Category:Holocaust Children Studies--1940s

Holocaust Children Studies (1940s)

The page: Holocaust Children Studies Studies--1940s includes (in chronological order) scholarly and literary works in the field of Holocaust Children Studies made in the 1940s, or from 1940 to 1949.

Highlights (1940s)

Interpreters (1940s)

Timeline (1940s)

Holocaust Children Studies : 2020s -- 2010s -- 2000s -- 1990s -- 1980s -- 1970s -- 1960s -- 1950s -- 1940s -- 1930s -- Home

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Languages

Holocaust Children Studies : English -- French -- German -- Italian -- Spanish

Overview

"In the immediate postwar period, thousands of testimonies were taken from Jewish children who survived the Holocaust. These testimonies, many of them in the children’s own handwriting, enable us better to understand the Holocaust experience of Jewish children and provide a unique insight into their world ... The initiators of the collections believed that the testimonies served therapeutic purposes for the children involved, and also broader educational and moral purposes—for example, to focus the world’s attention on the Jewish tragedy

Many collections of children’s testimonies were initiated in the immediate postwar years. Benjamin Tenenbaum (1914–1999), a Polish-born Jewish prewar emigrant to Palestine, traveled to Poland in 1946. With the aid of a few friends, he collected 1,000 “autobiographies” written by surviving Jewish children ... Dr. Helena Wrobel-Kagan, a survivor of Bergen-Belsen, started a school at that camp in late 1945. She asked the children, themselves survivors, to write essays entitled “My Way from Home to the Camp” ... Similarly, the Jewish Historical Commissions in Poland and in the American Zone in Germany focused on children in their effort to collect survivor testimonies. Other Jewish organizations, such as the National Relief Committee for Deportees in Hungary and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) in its children’s homes in France, collected children’s testimonies more sporadically ... Many of the testimonies were published soon after the war. The regional Jewish Historical Commission in Krakow published excerpts from children’s testimonies and one full testimony, in book form, in 1945. From 1946 onward, the Central Jewish Historical Commission in Munich (lead by Israel Kaplan) published a child survivor’s testimony in each issue of its journal, Fun letstn khurbn...

Whereas the testimonies collected at Beren-Belsen were not published, three major works devoted to Polish-Jewish children, three anthologies of children’s testimonies, were published in 1947:

(a) Benjamin Tenenbaum’s Ehad me-ir u shenayim mi-mishpahah [One of a City and Two of a Family] (Tel Aviv, Israel), a selection from among some one thousand testimonies;
(b) Dzieci oskarz˙aja [The Children Accuse] (Warsaw, Poland), edited by Miryam Hochberg-Marian´ska and Noe Gruss of the Jewish Historical Commission in Poland
(c) Kinder-martirologye: Zamlung fun dokumentn [Children’s Martyrdom: A Document Collection] (Buenos Aires, Argentina), also edited by Noe Gruss.

--Boaz Cohen, Bar-Ilan University.