Gaye Sanders

"I was a tree that love had planted. I had become a symbol that love will always conquer hate."

The story of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, in which 168 people lost their lives, is told in this immensely moving picture book from the perspective of the American elm tree which survived the cataclysm. Planted on the prairie as the city around it was just starting to grow, the tree matured with the family that cultivated it, and endured after they left it behind. Eventually, in the 1970s, a large federal office building was built beside the tree, and it became a site for office workers to take their lunches, and children from the building's day care center to play. Then one terrible day, in April 1995, a truck bomb destroyed the building, killing many of those inside, including nineteen of the children in the day care. The tree, caught up as the people were in this terrible event, was a charred ruin of its former self. Many said it should be chopped down, especially as there was evidence from the blast in its seemingly dead branches. Despite this, it somehow survived, and the next spring it bloomed again, bringing hope to the people of Oklahoma City and America. A symbol of strength, resilience, healing and love, the tree was dubbed the Survivor Tree, and its seedlings were planted in all fifty states, including one on the grounds of the 9/11 memorial in New York City, where another famous survivor tree also stands...

Like so many others alive at the time, one of my most vivid memories of the Oklahoma City bombing was the iconic image, reproduced in so many different newspapers and television news programs, of a firefighter cradling the bloodied body of a tiny child, killed in the bombing. I have but to think of that image, to feel a lump in my throat, and a terrible sense of sadness. Although often overshadowed by the subsequent events of 9/11 in our national memory, the bombing of the Edward P. Murrah building was a terrible trauma for the country, and author Gaye Sanders, a fourth-grade teacher in the Mustang, OK schools, handles the subject beautifully. Her text is emotionally resonant, and deeply moving, following the life story of the tree and letting the events it witnesses speak for themselves. Its power is complemented and accentuated by illustrator Pamela Behrend's simple but expressive artwork, which looks to have been done in colored pencil or crayon. I had to obtain this one through interlibrary-loan, and I sought it out after being immensely moved by a number of picture books about the survivor tree at the World Trade Center—Branches of Hope: The 9/11 Survivor Tree, This Very Tree: A Story of 9/11, Resilience, and Regrowth, and Survivor Tree—and discovering this other survivor tree, from an earlier terrorist atrocity. I think that stories like this are an excellent way of approaching terrible events, when working with younger children, because they focus on hope and healing, resilience and strength, rather than on the hatefulness and evil that led to those events. Given the subject matter, I would recommend this one for slightly older picture books audiences, perhaps in the upper primary school range. It would make an excellent avenue for discussion with children curious about the Oklahoma City combing, and a good companion to one of the 9/11 survivor tree stories mentioned above.… (més)