Student Directions: Read this excerpt from Hana’s Suitcase by Karen Levine, in which a librarian, Fumiko Ishioka, is researching the town from which Hana, a Jewish girl, was sent to a Nazi prison camp during World War Two. Write the central idea of the passage. Theresienstadt was the name that the Nazis gave to the Czech town of Terezin. It was a pretty little town, with two imposing fortresses, first built in the 1800s to hold military and political prisoners. After the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, they turned Terezin into the Theresienstadt ghetto—a walled, guarded, overcrowded prison town to hold Jews who had been forced to leave their homes. Over the course of World War Two, more than 140,000 Jews were sent here—15,000 of them children. Fumiko stayed up late at night, her office a glow of light in the darkened center, reading everything she could find about Theresienstadt. She learned that awful things had happened in Theresienstadt, and that over the course of a few years almost everyone in the ghetto was deported again, put on trains and sent off to the more terrible concentration camps in the East, which were known to be death camps. But Fumiko also learned that brave and inspiring things happened in Theresienstadt. Among the adults were some very special people—great artists, famous musicians, historians, philosophers, fashion designers, social workers. They were all in Theresienstadt because they were Jews. An astonishing amount of talent, training, and knowledge was crowded inside the walls of the ghetto. Under the noses of the Nazis and at great risk, the inmates secretly plotted and established an elaborate schedule of teaching, learning, producing, and performing for both adults and children. They were determined to remind their students that despite the war, despite the drab, cramped surroundings, despite everything—the world was a place of beauty and every individual person could add to it.

\whats the Central Idea?