My Story: Noor-Un-Nissa Inayat Khan by Sufiya Ahmed

I first learned about Noor Inayat Khan while reading Kathryn Atwood's brilliant YA book Women Heroes of World War II: 26 Stories of Espionage, Sabotage, Resistance and Rescue. Noor's WWII experiences as a radio operator for Winston Churchill's SOE (Special Operations Executive) is now made more accessible for younger readers with Sufiya Ahmen's excellent fictional biography.

Noor was an unusual yet totally logical choice for the SOE. She was born in Moscow, Russia to a white American mother and an Indian Muslim father. The family moved from Moscow in 1914 to London, where Noor's three siblings were born, and finally, in 1920, they settled in Paris, France. 

Ahmed begins Noor's story in May 1927, as the family journeys to India to visit the place where her father had died in February. It's there that Noor begins to realize just what it means to be her father's daughter. It makes her a princess with a famous royal ancestor - Tipu Sultan, who was a hero of colonial resistance and had been killed in 1799, "fighting like a tiger to save his people." (pg 17)

Fast forward to June 1940. With the Nazi invasion of France, the Khan family leaves Paris and relocates in England, just as the Blitz begins in full force. Finding rooms in Oxford, Noor's brother Vilayat wants nothing more than to join the Royal Air Force (RAF), but ends up in the Navy instead. Meanwhile, Noor uses her Red Cross certificate working in a military hospital. But getting caught in a daylight air raid while on a day trip into London makes Noor realize she wants to do more for the war effort. She decides to join the WAAF (Women's Auxiliary Air Force). There, she becomes Nora Baker and is sent to Yorkshire for training in November 1940, where the weather is cold and windy, and the exercises are physically challenging. It is also there she discovers she has a real ability for Morse Code. 

Noor in uniform

After her WAAF training is complete, Noor is assigned to work in Bomber Command, but when she applies for a new commission, she's sent to Wiltshire for a 7-week training course. Afterwards, she is called for an interview, but when they ask her how she feels about Indian Independence from the British Empire, she is convinced that her answer, that she "believes the Indian people should be given their freedom," (pg 64) spells the end of her career. 

Instead, thanks to her excellent communication skills and her ability to speak French like a native, Noor is asked to become part of Churchill's SOE and begins training for her eventual return to France to work undercover as the first woman radio operator with the Resistance there under the code name Madeleine. The majority of the book is devoted to Noor's war work and are some really exciting chapters. Unfortunately, Noor was betrayed and as she is getting ready to leave France, she makes a poor decision and ends up captured by the Gestapo. It is, as Ahmed writes, the beginning of the end. 

My Story: Noor-Un-Nissa Inayat Khan is written in the first person in Noor's voice. The book is organized in chapters that reflect Noor's activities in a given month. This makes it easier for readers to follow Noor's many adventures in India, England, and France.  

I was very curious to read My Story: Noor-Un-Nissa Inayat Khan, first because I already knew about her life and work during WWII in France, and second, I was curious to see how it would be handled for young readers. And I thought that given the complexity of the subject matter, Sufiya Ahmed to a really great job of synthesizing the material for her target age group. Most kids have probably never heard of Noor, and it is especially important for young Muslim readers to know about her. 

What was particilarly good to see is that yes, Noor is a hero, but as Ahmed shows, she is not without flaws, doubts, and weaknesses, and sometimes she's even headstrong and impulsive. But Ahmed also shows how her parents were great influences on Noor, as were her ancestors. 

One thing of note, Ahmed points out, is that Noor had originally wanted to become a children's author. She loved tells tales to her siblings growing up and had even published a book of short stories called Twenty Jātaka Tales in 1939 and which I highly recommend since it is still in print. 

My Story: Noor-Un-Nissa Inayat Khan is a definite must read for young readers interested in WWII history and/or women war heroes. It should be of particular interest to young Muslim readers.

This book is recommended for readers age 8+

This book was purchased for my personal library

Ghostscape by Joe Layburn

Ghostscape is a small, time travel story about a young Muslim Somali girl named Aisha. She is a very unhappy, angry girl, who is now living in London with her mother after her father was murdered in Somalia’s civil war.

The story begins with Aisha crying in the girl’s bathroom because she has once again been bullied by a girl named Chevon. Hearing a cough, Aisha opens the door and there is a pale young boy standing there. She doesn’t recognize the boy and he isn’t dressed like anyone else at school, in fact, the bathroom isn’t even the same. And the boy is asking her if she is afraid of the bombs. Next thing Aisha knows, she back in the right girl’s room - alone.

Later, in the playground, she tells two friends about the experience. Chevon overhears her and threatens to tell Aisha’s mother that she has a boyfriend, knowing that goes against Aisha’s religion. The two girls get into fight and Aisha again finds herself in the presence of the mysterious boy, yelling at her that the sirens are going off and they are in danger.

This time, Aisha finds out the boy is named Richard and it is 1940 London, in the midst of the Blitz. They run through the streets to the shelter of a railway arch to wait out the bombing raid. Richard tells her that he lives with his grandfather, who refuses to go to a shelter during raids. When the air raid warden comes by, they discover he cannot see Aisha.

During a break in the bombing, Aisha goes with Richard to his grandfather’s house. They find his grandfather surveying the remains of their home, which has been destroyed by a bomb along with many other homes on the street. Everyone is taken to nearby Trentham School for shelter. This is also the name of Aisha’s school, but they don’t look a bit alike. They find a spot on the floor and settle in. Just before they fall asleep, Richard asks Aisha to tell him about Chevon.

When she wakes up, Aisha is in her own bed and her mother tells her she had fainted during her fight with Chevon. Aisha can’t wait to get to school that day to talk to the teacher who teaches World War II history. But instead of Miss Brown, Aisha finds Chevon in the classroom, ready to exact some justice. To Aisha’s delight, Richard also shows up and starts to invisibly torment Chevon. Richard manages to actually scare an apology out of Chevon, along with a promise to leave Aisha alone.

Later, Miss Brown tells Aisha to speak with the lollipop lady (crossing guard) about the local history of the area during the war, but she does find out that the Trentham School was bombed during a raid and had to be rebuilt.

By the end of the school day, Aisha has been suspended from school until the following Monday, resulting in yet another terrible fight with her mother. But suspension gives her time to go to the library and read about the bombing of the Trentham School. Aisha determines that she must find Richard and warn him.

But time travel can be capricious. Will she be able to find Richard again or lose the first person she has cared about since her father’s murder in Somalia? Will she ever come to terms with the loss of her father and begin to get along with her mother? The ending yields a bit of a surprise for Aisha.

Ghostscape is a good book. It is essentially about differences, similarities and acceptance. Despite the fact that both kids come from paranoid times when suspicion and mistrust of “the other” run high, and despite their individual differences, Richard and Aisha accept each other’s presence unquestioningly. Their differences become that which binds them together and gives the story its interesting twist. Richard and Aisha are reflections of each other, they have both experienced loss because of war; both are scared, and scarred; if Aisha can save Richard, she can save herself.

Though I do highly recommend this book, I did have one problem with Ghostscape. Layburn is certainly not without talent as a writer, but I think because the issues he addresses in this book are serious and it should have been a longer, more finely drawn story. For example, one of the things he does address is the issue of bullying, particularly how distressing it can be and how easily it can be missed by those who should be more aware of what goes on among students. Instead I felt that he have found a true life incident and that was his focus, not the characters and the issues.

The true story upon which Ghostscape is based has been the subject of disagreement between the British government and the people of the East End of London since it happened. After a night of heavy bombing, hundreds of people made homeless were moved into the shelter of the South Hallsville School, in Canning Town in the East End. On September 10, 1940, the school was hit by a bomb. The government claimed that it killed 73 people, but the area residents believed it was more like 400, mostly women and children.

An interesting article about the author, Joe Layburn, and the genesis of the book can be found at Ghost of a Chance

This book is recommended for readers ages 9-12.
This book was purchased for my personal library.

The Grand Mosque of Paris. A Story of How Muslims Rescued Jews during the Holocaust by Karen Gray Ruelle and Deborah Durland DeDaix

The Grand Mosque of Paris is a little known but important story, just like the The Cigarette Sellers of Three Crosses Square was; a book about people helping others in a time of great peril. The central theme of The Grand Mosque can be summed up in the Islamic hadith* and a Jewish proverb quoted by Ruelle and DeDaix:

“Save one life, and it is as if you’ve saved all of humanity.”

The Grand Mosque of Paris was opened in 1926 on land donated by the French government in tribute to the many Muslims of her North African colonies who fought and died for France in World War I. At the time, most of the mosque’s members were Kabyle Muslims, Berbers from Kabylia in Algeria. It is a large place with both religious and social areas, including living accommodations, so that many people can be within it’s walls at any given time. When the Nazis invaded Paris in 1940 and began their roundups of Jews for deportation, it did not take long for the rector of the mosque, Si Kaddour Bengharrit, to realize that the Muslim community could do something to help the Jews – they had both the space and the means to do this. And so the Muslims of the Grand Mosque began to rescue Jews, and within three months of the Nazi occupation of Paris, the rector and his congregation were suspected of and warned against helping anyone escape to safety.

The story is well done and well researched but the authors also write that attempts to verify much of what they found for this book were not terribly successful:

Writing about clandestine events that took place at a time of turmoil involving people who had an oral rather than a written tradition, and with many of the participants having now passed away, presents many difficulties.” (pg34)

Yet, there is enough evidence to prove that it happened and Ruell and DeDaix present the story in part by using examples of people who had been helped. One such person was Salim Halali, a Berber Jew from Algeria, studying in Paris to become a singer. Salim found refuge in the mosque and received a “Certificate of Conversion” from the rector. The rector even had a stonecutter called in to carve a false gravestone with Salim’s family name on it for authenticity. Although Salim remained at the mosque until the war was over, most of the people who received help did not stay as long. In fact, only those Jews who also looked North African were able to stay in the mosque for more than a few days, since it was easy for them to pass as Muslims. Those who did not look North African had to be guided out to safety as quickly as possible.

According to Ruell and DeDaix, the Muslims had a real advantage as far as the Nazis were concerned. Though the mosque was suspected of helping Jews, the Nazis didn’t target its members for it because they feared an uprising of Muslims in Northern Africa and the Germans were already fighting the Allies there. And on the occasions when the Nazis did show up to search the mosque, the members had various ways of delaying their entrance, giving the people inside time to hide. In addition, though the authors do not indicate whether or not they were actually sick or orphans, many of the Jewish children brought to the mosque were sent to Muslim clinics outside Paris to protect them from the Nazis. These clinics were run by a Tunisian Dr. named Ahmed Somia. There, they administered to the children as well as Allied pilots, parachutists and even spies who found themselves injured and trapped in France.

The Muslim helpers had many ways of doing what they needed to do in order to help the Jews. Ruell and DeDaix explain that as members of the French Resistance, the Kabyles could safely carry messages and instructions written in their native language which was difficult and understood only by other Kabyles. As businessmen, they were also able to sneak people into the mosque with the help of their deliverymen using a three-wheeled bicycle with a large bin in front. Once inside the mosque, the members could provide the escapees with whatever they needed until they could be secreted out through a complicated series of tunnels. These tunnels, sometimes compared to the American Underground Railroad, were the result of stones quarried underground for constructing the buildings in Paris centuries ago. The Jews would then be led through the tunnels to the River Seine and put on to barges. There, the Jews were hidden in the large barrels that were used for delivering wine to Paris.

The authors also did the illustrations for this book and they are simply lovely, providing a real sense of the story. The Grand Mosque is, in reality, a truly beautiful place and the illustrations capture much of the artistry of the North African craftsmen who built the mosque. The illustrations give the sense of an oasis of peace and calm and safety in a world gone mad.

This is a highly recommendable book, containing a lot in this interesting and touching information. I think it would be a wonderful addition to a class learning about the Holocaust. There is an excellent teacher’s guide provided by the publisher, Holiday House, for use with this book at

http://www.holidayhouse.com/docs/TheGrandMosqueEdGuideFINAL.Web.pdf

*A hadith is a saying attributed in some way to the Prophet Muhammad.

Non-Fiction Monday is hosted this week by  http://blog.wrappedinfoil.com/2010/09/nonfiction-monday-for-september-20-2010/