43 pages • 1 hour read
Ian SerraillierThe Silver Sword
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1956A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
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Themes
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BetaChapters 11-20Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 11 Summary: “The Road to Posen”
Ruth, Jan, and Bronia pack up their meager possessions and set off toward Posen and Switzerland. They pass other refugees on the road, many of whom seem dazed and overwhelmed. They get a lift in a lorry and pass bombed-out areas, discarded tanks, shells, trenches, and barbed wire. On their fourth day of traveling, they reach Posen. Ruth is directed to the secretary, but they have no record of Edek. A passing doctor says that they saw Edek at a camp the previous day. They go to the medical camp but learn that Edek ran away the previous day.
Chapter 12 Summary: “The Hand”
Ruth, Jan, and Bronia go to the village of Kolina, where a refugee camp is being set up. They line up for soup. Jan trips and spills his soup. Anarchy breaks out among the line of starving children, who scramble for the bits of food on the ground. Jimpy, Jan’s rooster, is killed in the scuffle. He is dazed when the group is broken up. Suddenly, Edek appears to help Ruth onto her feet.
Chapter 13 Summary: “The Frozen Journey”
Ruth, Edek, Jan, and Bronia get on a crowded train headed towards Berlin. They reflect on leaving the camp; a doctor had tried to insist that Edek was too ill to travel, but a welfare officer had suggested that the hope of finding their parents would spur the children on and that they should not detain them. Ruth looks worriedly at Edek, reflecting that he looks gaunt and unwell.
They get out to stretch their legs, and a fire is lit in the carriage’s stove once the train restarts. A man and his wife sing and play the guitar. Others tell stories. Edek tells the story of how he got back to Poland after he was taken to Germany to be a laborer. He clung onto the bottom of a truck and became frozen to it when the truck went through a puddle. When he heard Polish voices, he called out and was cut out of the ice with an ax. Edek and Jan get into a scuffle when Jan accuses him of making it up, but Edek insists that the story is true.
Chapter 14 Summary: “City of the Lost”
Nine days later, the train arrives in Berlin. Aid workers arrive with bread and milk, but there is not enough food for all the refugees. Ruth, Edek, Jan, and Bronia go to a transit camp near the station. On the way, Edek produces a loaf of bread he stole from the cart at the station. He is almost hit by a car containing a British officer.
At the camp, which is an old cinema, they are given more food and set up mattresses in an area labeled “Poland.” The children are happy there, as it is warm and there is food and Polish-speaking people around them. A chimpanzee escaped from a Berlin Zoo, arrives, and causes a brief stir. Jan disappears, looking for the chimpanzee.
Chapter 15 Summary: “Jan Finds a New Pal”
The British officer, Mark, who almost collided with Jan in his car writes home to his wife about the destruction in Berlin. He also includes an anecdote of being attacked by a chimpanzee that climbed into his car. Mark describes Jan arriving—he recognizes the young Polish boy whom he almost hit with his car days earlier—climbing into the car with the chimpanzee called Bistro, offering it a cigarette, and befriending it. Jan and Bistro leave together, and Mark gets his car back.
Chapter 16 Summary: “Through the Russian Zone”
The children travel south towards Switzerland. They are held up at the river Elbe as the Russian army, en route to Czechoslovakia, passes by in a mass of soldiers and tanks. They hitch rides on horse-drawn carts. They worry when they are separated from Jan, who is in a separate cart, but they find him in camp that night.
The children have some money; Jan received 100 marks for returning Bistro to the Berlin Zoo, but they are usually offered free food at villages and refugee camps. Civilians and soldiers are generally friendly, waving at the children and offering help.
They pass from the Russian Zone into the American Zone, only noticing the change when they see different uniforms and hear different accents.
Chapter 17 Summary: “The Signal”
They stop at a village to let Edek, whose health has deteriorated, recuperate. They camp by a stream. Ruth works as a cleaner and Jan works for a local farmer; Bronia nurses Edek. Jan sometimes comes home with armfuls of foreign food. Ruth and Edek are suspicious of where he gets it from. Edek follows him as he tampers with a train signal, changing it to red. Jan yells at Edek and disappears. The train comes to a stop. Suddenly, an American soldier appears, pointing his gun at Edek.
Chapter 18 Summary: “Captain Greenwood”
The Americans charge Edek with tampering with the signal in an attempt to stop, and therefore rob, the train. Ruth arrives at Edek’s hearing with Jan and Bronia. Jan explains that he was with a team of local thieves. He tampered with the signal in return for some of the goods stolen from the train. Edek was not involved. Jan explains that they are hungry and that Edek is sick. Ruth urges him to speak politely. Jan is offered a fine or a week’s worth of detention; they are saving their money for shoes for Edek, so Jan takes the week of detention.
Chapter 19 Summary: “The Bavarian Farmer”
A farmer finds the children in his barn. Edek, who knows some German from his two years of laboring, translates as Ruth explains that they were just sheltering there through the night. Jan throws a turnip at the farmer, and Ruth chastises him.
The farmer forgives the group and invites them for breakfast in return for a day’s work. He explains that the military police—headed by the Burgomaster—are trying to return all the Poles to Poland, but the group explains that they are going to Switzerland. Ruth and Jan help the farmer in the field. Bronia is sent to feed the chickens, and Edek, who the farmer’s wife notices looks very unwell, remains in the kitchen to help prepare food.
Chapter 20 Summary: “The Burgomaster”
The family remains with the farmer, Kurt Wolff, and his wife to avoid the Burgomaster who, following orders from the Americans, is rounding up Polish people to direct them to lorries returning to Poland.
They discuss the Wolffs’ sons, Hans, who was killed in Tobruk, and Rudolf, who was killed in Warsaw. Jan finds it disorienting that one of the kind couple’s sons was one of the German soldiers he had hated so much in Poland. The children tell the couple about the silver sword that helped Ruth realize that Jan had met their father and spurred Jan’s memory that Joseph was going to Switzerland.
Edek sees a jeep speed by as he is working in the field, and then he hears a bang as one of the jeep’s tires blows. He goes to help the driver change the tire, pretending to be German. Jan climbs a nearby tree and throws acorns at Edek, signaling that the German man is the Burgomaster. The Burgomaster notices Jan and good-naturedly asks why he is in the tree. Jan comes down to help with the tire change, avoiding speaking and pretending to be stupid. Bronia arrives and speaks Polish; Edek quickly speaks over her in German. Edek is hopeful that they got away with it, but Jan is not as hopeful.
Chapters 11-20 Analysis
While the opening chapters illustrated the devastation Polish citizens experienced during the war, these chapters further develop the theme of Trauma, Displacement, and Destruction During and After World War II with emphasis on the ways trauma, displacement, and destruction persisted well after the war had officially ended. As the Balicki children travel through Poland to find their father, they observe the effects of the Nazi’s “Scorched Earth Policy” (Nerobefehl), whereby the retreating Nazis destroyed infrastructure, crops, and civilian housing as well as military targets: “the children followed them along a narrow street, between smoking rubble. No buildings were standing. The Nazis had blown everything up before they left” (37). Similarly, the city of Berlin, renowned for its splendor, has been largely reduced to ruin: “buildings that had stood for generations had been wiped out” (46). As in the case of Warsaw, Serraillier conveys the devastating loss of historical and cultural sites in the city. Other armies, such as the Russian Red Army, also adopted this policy, and the Polish countryside carries scars as severe as those in the cities: “The fields were littered with the debris of war—derelict tanks, shell cases, dug-outs, lines and twists of rusty barbed wire” (37-38). These passages convey in concrete images the extent of the destruction and debris left in the wake of World War II. The war’s effect continued long after the German withdrawal from Poland, as people tried to rebuild their lives among destruction, ruin, and discarded equipment. The fact that the Polish people suffer equally as the result of both German and Russian acts of destruction suggests that their trauma is the result of war itself, not of a designated enemy or bad guy.
Furthermore, the chaos caused by displacement in post-war Europe is conveyed through the listless and directionless masses in the Berlin train station, who have no idea where to go or what to do:
Most of them hung about or sat down on their luggage—hundreds of tired and disconsolate men, women and children—in the hope that they would be given food or told where to go. A few UNRRA workers appeared, shouting orders in broken German, trying to make them stand in a queue (46).
The ineffectiveness of the understaffed aid organization, overwhelmed with people who are starving and without homes, is emphasized in their inefficient attempts to communicate with and organize the new arrivals. The characterization of Berlin as ruinous and chaotic is further established in Bistro, the chimpanzee who escaped from the Berlin Zoo after the Allied bombing, which further conveys the collapse of the usual organization and infrastructure. Though the war itself is over, the chaos that follows deepens the trauma of the people who have survived it. Many lack homes or families to return to. The destruction of centuries-old cities and towns emphasizes the sense of existential displacement that refugees experience in addition to their physical displacement.
The children’s Resilience and Determination in the Face of Immense Hardship is further illustrated in these chapters through their journey towards Switzerland. The strain of the journey is apparent when they walk 20 miles on their second day: “Bronia’s feet were blistered, Jan was cross” (38). Nonetheless, the group continues undauntedly. Edek’s determination to journey towards Switzerland, despite his compromised health, is admirable: “the doctor had remarked that Edek was too ill and would die on the way” (42). The welfare officer sees Edek’s immense inner strength and determination and suggests that he and his family will survive the journey based on this: “there’s a sort of fierce resolution about the boy—about all of them—which saves them from despair” (42). Once again, The Importance of Family provides an invaluable source of Resilience and Determination in the Face of Immense Hardship.
The children’s friendship with the Wolff family, who care for them in return for their help around the farm, forces the children to reevaluate their understanding of German people and German soldiers. The trauma of the war in Poland has taught the children, especially Jan, to view Nazi soldiers as hateful enemies. He is shocked to learn that one of the Wolffs’ two boys was stationed in Warsaw:
Jan looked at Frau Wolff, quietly intent on her knitting; then at the farmer, whose eyes had a gleam of sadness he had not seen before; then back at the photo. That there could be any connection between these homely folk and the soldier in the photo was beyond his understanding (69).
Jan experiences cognitive dissonance when his belief that all Nazi soldiers must be inherently evil is challenged, as he reasons that the Wolffs’ sons were likely to have been kind and generous like their parents. He is forced to consider that the German army, like all armies, was composed of both moral and immoral individuals.
