This true story of one of the few survivors of a Russian concentration camp was enthralling to read. Zhanna and her sister Frina are two of the only known survivors and they kept their story secret for years until her granddaughter wrote to her and asked about her life at 13. This opened the floodgates and Grandma Z shared her story. The original documentation was written by her son for adult readers. However, Susan Hood was able to partner as a co-author and record the passages in prose. Most of the book is written in free verse, however, it uses poetic techniques. The author explains each type of poem used in an afterword: tercet, list poem, couplet, cinquain, ABC poem, and so on. The book is visually appealing in addition to being a narrative feat.

The story of Zhanna (Anna)'s resistence and resilience, her near misses with capture by the Nazis and her musical talent which saved her time and again was a story I will be turning to again and again. This is inspiring and will be popular with middle grade readers. I plan to select this novel for our biography section at our library.

“I don’t care what you do. Just live.”

So says Zhanna’s father before telling her to run away from the column of Jews being marched to Drobytsky Yar. Her father is smart enough to know that a massacre is coming, but he thinks Zhanna is strong enough to survive and small enough that the nearest guard will let her escape (with a pocket watch as bribe). And she does, and then she and her sister spend the rest of the war trying to stay alive.

As you might expect from a book set in Ukraine during WWII and the years leading up to it, this true story was harrowing. Zhanna and her sister Frina experienced true horrors—from the state-induced Ukrainian famine of the 1930s to the Nazi invasion and the holocaust. Because of the subject matter, this might be a better choice for the older end of middle grade and YA readers. I read it with my 11-year-old-twins and it made for some good discussions about history and warfare.

Though the subject matter is sad, the book is very well done. It’s one I won’t soon forget. There is something so compelling about young people trying to survive dark times. Each act of kindness seems more meaningful, each misstep has such potentially disastrous consequences, and each escape is such a huge victory.

Note: the style of the book took a while to get used to. It alternates third-person point of view and first-person point of view, and sometimes nonstandard font sizes and layouts are used to help tell the story. The chapters are very short, and it took a while (until the Holodomor) for my kids to be interested, but then they were hooked.

I highly recommend the book, for the appropriate audiences. I received a review copy from Netgalley and the publisher, but I plan on buying a copy for my home library when it releases next year.

Alias Anna
A True Story of Outwitting the Nazis
by Susan Hood; Greg Dawson
Pub Date 22 Mar 2022
HarperCollins Children's Books, HarperCollins
Children's Nonfiction | History | Poetry


I am reviewing a copy of Alias Anna through HarperCollins Children’s Books and Netgalley:



Written in free verse format Alias Anna is a powerful story about survival against all odds.






Alias Anna is the moving story of how young Ukrainian Jewish piano prodigies Zhanna (alias “Anna”) and her sister Frina outplayed their pursuers while hiding in plain sight during the Holocaus.



She would no longer be Zhanna she’d use an Alias A for Anna. A for alive.




After the Germans invade the Ukraine Zhanna, a young Jewish girl, must leave behind her friends, her freedom, and her promising musical future at the world’s top conservatory. Without any time to say goodbye Zhanna, her sister Frina, and their entire family are removed from their home by the Nazis and forced on a long, cold, death march. When a guard turns a blind eye Zhana takes the opportunity to escape and that’s what she does with nothing more than her musical talent, her beloved sheet music, and her father’s final plea: “I don’t care what you do. Just live.” She would later discover that Frina had escaped as well.


I give Alias Anna five out of five stars!


Happy Reading!

Zhanna Arshanskaya, a curious and fearless five year old girl, was given music lessons "to corral her energies...slowly, steadily...Chopin, Brahms, and Beethoven soon conjured up all that was good in the five year-old's life...Learning to play in the dark...[the way] Chopin taught his own students...pianists can show off their memory of the music and their mastery of the keys."

Ukraine, early 1930's. Dimitri was a candymaker. He was a self-taught violinist. Dimitri invested in a small upright piano shipped from Germany. Zhanna and Frina, two years her junior, lived with their parents in a home filled with music, literature and love. Two sisters, both piano prodigies, but so different in temperment; Zhanna always adventurous, Frina always "swaddling her dolls". In 1935, the Arshansky family was forced to move to a one room, run-down apartment in Kharkov, the former capital of Ukraine. Zhanna and Frina were soon accepted at the Kharkov Conservatory of Music.

"All music stopped, the way some birds go silent in the still air before a storm. A decree...all Jews must be evacuated...bone-chilling December cold...an eight mile march to a designated abandoned tractor factory...marching with small souvenirs of the lives they led...Dimitri's gold pocket watch...Zhanna's favorite piano piece, Chopin's Fantaisie-Impromptu "tucked inside her shirt, by her heart." A death march toward a ravine. A slim chance of survival. Dimitri's whispered words, "I don't care what you do. Just survive."

"...Compassion can be found where you least expect it...She'd hide behind a new identity-an alias...She wouldn't be Zhanna...she'd drop the Zh from her name and become Anna". Frina would become Marina. Anna and Marina Morozova. They needed to find an orphanage, the only place where official papers could be issued to validate made up names and ages. Playing the piano inside the orphanage, the music attracted passing German soldiers. They now had Nazi fans. "With expertise and emotion, Zhanna played her fury out, played her fear out, played her heart out."

It started with an eighth grade history project. What was life like when your grandparents were 13 years old? In 1940, Aimee's Grandma Z was 13 years old. In response to Aimee's letter of request for information for her project, Zhanna decided to share her long buried past. The floodgates were now opened. Journalist and author Greg Dawson, Zhanna's son, did extensive research on his mother's past, culminating in the tome, "Hiding in the Spotlight" published in 2009. In collaboration with children's author Susan Hood, Zhanna's story comes to life for readers ten years and older. "Susan's poetry create(s) a nonfiction biography in verse...to echo the music that played such a big part of their lives." "Alias Anna: How a Girl and Her Music Outwitted the Nazis" is a vivid, powerful, descriptive read. Most of the book is written in free verse with no set meter or rhyme scheme. This reader was blown away by the resolve displayed by two teenage virtuosos who were determined "to live". A must read for middle grade students.

Thank you HarperCollins and Net Galley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

What makes this astounding is that it is the true story of two young Ukrainian girls, who, by dint of their own resourcefulness, combined with the help of heroic strangers, managed to escape from a death march in which their family perished, finding their way to safety and eventually, the United States. Extensive back matter includes photographs, letters, and suggested reading.

The Holocaust (also known as the Shoah) was the attempted genocide of the entire Jewish population in Europe carried out by German dictator Adolf Hitler and his collaborators between 1941 and 1945. Crafted as the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, Hitler’s ultimate goal was the extermination of an entire people from the face of the earth, a horrific crime in aggregate.

While the crimes of the Nazis are unparalleled in the history of humanity, forgetting the stories of the people who were murdered and the people who survived is also a crime of incalculable magnitude. It is our duty to call out injustice wherever we see it, to speak truth to power, and to hold in memory the crimes of the past so that we can be the architects of a more just and equitable future.

This duty is not one that can be transferred or reassigned. We remember not only as an act of preservation but as one of defiance. Zhanna’s story is one of millions.

Alias Anna: A True Story of Outwitting the Nazis tells the story of Zhanna Arshanskaya and her sister Frina, who survived the Holocaust by quite literally hiding in plain sight, creating new non-Jewish identities for themselves and using their musical abilities to perform for high-ranking Nazi officers, providing entertainment to the very people responsible for the murder of their entire family because they had no other choice. It was play or die. And too much had been sacrificed for the sisters to die.

When most people think of the Holocaust, they conjure up images of concentration camps, of gas chambers and emaciated bodies stacked carelessly in mass graves. There were indeed many concentration camps operated by the Nazis, but they were indifferent to the methods used as long as the job—annihilating the Jewish people from the face of the earth—was done.

For the majority of the Soviet Jews, the Nazis’ primary method of execution was the firing squad, whereby they would march them to pits and ravines and unleash volleys of bullets. They also used fire and carbon monoxide when bullets were deemed insufficient. In December 1941, the Nazis rounded up the majority of the Jews from Kharkov and made them march to an abandoned tractor factory outside the city. After a few weeks of extreme deprivation, given little to no food and having scant protection against the elements, the Jews of Kharkov (including Zhanna, her sister Frina, her parents, and her grandparents) were marched to the ravine at Drobitsky Yar, facing certain execution.

Before the ill-fated march to Drobitsky Yar, Zhanna and Frina lived what could be called charmed lives with their family in Kharkov. They were musical prodigies of the highest caliber, becoming the youngest students (ages eight and six at the time) ever accepted into and given scholarships to the famed Kharkov Conservatory of Music. It was there that Zhanna was first introduced to her favorite piece of music, her choice composition—Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu. The sheet music for this composition would become Zhanna’s only material possession and thus the only physical reminder of her former life, though she could not have foreseen this.

Dmitri Arshansky was no fool. He knew with absolute certainty that the Nazis were marching them toward their deaths, and he also believed that young Zhanna was the only one who might have a chance of escaping.

Knowing this, his last gift and last act of fatherly love was to give one of their guards his golden pocket watch that he’d managed to hide during the long march in exchange for the man turning a blind eye when his daughter jumped out of line and made her escape. His final admonition to her was this: I don’t care what you do. Just live. The greatest expression of love has to be giving the last thing you have to the person you love the most; if a greater love exists, I am unaware of it.

It was Fantaisie-Impromptu that she clutched against her chest as she jumped out of line and blended into a crowd of onlookers. Knowing it was to be the last time she would see her family, she wept and wept. Not knowing where else to go, Zhanna made her way back to Kharkov. Once there, she first sought shelter with her friend and classmate Svetlana Gaponovitch and her family. She thought that since the father of the family was Jewish, despite the fact that he longer lived in the household, she would be shown mercy by people who understood her situation. Instead, she had the door slammed in her face.

Unsure of where to go next and desperately tired, hungry, and cold, she knocked on the door of another classmate, Lida Slipko. Rumor had it that Lida’s mother was an anti-Semite, but young Zhanna was out of options and at the end of her rope. To her great surprise, they (Lida and her mother) hastened her in and shut the door behind her, showing her more compassion and common humanity than she had received at the hands of the Gaponovitch family.

Her brief respite was not to last, however. Zhanna knew that to stay too long in one place would endanger not only herself but the people who sheltered her, and so Lida suggested she go to the home of Nicolai Bogancha, an acquaintance and crush of hers who lived in the same neighborhood as Zhanna did growing up.

The Bogancha family was a saving grace for Zhanna. There in their home she felt safe, cared for, and hopeful for the future. It was also during her time staying with the Bogancha family that she learned something truly miraculous—her sister Frina was still alive. After learning this, one night Nicolai’s father snuck out and retrieved Frina, bringing her to Zhanna, back to the last link she had left in the world. Words are insufficient to describe the absolute elation Zhanna experienced when she learned that her sister had managed to escape. To this day, historians have no idea how Frina managed to escape the death march to Drobitsky Yar. Frina herself never revealed how, not even to Zhanna. Some things are just too painful to share, even with the people we love most.

Together, the sisters were far too recognizable. After all, they had been performing in public for quite some time, given their enormous talent at such young ages. They knew they had to leave Kharkov, their home, and forge a new path somewhere else, somewhere the Nazis couldn’t reach them. Nicolai’s parents helped the sisters to craft new identities, giving them aliases and a backstory to protect them moving forward. They thus became Anna and Marina Morozova, orphans who had lost both parents—their mother during the German bombing of Kharkov and their father in battle while acting as an officer in Stalin’s Red Army.

As non-Jewish Russian orphans, if they could secure admission into an orphanage they could have identification papers drawn up, legally ratifying their new names and stories and giving them a modicum of protection against Nazi inquiry.

They managed to do just this, and by some act of divine providence or merciful coincidence, the orphanage they ended up at had a decrepit piano. It wasn’t much, this battered and careworn old instrument, but the talented sisters coaxed it to life and made it sing, bringing life and joy to all who heard their beautiful music. German soldiers passing by heard the lovely notes emanating from the run-down orphanage, and the director of the orphanage was so elated at this attention that he hired a piano tuner to make the instrument worthy of its practitioners.

The piano tuner’s name was Misha Alexandrovich, a kindly and intelligent man who took to Zhanna right away. He pleaded with her to come and play for the directors of the music school at Kremenchug. She was highly resistant to this suggestion, naturally not wanting to draw that much attention to herself and her sister. However, in the end she realized it would draw even more attention to refuse such a beneficent offer, and thus agreed to go.

Zhanna and Frina (Anna and Marina) accompanied Misha to Kremenchug, and the director of the school was so taken with them that they were given a studio to live and practice in. The sisters couldn’t believe their good fortune.

There was a catch to the director’s generosity, however. She needed the girls to play piano for the singers and dancers who were required to perform for the Germans at the theater next door to the school. When the theater director heard Zhanna play, he hired the sisters on the spot. And so that is how the Arshanskaya sisters came to play for the very Nazi officers who had upended their lives forever. They had taken away their home, their family, their state, and their very names, but they could not break their spirits. In the end, Zhanna and Frina would reign triumphant while the Nazi regime crumbled.

Alias Anna is a beautiful story of courage, resilience, and the triumph of the human spirit. It is a testament to the Arshanskaya sisters who survived despite all odds and the Jewish people who showed the Nazis and the world that you can destroy the body but you cannot destroy the soul, not with any force or weapon known to man. I want every person living to read this book.

*Conflicting birthdates are given for Zhanna. Alias Anna gives her birthdate as April 1st, 1927 while the oral history recorded with Zhanna by The Breman Museum gives her birthdate as February 1st, 1927. In deference to Greg Dawson, I have kept the date listed in Alias Anna.

Both a stirring and moving account of the time period as well as a love letter to the power and importance of music. The poems are lovely and varied, masterfully blending lyrical lines with source material and fact.

A fascinating, harrowing and heart wrenching journey through war, trauma and survival. What a riveting story, I’m so grateful the author was able to get her Grandmother to open up before this story was lost to time.
I greatly appreciated all the back matter as well, and found the story of the story just as interesting
Accessible, emotional and so important this book will stay with me for a long while.
A wonderful addition to any classroom or library collection.

This is a beautiful story in verse about a Russian musical prodigy and her willingness to survive through the Holocaust. This book broke my heart and was such a beautiful story that needs to be told.

Thank you NetGalley for this ARC!

Thank you to the publisher for the e-ARC of this true story in verse.

I thought this was a well told story that read like fiction. The seemingly vast majority of books written during World War II tend to focus on Germany, France and Poland, but the Russian people suffered tremendously first at the hands of Hitler, and later Stalin. Their stories are ones that need to be heard and told and this book does a great job at highlighting that.

This powerful story strongly affected me and I think it will strongly affect middle grade readers too. The story of how a musical prodigy and her sister escaped from the Nazis is horrifying and gripping. It is told through poetry by the talented author, Susan Hood, working with Zhanna’s son, also an accomplished author. This memorable story is one of human strength and desire to endure. We only know it because Zhanna’s granddaughter had a school assignment to ask a relative about his or her life when he or she was thirteen. And amazingly, Zhanna’s opened up to her granddaughter. Through the story, the reader learns a great deal of history, but also about the human desire to survive even the most terrible horrors. Back matter includes authors’ notes by Susan Hood and Greg Dawson, photos, and a copy of the letter sent to Zhanna by her granddaughter. This is an important book to share with middle grade readers. It provides many topics to explore in social studies, especially Holocaust studies, but also how authors create their books and the importance of preserving memories from the past.

Incredibly fascinating, based-in-fact verse novel about two musically gifted Jewish Soviet sisters who escaped the Nazis in World War II. Well-documented with source material including but not limited to author’s notes, photos, citations, quotes, letters and interviews. Heart-stopping action could have been stolen from a Hollywood movie screenplay. Coupled with the fact that the memoir itself stems from a granddaughter’s genealogy assignment, makes the book an obvious essential for a middle school library.