The Island on Bird Street

Uri Orlev’s The Island on Bird Street (1981) is a middle-grade historical novel about Alex, an 11-year-old Jewish boy living alone in a Polish ghetto during World War II. Semi-autobiographical in nature, Orlev’s story shows Alex’s steady determination and strength as he comes of age during the dangers of Nazi occupation. The Island on Bird Street received the 1982 IBBY Honor List Book for Israel and the 1981 Mordechai Bernstein Award. Additionally, the author received the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1996 for his contributions to children’s literature. The novel explores themes of Resourcefulness and Ingenuity for Survival, Longing for Connection, and The Opposing Forces of Fear and Luck.

This guide refers to Houghton Mifflin Company’s translated edition (1983) of Keter Publishing House Jerusalem Ltd.’s publication (1981).

Content Warning: The source material and this guide feature depictions of religious discrimination, graphic violence, bullying, cursing, illness and death, substance use, and physical abuse. In particular, the text depicts antisemitism during the Holocaust, including the incarceration of Jewish people in ghettos, Nazi work and extermination camps, death, and family separation. 

Language Note: The source text includes several uses of slurs for Jewish people. This guide refers to Orlev’s representation of slurs for Jewish people without quoting the slur directly. This guide preserves the use of the text’s term “madman” in quotations.

Plot Summary

Alex is an 11-year-old Jewish boy living in Ghetto C in an unnamed city in Poland in 1943. Soldiers of Nazi Germany, under dictator Adolf Hitler, occupy Alex’s part of Poland. They established ghettos to gather and confine the city’s Jewish residents. Alex lives with his father in a house with apartments on Bird Street; they share this apartment with another family, the Gryns. Alex has a white mouse named Snow as a pet. A week before the narrative begins, Alex’s mother went from Ghetto C to visit a friend in another ghetto and did not come back.

Because German soldiers sometimes remove the Jewish people from the ghetto and send them away, Alex and his father, along with the Gryns, built a bunker to hide in below their apartment. Alex and his father have another hiding place in the ceiling. Rumors are spreading that the Nazis are killing Jewish people in camps, but his father says no one knows if they are true. Alex recalls his mother’s desire for the Jewish people to have a persecution-free home in Palestine and his father’s insistence that people should not judge one another by ethnicity, religion, or culture. One night, Alex sees his father cleaning a pistol. His father coaches him on aiming and firing.

When Alex’s father goes to work at the rope factory down the street, Alex hides in the bunker or the ceiling. Sometimes, his father takes him to work, where Alex waits with his father’s friend, Boruch, the factory’s storeroom manager. One day, German soldiers pull everyone from the factory for a “selection,” in which they keep the strong workers and send everyone else to transports leaving the ghetto for unknown destinations. The soldiers select Boruch, Alex, and his father for transport; Boruch gives Alex a knapsack with Alex’s father’s pistol and some supplies and then sends him running into the bombed-out ruins of a house at 78 Bird Street. Alex is small enough to squeeze into a hole to the cellar; no soldier pursuing him can fit. Boruch’s instructions are to wait there for his father to return.

The middle of 78 Bird Street is a wrecked, empty pit. Unsupported stairs go up to a second floor, which has a window that looks onto the Polish quarter beyond the ghetto wall. The floors for the third- and fourth-floor apartments stick out into the center of the empty space with no way to get up to them. During a brave trip to collect Snow, Alex finds that the ghetto is now mostly empty and that the Gryns, hidden in the bunker, stole all the food he and his father stashed. They give Alex only a small amount. He returns to Number 78 to wait for his father.

When his father does not come, Alex must make more trips to find food. He travels the connected lofts (attic spaces) of buildings along the street. The cellar has no second exit, so Alex acquires rope and wood and then engineers a ladder to get to the third floor of Number 78. He hoists this ladder up and down when needed. He stays out of sight by sleeping in the third floor’s larder (pantry). Soon after moving his things to the larder, German soldiers raid a bunker beneath Number 78’s cellar Alex did not know existed. The soldiers take the Jewish people living there away. Once it is abandoned, Alex takes their food supplies and enjoys a working toilet and hot shower. The next day, though, the Germans return and bomb the cellar; Alex can no longer reach the bunker.

Alex encounters looters on his trips away from his hideout. One looter, Bolek, lives in the Polish quarter and tells Alex he knows a secret passage through the wall of the ghetto. Bolek will not reveal the passage location, but he tells Alex his address in case Alex needs help.

Alex can see the street in the Polish quarter directly behind his hideout. Looking through the larder’s air vent, he grows to recognize the neighbors, the children, and a bully; he also sees a doctor who helps people in the middle of the night.

During a Jewish uprising in Ghetto A, a German soldier chases two men, Henryk and Freddy, into Number 78. Alex saves them by shooting the soldier. Henryk is injured; after Freddy goes on to fight in the uprising, Henryk tells Alex where the secret passage is. Henryk learned of it from Bolek. Alex sneaks past the ghetto wall and into the Polish quarter to get the doctor. The doctor returns with Alex and removes a bullet from Henryk. The doctor is astounded that Alex lives alone. Later, the Gestapo, the German secret police, take the doctor away.

Henryk gets typhus; Alex tends to him for three weeks. When Henryk improves, Alex decides to find Bolek, who can help Henryk leave the ghetto. On this trip, Alex meets and befriends a girl he watched, Stashya. He learns the bully’s name, Yanek. Bolek wants Alex to stay with him where he will be safe, but Alex refuses; he must wait at Number 78 for his father. He returns to the Polish quarter a few times. When Yanek calls him out as being Jewish, though, Alex ends his trips out of the ghetto.

Alex worries his food and kerosene will not last the winter. His freedom to loot for supplies is cut off when the ghetto is opened for the Polish people to claim its properties. No one claims the ruins at Number 78, but Polish children explore, forcing Alex to hide constantly. Bolek brings him treats on New Year’s Day, but Alex still refuses to leave. Stashya visits to tell Alex goodbye; she and her mother are moving to the country.

One day, the heavy snow causes part of the roof to cave in, making a treacherous hole in the cellar. The police barricade the ruins from snooping children. At night, Alex finally leaves his hideout to go to the cellar. Two men come in; Alex hides but soon realizes one is his father. They tearfully reunite; Alex shows them his hideout before leaving to join them in the forest with a partisan group.