North to Freedom (by Anne Holm)

He has no family that he knows of, and knows nothing about himself or the world outside the camp. He is bright and reasoning, but has little useful experience, and thus misunderstands almost everything he sees. Other children he finds especially difficult, and the idea of imaginative play is completely beyond him. Yet some things, like brutality and evil, he understands all too well, and more clearly than many of the people he encounters.

David's first encounters with such things as bright colors, a bath, and good people are touching and, amazingly, exciting. His convictions are well reasoned and often cause young readers to evaluate their own ideas about suiting their actions to their beliefs. Many children at this age find in David a unique role model whose goodness comes from indomitable strength and courage. The reader sees through David's fresh eyes the ordinary things of everyday life. An orange, a beautiful landscape, a school, all suddenly appear as the miracles they are. And as David constructs his own relationship with "the God of the green pastures and still waters" from fragments of the Bible and his own perception of the world, the reader hears the ancient words anew. North to Freedom is hard to put down, and harder to forget.