In the book “If I Die Before I Wake” by Han Nolan a girl named Hilary Burke has been severely injured in a motorcycle accident while riding with her boyfriend, Brad, the leader of a local neo-Nazi gang. The closest hospital is a Jewish hospital and Hilary is taken there, Nazi armband and everything. In a strange twist of fate, Hilary is transported back through flashbacks to the German occupation of Poland where she becomes a girl named Chana. Chana is a young girl who, along with her Polish family, is faced with the horrors of being a Jew in wartime Poland. Hilary sees World War II in the perspective of Chana. The story flips back and forth between Chana and Hilary with one major plot in each girl’s life.
Before her accident, Hilary helped out with her friends to kidnap her Jewish neighbor, Simon, and they stuffed him in a gym locker at school. There is a large search underway to find him. While Hilary thinks treating the Jews differently is funny, she has to live in the eyes of a Jewish person while she flashes back into Chana’s time. In Chana’s story she goes through the full horror of being Jewish under Nazi rule which includes the complete breaking down of her family, the horrors of the Lodz ghetto, and ultimately the suffering of Auschwitz. Meanwhile, Hilary and her mother don’t have the best bond. Yet Hilary’s mother does all she can to help nurse her back to stable heath, and she sits by her side the whole time while she is at the Jewish hospital.
Even when there was a horrible fire at the hospital, Hilary’s mother stays with her. Throughout this book, Hilary realizes how wrong she was treating Jews. Chana shows her what it was like to be her during hard times. Towards the end of the book Hilary learns to treat Jews in a better way. By Being Chana, Hilary lives as a Jew and sees how it was like to be treated poorly. She witnessed almost all of Chana’s family and friends getting killed, and she saw Word War II in front of her very eyes.
In the end Hilary lives throught the hard times both her and Chana went through. She tells her mother where Simon is, the boy trapped in the locker. The police find him. Hilary finds out that Brad, Hilary’s boyfriend, hung Simon in a tree by his suspenders and him and his friends teased him. Simons nearly survived on a bottle of water and some orange peels left in the locker he was trapped in. He was taken to the same hospital that Hilary was at.
He too lived. Hilary wasn’t pleased with what her boyfriend and his friends did to Simon, just because he was a Jewish boy. Hilary and her mother find love in their relationship as mother and daughter. Hilary also has a new found respect toward Jewish people.
Chana taught her to do this by showing Hilary what it was like to be a Jew during World War II. Just as Hilary is getting better and as ready to leave the Hospital, Hilary starts to wonder about Chana. Was she real or some one made up in Hilary’s mind. Maybe Hilary got so hurt that she was hallucinating about this girl. Just at that very moment an older woman named Nadzia walked into the room.
Nadzia was Chana’s babysitter. She handed Hilary a photo album of Chana and her family. Nadzia told Hilary Chana said to give it to her. Hilary and her mother looked confused. Hilary found out that Chana had died of Cancer. It was all coming together for Hilary, but her Mother had no idea what was going on.
Hilary then knew Chana was real. She took the photo album from Nadzia and her and her mother went home.