What are the themes of "The Upstairs Room"?

The Upstairs Room was written by Johanna Reiss. It is an autobiographical novel telling of Johanna's experience during Hitler's Final Solution plan, one whose intent was to exterminate the entirety of the Jewish race. Her autobiographical novel parallels The Diary of Anne Frank and other Holocaust novels like Elie Weisel's Night, Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, John Boyne's The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, and Markus Zusak's The Book Thief.
The themes present in The Upstairs Room, and other Holocaust novels like it, revolve around family, fear, war, hope, and persecution.
In regards to the theme of family, the novel presents numerous different situations which highlight the importance of family. Throughout the novel, the protagonist's family must make numerous decisions regarding how to survive the war and Hitler. They face illness, death, separation, and the question of how to survive. The family, at one point, goes in different directions, and the protagonist and her sister find themselves having to make the decision to stay with a family they have been living with or rejoin their own family.
The theme of fear is prevalent in the novel as well. As with most Holocaust novels and stories, fear exists in a very obvious and upfront way. Reiss and her family face numerous dangers over the course of the novel. Most obviously, they face Hitler and his Final Solution. They also face fear as the rights of the Jews in her town are taken away little by little. They face the fear associated with the death of their mother, as well as the forced separation necessary for survival.
War, like fear, is another obvious theme which runs through the novel. Given that the novel openly depicts the war raging around them, it is hard to miss this theme.
Hope is another theme present in the novel. For families and characters portrayed in Holocaust novels, hope tends to be the prevailing theme. Hope tends to be the one thing that brings the people and characters through tragedies such as the Holocaust. Without hope, many of the people and characters state they would not have made it out of the challenges alive.
The final theme present in the novel is that of persecution. Essentially without the persecution described in the novel, the story simply would not exist. Most of the conflict and action circulate around the idea of persecution. Had it not been for Hitler's (and like-minded thinkers) persecution of the Jewish population, stories like Reiss's would not exist.