To Make A Difference: White Rose by Kip Wilson

Growing up in the prewar days of the Third Reich, Sophie Scholl yearns to follow her older brother Hans to the university in Munich, to laugh and dance with other young people, to drink wine and talk all night, and to study and make a difference for the world.

"Our spirits are as light as dandelion fluff," she writes.

But Germany's future grows dark with the rise of Adolf Hitler. In Ulm, where she lives, the houses and workplaces of Jews are shattered and soon her Jewish neighbors begin to disappear--to where?

...my childhood is
fading away, stomped
flat by something that feels
like doom.

Hans goes off to train for the army, where as a medical student he is assigned to care for the wounded. Sophie and her friends are also called for six-month work camps where they assemble weapons of war. Her boyfriend Fritz is drafted to the frozen Eastern Front and Sophie despairs of his life and the life she has hoped for.

But finally in Munich, Sophie sees the secret glances between Hans and some of his friends, their whispered words, and their strangely ink-stained fingers every morning. Leaflets bravely speaking the truth of the horrors of Hitler's war have begun to appear around the campus, and finally Sophie confronts her brother with one, and asks the question:

With one glance at me,
Hans breaks, spills the truth.
I nod, we embrace.

Sophie Scholl joins the resistance movement called the White Rose and begins to work with the clandestine pamphleteers, purchasing paper and stamps and sometimes transporting hundreds of leaflets for mailing in her spare suitcase. When Hans is re-called to fight in the siege of Stalingrad, Sophie assumes a greater role in the preparation of their publications. To conceal their location she takes to boarding trains to mail leaflets from other cities, trying to look innocent as she rides, trying to keep her eyes off her rucksack...

... a rucksack full of treason...
a sentence to death.....

And one bright morning in 1943, Sophie and Hans are caught in a university lecture hall leaving leaflets outside each classroom, and their arrest leads to the capture of their friends as well. And on another sunny morning, Sophie and Hans are beheaded by the Gestapo's guillotine.

Sophie's wish to make a difference in Germany was not to be. The people were too terrified to object to their deaths, but in the years to follow the young students of the White Rose have become martyrs, remembered and celebrated for their courage and self sacrifice. Kip Wilson's just-published White Rose (Houghton, Mifflin Harcourt, 2019) joins the accounts of this small band that could not stop the devastation but whose writings survived to speak volumes to the peace that finally came. Written in lyrical free verse, Wilson's narrative brings to young adults of our time the immediacy of the words of these courageous and hopeful young people who gave their own lives to save their country and speak their truth to the future. Sophie Scholl speaks in her own voice, across the years, of what must be done when there is no one else who will.

I for one refuse
to be guilty
going forward.

Author Wilson provides an author's note, a dramatis personae, a glossary of German terms, and a bibliography of books in English and in German for young scholars. See also Russell Freedman's dramatic history of this movement, We Will Not Be Silent: The White Rose Student Resistance Movement That Defied Adolf Hitler (Jane Addams Honor Book (Awards)) (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Clarion, 2016) (reviewed here).