You are invited to join Mirla G. Raz and Tom Palmer on Thursday 13 January to talk about his new children’s book “After the War-from Auschwitz to Ambleside”.
3 pm MST US and 10 pm GMT.
“A powerful and moving novel, following meticulous research and with the support of the Lake District Holocaust Project” Jewish News
For Holocaust Memorial Day 2022 please click here.
For Holocaust Memorial Day 2023 plans please sign up on the contact form here.
I hope my book “After the War – from Auschwitz to Ambleside” and these virtual and streamable resources will help schools, libraries and families mark Holocaust Memorial Day – Wednesday, 27 January 2021. (The Win a class set competition has ended, see below). I am extremely grateful for the support of the National Literacy Trust, UCL Centre for Holocaust Education, Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, Lake District Holocaust Project and other partners to bring these to you.
The FREE resources include :
” The Question” a five-part story to read in school with the National Literacy Trust (available in written format here for you to read aloud / stream / share or as a series of 5 films of Tom reading the story for you to use however suits your school here ).
a series of films about developing writing and worksheets to support and inspire pupils to write their own responses with the National Literacy Trust (available now here).
Friday, 29 January 10.30 am 
a resource pack created around “After the War” by UCL Centre for Holocaust Education. Containing lesson plans and materials for KS3 History, RS, Cit and Eng (available now here ).
a CPD session hosted by UCL and myself relating to “After the War” (booking open now here).
Blackout Poetry Challenge includes how to guide, examples, text and certificate, here.“The Question” is a five-part read aloud story will be set in the present day about the visit of a Holocaust survivor to a UK school and how the children prepare and reflect on the experience. The survivor will be Yossi, one of the main characters from “After the War”, 75 years on from his liberation, age 91. The story will be from the point of view of the pupils and will be aimed at Y5 to Y8. It is not essential to have read “After the War” beforehand (but you can read Chapter 1 of the book for free here https://www.tompalmer.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/After-the-War_chapter-sample.pdf . There is more about it here: https://tompalmer.co.uk/after-the-war/
There are many ways to mark Holocaust Memorial Day 2021 using HMD Together, a set of resources designed to enable people to mark the day in meaningful ways with other people – even if you can’t gather together in person.
On Holocaust Memorial Day, join the nation in Lighting the Darkness. Light a candle and put it in your window at 8pm on 27 January to:
And here are some very quick extracts to share from an interview I did with the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, introducing my book After the War and about the importance of survivor testimonies.
Thank you for your interest and support. If you’d like to know what we’re planning for Holocaust Memorial Day 2023 please sign up here:
“After the War” is suitable as a class read for children in Y6 and above, although many children in Y5 will be able to deal with its tough subject matter. More here.
Get the Book : available from your local or school library, your local bookshop, Waterstones, Amazon or support indie bookshops through Bookshop.org here.
Holocaust Memorial Day is the international day on 27 January to remember the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, alongside the millions of other people killed under Nazi Persecution and in genocides that followed in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. More here.
Be the light in the darkness Holocaust Memorial Day 2021
‘We will continue to do our bit for as long as we can, secure in the knowledge that others will continue to light a candle long after us.’
Gena Turgel, survivor of the Holocaust (1923-2018)
Thank you
Join me and Sufiya Ahmed on 4 November talking about about bravery, the importance of history and the true stories told in our Second World War books. Save your spot on Crowdcast here.
More events here
Buy After the War here
Schools bumper book pack and class set offers here.
Visit my 
bookshop or support your local bookshop HIVE
Overseas : FREE Delivery worldwide from The Book Depository.
Australia: Boomerang
Canada: Amazon Canada
New Zealand: Wheelers
USA : Indigo books
Email me here for more information or use my contact form here to ask me a question.
Thank you.
This is a screenshot of my autumn term e-newsletter. For the full version with all working links please sign up for my e-newsletter (which comes out just 3 times a year) here.
This terms news is all about my new resources and my new children’s book “After the War : from Auschwitz to Ambleside.” Read Chapter 1 NOW.
“The best children’s fiction book I’ve yet read about the Holocaust. After The War manages to be vividly engaging both as history education and as a human story – eye-opening, exciting, hugely touching. Beautifully structured and written it may be aimed at 9-14 year-olds, but no-one should miss it” CEO Anne Frank Trust UK
And I’ve been working on a range of FREE resources that schools and families can access virtually. I hope you find some of them useful.
With very best wishes
Tom
Tom Palmer is the author of 50 KS2 and KS3 books for children including three Puffin series. Foul Play was shortlisted for the 2009 Blue Peter Book Award. Armistice Runner has recently won 6 prizes including the national FCBG Children’s Book Award 2019 and was nominated for THE CILIP CARNEGIE MEDAL and 16 other UK prizes. D-Day Dog about the D-Day paratrooper Emile Corteil and his dog Glen, has been listed for 13 UK prizes and has won the Portsmouth Year 5 Book of the Year Award, the James Reckitt Hull Children’s Book Award and the Warwickshire Junior Book of the Year Award.
Tom is the recipient of the 2019 Ruth Rendell Award for Services to Literacy by the National Literacy Trust.
You can also stay up to date with what I’m doing – or simply say hello – on social media.
Twitter: @tompalmerauthor
Facebook: www.facebook.com/tompalmerauthor/
Thank you
For the past few years I have asked teachers and librarians to nominate children they think would benefit from the gift of a book for Christmas. My family and I would like to do the same for Christmas 2020.
Our idea is to work with teachers and librarians to help us gift books to children who do not have any books at home; to children who need that one special book that could help engage them with a lifetime of reading for pleasure; or, to children who have had a difficult year at school or home and a book would be a boost for them. Sadly, there will many such children this year.
Each book will be personally dedicated, signed, gift-wrapped and will come with a Christmas card from me. Those nominating can choose from any of my books for children.
The Christmas card will have this year’s illustration by the wonderful James Innerdale.
If you’d like to nominate a child, please email the following information to admin@tompalmer.co.uk by Friday 27th November 2020:
I am sorry, we cannot promise to send a book to every child nominated. I have set an upper limit of 50. But I will send a personal Christmas card to each nominee and a poster pack for each school.
My family and I will choose the recipients and have the books dispatched to schools in the first week of December 2020.
(For more information about special offer schools book packs, FREE signed bookplates and signed books to purchase as gifts see here. )
For Remembrance Day 2022 click here
To help schools mark Remembrance Day 20220 and link it to developing literacy in the classroom, I am offering a range of FREE resources for schools to use throughout the week, based around my books Over the Line, D-Day Dog, Armistice Runner and the Wings RAF series.
Here is a pre-recorded twenty-minute assembly aimed at KS2 and KS3 for use in the hall or for schools to stream throughout classrooms, where I will talk about the real First and Second World War soldiers, airmen and women and sailors that have inspired the characters in my books.
There will be also be a live online FACEBOOK Q&A session on the afternoon of 11th November 1.30-2.30 p.m. from here : https://www.facebook.com/tompalmerauthor/ You can submit questions for me to answer by emailing admin@tompalmer.co.uk up until 10th November or on the day.
All my other FREE WW1 and WW2 literacy resources are available from here:
https://tompalmer.co.uk/first-world-war-literacy-resources/
or here:
https://tompalmer.co.uk/second-world-war-literacy-resources/
and they include :
Book cover prediction sheets with questions encouraging the children to think about what a book might be about.
You can find our more about each of my books here:
Over the Line
Armistice Runner
Wings Series
D-Day Dog
as well as more about what I am currently writing about the Arctic Convoys here.
Rosemary Hill Books is offering a special rate for schools to purchase multiples of these books:
You can contact Rosemary direct at rosie@rosemaryhillbooks.co.uk.
For additional information and for reminder emails with links to the free online events please contact admin@tompalmer.co.uk.
I wish my mum was alive to see this.
Monday will be my first day as Leeds United Children’s Writer in Residence. I’ve been taken on by the Premier League club to work with their education department and Leeds schools to promote reading for pleasure through football.
I write books and promote literacy because of my mum, but, as a kid, I struggled with reading. My mum, who was a teacher, used the only thing I was properly interested in to engage me with reading.
Leeds United.
She had me reading matchday programmes in the South Stand, the Yorkshire Evening Post every day and magazines like Shoot and Match each week.
Sadly, she died when I was in my early twenties. But she left a great legacy. I am a reader because of her. I am a writer because of her. I am Leeds United Children’s Writer in Residence because of her.
So, when I got the call from Mat at Leeds United Education to tell me the name of the first school that we’re going into I didn’t see it coming.
‘Where shall I meet you?’ I asked him.
‘Seacroft Grange Primary School,’ he told me.
I went quiet.
‘Is that okay?’ Mat asked.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘That’s where my mum was a teacher.’
When I was researching my new book – After the War – I went to Kendal Library to read the Westmorland Gazette microfilms for 1945. It was there that I read about a group of Jewish children who were arriving from Europe to stay at the Calgarth Estate on Windermere.
This was part of my research into a story that many Cumbrians know very well. The Windermere Boys.
On 14th August 1945 ten stripped-out Stirling Bombers touched down at Crosby-on-Eden airfield. Thirty children emerged from each plane. They were given something to eat and drink, then driven – in buses and army trucks – to the shores of Windermere. To the Calgarth Estate where, during the war, the workers at the White Cross Bay flying boat factory had lived.
But the war was won and most of the workers had gone, although a community continued to live on the estate until the late 1950s.
The 300 children were Jewish refugees. Aged from infants to teenagers, mostly orphaned, they had come directly from the concentration camps of central Europe to Cumbria.
It was dark when they arrived, so they had little idea of this place that they had come to: Windermere.
What they saw in the morning astonished them. They have said since it was like coming from hell to heaven. Some refer to it as Wondermere.
You might have seen the BBC film – The Windermere Children – earlier this year.
Before the film was released, I heard the story on Radio 4’s Open Country and was immediately struck by how the Boys enthused about their relationship with the local people. That was something that the film – with so much to cover in only 90 minutes – didn’t explore.
But I was keen to explore it. For three reasons.
One. The director of the Lake District Holocaust Project, Trevor Avery, told me how the families of Calgarth welcomed the children. The book would not have been possible without his support and the work he has done at the Windermere Library exhibition, From Auschwitz to Ambleside.
Two. The Boys talking about the welcome they had on Open Country and on the audio files you can listen to on the Lake District Holocaust Project website (ldhp.org.uk).
Three. When I visited the exhibition at Windermere Library, I met Joyce and her niece, Marion. We got talking. Their openness and friendliness reminded me of how some of the Boys talked about their welcome from locals.
I have written a book about the Windermere Boys. For children. It is called After the War. It is a story that must be told again and again and through different media; and a story that Cumbria must be very proud of. First for taking the children in in 1945. Second, for devoting a whole floor of a library to ensure this story reaches future generations.
The children had suffered ghettos, concentration camps, death marches and seen family members murdered. But they were given refuge at Windermere. Lessons in English. Exercise to rebuild their strength. And they were fed as well as they could be in rationing Britain.
There is a story about how the locals gathered hundreds of tomatoes to give the children each a bowl of tomato soup one evening. That story is in the book. As are many examples of Cumbrian compassion.
Research in a book like this is vital. Talking to people who were there when the events happened. And reading the Westmorland Gazette was just as vital. I had this idea for a scene where one of the Boys would teach himself English by reading the local newspaper. A headline stuck with me and I had my character read it out to his friends:
PEACE ON EARTH: JAPAN SURRENDERS
WORLD WAR TWO ENDS
It was exciting to be reading the exact issue of the newspaper that no doubt some of Boys would have read.
Over several months, I visited the settings of the story. The Lakes School is on the site of Calgarth now. The school kindly allowed me to watch one of the Boys – Arek Hersh – speaking with the students.
But it was another school in the area where I realised I was writing something important for the children of Cumbria and beyond.
I have a good relationship with Grasmere Primary School. They helped me when I published Armistice Runner, a story of fell running, set in Cumbria in 1918 and 2018, featuring a character based loosely on Skelwith Bridge fell runner, Ernest Dalzell.
The children read After the War before publication and their reaction and advice had a profound impression on me and the book. As did their compassion. The way they took to the story and empathised with the Jewish refugee children who arrived here 75 years ago was one of the most moving part so of writing After the War. If I wrote After the War for anyone, I wrote it for the children of Grasmere Primary School.
More here.
Schools bumper book pack and class set offers here.
Visit my 
bookshop or support your local bookshop HIVE
Overseas : FREE Delivery worldwide from The Book Depository.
Australia: Boomerang
Canada: Amazon Canada
New Zealand: Wheelers
USA : Indigo books
Email me here for more information or use my contact form here to ask me a question.
Thank you.
PRIVACY & COOKIES POLICY TERMS & CONDITIONS
From 20 July 2020
Tarn grapples with the loss of her brother at Dunkirk as she faces the threat of Nazi invasion in the Cumbrian countryside in this gripping wartime tale.
Tuesday 9 May 11am
Angel of Grasmere, from Dunkirk to the Fells
80 year Dunkirk Anniversary - A Commemoration Special with Mr Dilly and Tom Palmer
Signed copies make an extra special gift. I can sign and personalise books - including a special birthday card - through my local independent children's bookshop.
Sat 27 April, 10 am Thoughtful Spot Bookshop, Halifax (launching Rocky’s Big Move)
Tues 7 May, 3 pm Sam Read Booksellers, Grasmere (launching Angel of Grasmere)
Thurs 30 May Imperial War Museum North
Fri 31 May Imperial War Museum London
Now available for After the War, Resist and Soccer Diaries. More coming May 2024.
"Resist" shines a light on the incredible work of the WWll Dutch resistance, in a story inspired by the childhood of Hollywood legend Audrey Hepburn
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