What FDR ignored and the Times buried, the children already knew ... and in some detail. Or at least the Jewish children in war-time Palestine. Of course, the excuse was that no one knew or knew in time. Or that no one could grasp the enormity. It is clear that Franklin Roosevelt knew and many in his circle of associates and friends did, as well. The owners of The New York Times simply decided to squelch the story, as detailed by Laurel Leff in her devastating book, Buried by The Times. The fact is that everyone who might have been able to rescue the Jews of Europe knew and decided not to ... or suppressed their knowledge, which is the same thing. The ignorance excuse is laid bare in its ugliness by a new book by Yael Dorr out in Hebrew. Published by the Magnes Press at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, its title translates cumbersomely into Called Away from our School Books: The Yishuv in the Shadow of Holocaust and in Anticipation of Statehood in Children's Literature of Eretz Israel, 1939-1948." I can't read the book in its original (my Hebrew is far too weak.) So I come to it via a review in Friday's Ha'aretz by the eminent historian Dina Porat. Her essay is headlined, "Not fairy tales, these grim tales." The children's stories "didn't protect them from the horrors of war." Somehow eluding the gruesome, this literature was apparently concrete and contextual. Remember that many of the child readers were reading about their own relatives, and not only metaphorically. The dread was close: "Had the army of Field Marshall Rommel not been stopped at El Alamein in late 1942," what had happened in Europe would have happened to the Jewish children in Palestine. This is a counter-historical, of course. But since there were Arab volunteers in Hitler's armies and Haj Amin al-Hussein, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the leader of the Arabs of Palestine, was in the Fuhrer's court in Berlin, do you think that the neighbors of the Jews would have behaved differently than their neighbors in the Ukraine or Poland?