When Johanna’s father says good-bye to her, neither dreams it will be over four years before they see each other again. "Take care of the little riders," her father says as he leaves her. . Johanna lived in America, but her father was a sea captain who got lonely for his wife on his long voyages, so he had decided to take her along on one and let Johanna spend some time in Holland with her grandparents. No one expected World War II to start or the German Army to invade Holland. Now Johanna’s parents had not been able to come and take her home as planned. She thought of them as she watched for the little horsemen her father had loved, to ride out on their white horses from the doors under the church steeple when the clock struck twelve. She loved the mounted noblemen of old, too, as did everyone in the little village. They, like the town itself, were hundreds of years old, and when they rode out of the doors, the church carillon played old Dutch folk tunes. For many they symbolized the Dutch people’s love of freedom -- the freedom Hitler’s army was suppressing.

The care of the church and the little riders belonged to Johanna’s grandfather. He was the only one who understood the complex mechanisms that made them work, and Johanna helped her grandfather care for the riders as her father had done before her. Johanna loved her attic room at her grandparents’ house where she could look out from her window across to the church and watch the little riders.

But one afternoon, a German officer, a Captain Braun, requisitions Johanna’s room to use himself, and Johanna has to start sleeping on the couch in Grandfather’s den. Everyone is quite upset over this invasion of privacy, especially since grandfather has a forbidden radio at home, and holds secret weekly meetings upstairs. Needless to say, Captain Braun gets a very cold welcome, and no one speaks to him.

When Johanna tells Grandfather it will be hard to sleep without seeing and hearing the little riders, and how Captain Braun has no right to be in her room and hear them, Grandfather replies that Captain Braun never will see them. Grandfather explains the Germans have forbidden them to ride any longer and that he had shut the doors. Even worse than that, Grandfather fears the Germans will steal them and melt them down to make ammunition, because they are made of lead. It is agreed that Grandfather will hide them carefully under Johanna’s bed, and then the underground will sneak them away where they can’t be found.

Meanwhile, Captain Braun begins to play his flute at night, and Johanna begins to listen. One night when Captain Braun was out, she went back to look at the room. She saw pictures of Captain Braun’s family -- mother, wife, and little boy, and she began to wonder about them.

And then one night the soldiers come to get the key to the church from Grandfather so that they can take the little riders. When the soldiers find them missing, they take grandmother and grandfather away to Headquarters for a hearing, threatening that they will be back to search the house, and if they find the little soldiers, it won’t go well for Johanna’s grandparents. They decide to let Johanna stay in the house alone. She decides the fate of the little riders and her grandparents is up to her, and she can think of only one place to hide the little riders -- in a cubby hole at the back of the closet in her old attic room -- the one Captain Braun now occupies. He was always gone on this night of the week, and she figured if she worked fast, she could get the little riders hidden.

She sets to work immediately, but the figures are awfully heavy, and then ......Captain Braun comes home early. I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.

This book has a lot to say about freedom and oppression, loyalty, human decency (even in enemies), and bravery. There is a lot of action and food for thought in the 76 pages of this chapter book. It should appeal to both boys and girls who are nine and over, and would be good to read aloud. My husband and I both enjoyed it.

©Barbara Radisavljevic, August, 2006