Isabel’s grandfather, Abuelito Padron, is the only character apart from Ruth who appears in multiple storylines. Together they convey the enduring struggles of political upheaval and international intolerance for refugees. He was one of the police officers who turned the MS St. Louis away in 1939. In 1994, he realizes that he had a moral duty to help others but failed, and now he, too, is experiencing the life-threatening results of immigration policies. He redeems himself from that mistake by creating a diversion so that his family can reach Miami before the Coast Guard catches them.

Mahmoud is a 12-year-old Syrian boy living in Aleppo in 2015. Because of all the conflict in his country, Mahmoud does his best to remain invisible. He learned the hard way that defending someone else from bullies is a good way to get beaten up. This motif of bullies runs through Mahmoud’s plotline as he learns to hide from and then stand up to bullies. This allows Gratz to present political tyranny through a child’s eyes, as the complexities of Mahmoud’s political context are partially boiled down to identifying those who are bullies and those who aren’t.

Like the other children in the story, Mahmoud is resourceful and will do anything to keep his family together during their migration to Germany. Throughout much of the novel, Mahmoud struggles with the conflict between remaining invisible and the need to ask for help. He ultimately learns that drawing attention to himself, though dangerous, is the only way to enlist the support of good people who want to assist him. After conquering his fears, he winds up leading a refugee march to freedom, highlighting the theme of coming of age in a humanitarian crisis.