The Children of Topaz: The Story of a Japanese-American Internment Camp Based on a Classroom Diary

Rating:
Summary: 5th grade class learns about discrimination during WW2
Review: We are class 5T in Holland Elementary School in Holland, MA, USA. We just finished reading The Children of Topaz for our Holocaust unit in Reading. This was our fifth literature study book of the year.

This book is about a diary kept by a 3rd grade class in a Japanese internment camp in Utah during WW2. It was about the life and times of the camp community. The 3rd graders illustrated their diary. The book showed some of those pages. There were also photographs. The book covered the span of one school year.

Some of us liked how such young children wrote such an amazing story. It was amazing how the Japanese took the relocation so well. The children drew very good pictures in the diary.

Some of us did not like The Children of Topaz because it wasn't fiction, and we like fiction. The book was also kind of boring. It didn't have very many exciting parts. It was also depressing to read. Some of us felt there could have been more writing by children and less commentary. We found the terms and names confusing.

Some of us felt uncomfortable reading this book. The people who put the Japanese in this camp were us, the American people. We should have thought before we placed innocent American people in camps because of the way they looked. The whole story was about racism. It was heartbreaking.