How a Few Make a Difference: A Review of The Assignment

Based on true events, Liza Wiemer’s YA contemporary novel explores the fallout of a young history teacher’s misguided simulation project. When the innovative and well-liked Mr. Bartley assigns his senior European history class to reenact the 1942 Wannsee Conference that signed the death warrant for Europe’s Jews, longtime friends Logan March and Cade Crawford seem to be the only ones who object. The two couldn’t be more different. Class valedictorian Logan is the daughter of a college professor; she and her father moved to the small upstate New York town from Wisconsin six years earlier. Though his grandparents immigrated from Poland after World War II, quiet, hardworking, average-student Cade has lived in Riviere all his life and expects to stay, managing his family’s inn. At first they think the assignment is a trick – a way for Mr. Bartley to show the moral repugnance of the event and how easily people can be manipulated into defending the indefensible – but classmates in this all-white town with no Jewish families seem to revel in playing the role of Nazis.

Despite threats against them when their efforts go viral, Logan and Cade persist and find support in unexpected places. Wiemer shows the costs of their activism. They never intended to hurt their teacher, but his refusal to back down (except for offering an alternative assignment to the offended) has consequences for him and for the broader school community. Revealed family secrets lead Cade’s family to be forever changed. Other students are also transformed when they join Logan and Cade in speaking out. Although most of the story is told from Logan and Cade’s first person perspectives, chapters from other students’ points of view in third person, as well as letters, texts, and interviews show how these events affect an entire community, tearing it apart but also bringing people together. The Assignment is a fast-paced, gripping story that raises important questions in the aftermath of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville and the Tree of Life synagogue massacre. The novel challenges readers to do the right thing while showing how individual choices, large and small, affect us all. An extensive list of resources serves as a starting point for students wanting to learn more about WWII and the Holocaust.