The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain is a children's book written and illustrated by Peter Sís

Peter Sis

Peter Sís is an award-winning children's book writer and illustrator. Sís attended the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague and the Royal College of Art in London...

. It received both the American Library Association's Caldecott Honor and ALA's 2008 Robert Silbert Medal

Sibert Medal

The Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Award established by the Association for Library Service to Children in 2001 with support from Bound to Stay Bound Books, Inc., is awarded annually to the author and illustrator of the most distinguished informational book published in English during the...

 for the most distinguished informational book for young readers. It is a memoir on Sís's life under the Communist rule of Czechoslovakia

Czechoslovakia

Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...

, the oppression he faces and his dreams of leaving for America

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

. The book mentions adult topics such as Laika

Laika

Laika was a Soviet space dog that became the first animal to orbit the Earth – as well as the first animal to die in orbit.As little was known about the impact of spaceflight on living creatures at the time of Laika's mission, and the technology to de-orbit had not yet been developed, there...

, Prague Spring

Prague Spring

The Prague Spring was a period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia during the era of its domination by the Soviet Union after World War II...

 and Plastic People of the Universe. This book is about a boy who grew up on the Communist side of the Iron Curtain

Iron Curtain

The concept of the Iron Curtain symbolized the ideological fighting and physical boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas from the end of World War II in 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1989...

 during the Cold War

Cold War

The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...

.