Jewish Children During the Holocaust

by

Joanna Sliwa

• LAST MODIFIED: 24 July 2024
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199840731-0250

Introduction

Children deemed as “Aryan” by Nazi ideology epitomized the future of a unified and pure “Aryan” racial community. On the other hand, Nazi ideology and policies targeted “non-Aryan” children, such as Jewish, Roma, and Slavic children, as well as children with disabilities. The Nazis and their collaborators murdered an estimated 1.5 million Jewish children under the age of sixteen. A child’s age during the Holocaust determined his or her experiences, identities, and understandings of the events, as well as child survivors’ memories. The Nazi definition of a Jewish child differed geographically and temporally. Jewish children endured the same patterns of Nazi-inflicted persecution as adult Jews, such as restrictions on freedom of movement, confinement in ghettos, incarceration in camps, and forced and slave labor. Jewish children embodied the continuity of the Jewish people and as such were among the first to be murdered in mass shootings and in killing centers. The Nazis considered the youngest children dispensable because they could not work. To survive, Jewish children employed the same strategies as adults, such as flight, life under a false identity, and life in hiding. Fewer than one in ten Jewish children survived the Holocaust. Initially, analyses of the voices and experiences of children were mostly absent from Holocaust scholarship, except to illustrate the extent and consequences of the Nazi genocide. A scholarly turn that began in the 1990s, including as a result of child survivors’ endeavors, recalibrated the focus to scrutinize the voices and texts of Jewish children and child survivors as valid historical sources. Doing so has led to a multidisciplinary investigation of the many dimensions of Jewish child life during the Holocaust, including forms of young people’s agency. An ongoing interest in children’s experiences during the Holocaust and in responses to the plight of young people have offered new insights into Holocaust history and memory, as well as contributed to efforts to provide compensation for Jewish child Holocaust survivors. The scholarly output on Jewish children during the Holocaust has also inspired studies on non-Jewish child victims of Nazism. This article focuses on the experiences of Jewish children, meaning those born in 1928 or later, during the Holocaust. It highlights some of the many works, both scholarly and popular, that have emerged over the years and that aim to expand our understanding of what and how Jewish children endured during the Holocaust.

General Overviews

Although children comprised about 25 percent of all Jews murdered in the Holocaust, few studies address the transnational experiences of young Jews and take a comparative approach to the patterns of Nazi persecution of Jewish children. Significantly, none focus on Jewish children in North Africa. A classic, Dwork 1991 constitutes the most sweeping study of Jewish children under Nazi rule across Europe. Heberer 2011 expands the discussion to include children of various victim groups. Nicholas 2005 also takes a broad view of children and looks at how Nazi policies shaped young people’s experiences. Similarly, Stargardt 2006 encompasses the experiences of children of various nationalities and religions.

• Dwork, Debórah. Children with A Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991.

  DOI: 10.12987/9780300156997

  This seminal book introduced a new turn in Holocaust studies by focusing on the Jewish child as a historical actor and on children’s recollections as a source of historical research. It remains the most comprehensive study of the patterns of Jewish children’s lives on continental Europe.

• Heberer, Patricia, ed. Documenting Life and Destruction. Holocaust Sources in Context: Children during the Holocaust. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2011.

  Contextualizes primary sources to present Jewish children’s lives and responses to oppression at different stages of Nazi persecution. With a focus on age (below eighteen) as a factor that shaped experiences during the Holocaust, the author also reflects on the roles of non-Jewish children as witnesses, resisters, and perpetrators.

• Nicholas, Lynn H. Cruel World. The Children of Europe in the Nazi Web. New York: A.A. Knopf, 2005.

  The history of children, Jewish and non-Jewish, during the Nazi era. The author zooms in on such notions as eugenics, flight, Germanization, hiding, and labor. This is an essential text for a broad understanding of what it meant to be of young age in 1933–1945.

• Stargardt, Nicholas. Witnesses of War: Children’s Lives under the Nazis. New York: A.A. Knopf, 2006.

  Explains the meaning of children for the Nazi ideology and delves into the multitude of experiences that defined Jewish and non-Jewish children’s lives during the Nazi rule.