Category:Street Children (subject)

Street Children of the Holocaust (see Holocaust Children Studies)

Overview

During the Holocaust, many Jewish children survived alone or in groups in the city streets or in the countryside or the forest. Begging, stealing, selling cigarettes or other goods, scavenging for food in the trash, etc. were the most common ways to survive.

Notable Children:

Plonski -- Meller -- Kaminski -- Tamir -- Brand -- Frustaci

Literature

1967

Child of the Holocaust (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1967) is the memoir written by Holocaust survivor Jack Kuper (b.1932).

KEYWORDS: <Poland> <Hidden Children> / <Lublin Orphanage> <Canada>

"Offers the true account of an eight-year-old boy who returned to his Polish town one day to find that all the Jews had been sent away and describes his young years traveling fearfully around the country in the hopes of finding his people and a place to call home."--Publisher description.

Jack Kuper (Poland, 1932), Holocaust survivor -- Jack Kuper (Jankele Kuperblum) survived the war alone as a street child, disguised for years as a Polish peasant and a Christian to escape the horrors of the Holocaust. After liberation he was placed in a Jewish orphanage in Lublin, Poland. He had to learn how to be a Jew again. During the years in hiding he had forgotten his language, culture and religion. In 1947, he was brought to Halifax by Canada’s Jewish community. He ended up settling in Toronto and working at the CBC.

1970

Joseph Ziemian, The Cigarette Sellers of Three Crosses Square (Minneapolis: Lerner Publications Co., 1970).

"The Cigarette Sellers of Three Crosses Square is the true account of a band of Jewish children, ages seven to sixteen, who survived the Warsaw Ghetto during the last three years of World War II (1943-1945). The author, Joseph Ziemien, finds two of the children by accident at a soup kitchen in Central Warsaw ... The astonishing, true story of a group of Jewish children who managed to escape from the Warsaw ghetto in 1942 and survive in the Aryan section of the Nazi-occupied city. Sentenced to death, hounded at every step, they kept themselves alive by peddling cigarettes in Warsaw's Three Crosses Square - where the author, a member of the Jewish Underground in Poland, met and helped them and recorded their story. Several of the children were finally caught and killed, but most survived and are alive today. The story of the cigarette sellers has been published in Polish, Romanian, Hebrew and Yiddish, and a dramatised version has been broadcast in Israel. The book was awarded a literary prize by the World Jewish Congress in New York."--Publisher description