The Littlest Hitler packed a lot of punch in such a short story! I thought the innocence of the main character, Davy, paired really nicely with the overarching horror of the holocaust. Davy comes into school on Halloween dressed as Hitler and from that point on, his day is hell. The first misfortune that occurs is that the most popular girl in the class comes dressed at Anne Frank, who many people look up to as a heroic symbol of the Holocaust. Immediately, Davy is ridiculed for killing Anne (and all the Jews) and is forced to take off his costume. To make matters worse for the nine-year-old, he had the worst costume in the parade! Boudinot's does a very good job of switching off from the very seriousness of the Holocaust, to the thoughts in the brain of an innocent fourth grader. At the beginning of the story, it also mentions how it was sort-of-okay or him for him to dress as Hitler because there were no Jewish kids in his whole school, and only one Jewish family in his whole town. What's interesting, though, is that he makes a point of describing these kids at "home schooled freaks." This is implying that the town he lives in doesn't view Jews in a positive light.
Davy's growth in the story has to do with his empathy towards Jews. When trick-or-treating, he comes across the home of the Friedlanders. When they open the door and he sees the kids who are forbidden from going trick-or-treating, he immediately feels this strong sense of pity and that he has to do something for this oppressed family. I think it was really well thought out of Boudinot to put the child's Hitler experience, where he learns about the "mean" things that Hitler did, next to the scene where he interacts with Jews. Davy feels so much pity and sympathy towards that family but he doesn't know what to do to express that emotion. If he hands them his whole bag of candy or makes a scene, people (including his father) would look down on him. He decides to just act normally and accept her swiss chocolate balls. When he drives arrives at his house later that night, there is a shift from him feeling sympathetic, to him feeling empathy towards that family--and in a broader sense, the Jews. After learning that day that Jews were burned in ovens during WWII, what better way to end the story, then by having Davy experience that pain himself.
On a totally different note, when I was in third grade, everyone in my class had to make a poster board about a certain planet. I was assigned Neptune. I had spent hours putting together a gorgeous display (that was also the first time I ate glue) and citing my sources on the information I used. After completing the board, I left it directly in the middle of my dining room table and went to school the next day--because the board wasn't due till the day after. In the middle of work, my mom gets a call that the floor under the upstairs toilet flooded, and then water was coming down from the ceiling above my dining room table. This, of course, meant that my project was ruined. While I was still at school, not knowing that this occurred, my mom came home, bought new supplies, reprinted all the text and pasted it on the brand new board. When I came home, she told me what had happened and that she fixed the problem by recreating the whole thing!! I was crestfallen and furious that it wasn't my work and I ignored the fact that she left work and spent her whole day recreating it.
Another quick one: When I was around eight years old, I liked to do mischievous acts that were sort of unnoticeable. I liked to draw on the walls of my house with Sharpies, but the same color Sharpie as the wall. Unfortunately, the Sharpie colors don't match perfectly to my wall shade, so there are clearly identifiable hearts and starts on the walls of almost every room in my house.
-s.sacks
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