Original Title: The Silver Sword (1956)

This old Scholastic book jumped out at me from a church library years ago and followed me all the way across the ocean, where it’s sat patiently on my shelf waiting to be enjoyed. This past week, I found myself in the mood for a tale from WWII, and I was thrilled from cover to cover with this one. I was glad to see that it’s still in print, because it definitely deserves to be.

This piece of historical fiction by Ian Serraillier is “taken from true accounts,” a promise from the back cover that I’m well-inclined to believe. It follows three young siblings and a friend on a trek across bombed-out nations in the closing years of WWII Europe.

Plot Summary

With his father in a German prison, young Edek fires a rifle from his upstairs room at the soldiers and their van as they kidnap his mother, hitting one storm trooper in the arm as the van flees the scene. Knowing full well that the Nazis would return with vengeance, Edek and his two sisters escape through their attic moments before the Nazis detonate their house. The children then flee to the woods and hide for months on end, until the Russians rout the Nazis and liberate Warsaw.

Meanwhile, their father escapes his own prison and returns to find his home destroyed and the neighbors hopeless about his family’s safety. He convinces a young urchin named Jan (pronounced “Yahn”) to keep his eyes open for his kids, leaving him with a message of “Switzerland” on his lips and a silver letter-opener in his hands. It’s these hopeful gifts that later convince the children and Jan to make the perilous journey through occupied nations to the comfortable promise of Switzerland and their father’s arms.

Personal Reflections

Although this book reads well for an adult like me, it’s a novel for youth, a fact betrayed not only by the publisher (Scholastic) but also by the illustrations and the constant inclusion of stray animals protected by Jan. I actually started reading this book aloud to my kids, but once again, they lost interest (it’s a sad time in my life for that one reason!). I did not lose interest myself, and I enjoyed it in small snatches of time during our most recent travel.

What I loved most about this book was its unique look at a world most would like to forget—the desolation of post-war Europe. Cities were leveled. Parents were killed. Refugees abounded. Liberators, occupiers, enemies, friends, foreigners, and neighbors were all a jumbled mess of humanity surrounding a person that forced a distrust and loneliness unrivaled by any other period in history. And yet through such mire these children walked for thousands of miles with a tiny hope that their father still lived and awaited their safe return.

What I felt was missing (for me, an American reader 80 years after the fact) was a broader picture of the War. I don’t know my WWII history well enough to know when the Russians routed the Nazis from Poland. I don’t even know my geography well enough to know what all stood in the way of these kids’ journey from Warsaw to Switzerland. I can’t picture the distance, terrain, occupiers, etc. At one point, the children leave Russian occupation and cross over into the American-occupied zone. This book was first published in Europe 10 years following the events, so virtually everyone could visualize the setting at the time. I simply could not. Nevertheless, it proved to be an exciting story with thick plots, several well-drawn characters, and a pacing that’s fit for the upper-youth genre.

A Peak into the Russian Side of WWII

One thing that’s lacking in American literature is solid info about the Eastern Front. Contrary to what we’d like to think, America didn’t singlehandedly end the War in Europe. Far from it. Not only were we late to the game, but when we did eventually join, we had battle-hardened compatriots from all the Allied war-torn nations at our side, plus secret revolutionaries from Nazi-occupied regions besides. Add to all this the Russian front, which eventually disabled the Nazis’ eastern flank, and it’s clear that America was just a large, shiny new cog added to a rumbling machine in desperate need of repair. The machine won the war, not the cog.

Hindsight being what it is, though, it was also very interesting to read how the Russian army moved and grew.

Here [at the Elbe near Rosslau] they were held up for half a day by a spearhead of the Russian army, bound (so rumor had it) for Prague to drive the Germans out of Czechoslovakia.

Never before had Ruth seen so many soldiers. First came the tanks to clear the way. Next, column after column of marching soldiers, tired and dirty in their ragged uniforms. They came from the Ukraine and the Tartar republics, from the Ural mountains and the Caucasus, from the countries of the Baltic, from Siberia, Mongolia. Over the bridge they poured in their thousands, while everyone else stood by to let them pass…

Columns of women and girls in grey-green uniform, with tight blouses and high boots. They had come to do the cooking and washing, to help in the hospitals and look after the sick. Tagged onto them were clusters of small boys picked up from the woods and burned-out villages. They had come because they were hungry and the Red Army was ready to feed them. (108-110)

The wayward peoples from Soviet lands were drawn to their Russian liberators at a time when all hope seemed lost. The community they found there was varied yet united. It’s no wonder that the U.S.S.R. had such strength and loyalty in its heyday! Oh the horrors these wandering people eventually endured! Horrors they could never have anticipated.

This was such a tiny portion of this novel, a glimpse at a side of the war Americans rarely see, that it really struck me hard. It makes me wonder about liberation and loyalty. What loyalties does one owe to his liberator? What are the limits to that loyalty, and what boundaries should be set from the very beginning?

Conclusion

I truly loved this book, and it’s no wonder: it was republished in 1966 —my favorite literary decade—and covers some of my favorite themes of WWII, survival, and children’s literature. I wish my kids had stuck with it when I read it aloud, but I guess I’ll have to trust them to pick it up on their own. I encourage them to do it—and I encourage you to do the same.

©2025 E.T.