The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain

The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain, by Peter Sís, is the 2008 winner of the Robert F. Sibert Informational Medal. This was a fascinating and true story of the author’s experiences growing up in Czechoslovakia during the Cold War. In this book, he combined historical notes and explanations, drawings from his childhood and today, family photos, journal entries in chronological order, and a simple text that tied it all together. The book began with a helpful introduction and ended with a satisfying afterword. We learned what it really was like for a young person to grow up in a communist country at that time, and how the people who lived there were treated. The totalitarian Communistic control of the people’s beliefs and actions was very similar to what I’ve read recently about China during that time period. Anyone who disagreed or seemed to promote capitalistic or progressive ideas was suspect and could be punished. The author got out in 1984, five years before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. He told his children that he came to America because of his drawing.