“Jan Rehner's novel The House of Izieu grabs you by the heart and doesn’t let go. It’s a wrenching portrait of a secret children’s refuge in war-torn France, where, for a time, joy replaces horror, and love brutality. Jan Rehner’s prose sings. The characters she spins are captivating, in particular the children. They are rendered so fully and intimately, their voices so pure, their personal histories so tragic, that readers will want to crawl right into the pages to comfort them. This story of selflessness and bravery is impossible to put down, and impossible to forget.” (Phyllis Rudin, author of Evie, the Baby and the Wife and My True and Complete Adventures as a Wannabe Voyageur)

“In this moving, earnest novel, Jan Rehner traces the inner and outer journeys of Sabine Zlatin, a courageous woman who risked her life during the Holocaust to try and save 44 children. Rehner, relying on historical accounts including Zlatin’s own postwar testimony, brings to life in heartfelt detail this harrowing, tragic, and inspiring story.” (Nora Gold, author of The Dead Man and Fields of Exile)

“Jan Rehner’s elegiac narrative of a chapter of the Holocaust in France fulfills a sacred obligation: to commemorate and honor the life-affirming presence of the orphaned children and their adult caregivers whose lives were brutally stolen, and whose hopes for a future were expunged during the Nazi terror. Through the plural voices and the interweaving narrative lines Rehner reimagines, we share sensory, trauma-laden memories of the pre-war past, the pleasure taken in attending to the natural world in an idyllic countryside setting, a sense of a play so inherent in childhood, post-war survival, and retribution. Alongside the small joys afforded the children, there lives in each character incalculable loss, suspended temporarily in the fragile shelter of the House of Izieu. Dramatic irony intensifies as we come to know, in fleeting measure, the children and adults compelled to play their part in the tragedy which took place some 75 years ago in rural Vichy France. I was deeply moved by this book.” (Carol Lipszyc, author of The Saviour Shoes and Other Stories)