Difference between revisions of "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)

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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 Krako´w 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 published a child survivor’s testimony in each issue of its journal, Fun letstn khurbn. In 1947, three anthologies of children’s testimonies were published—one in Tel Aviv, one in Warsaw, and one in Buenos Aires."--Boaz Cohen, Bar-Ilan University.

Bibliography

• Boaz Cohen. Representing Children's Holocaust

• Boaz Cohen. "The Children’s Voice: Postwar Collection of Testimonies from Child Survivors of the Holocaust." Holocaust and Genocide Studies 21. 1 (Spring 2007): 73–95.

1947

Title

• Benjamin Tenenbaum, ed. Ehad me-ir u shenayim mi-mishpahah: Mivhar m’elef autobigrafiot shel yaldei Yisrael b’Polin [One of a City and Two of a Family: A Selection from a Thousand Autobiographies of Jewish Children in Poland]. Merhavyah, Israel: Sifriat Poalim, 1947 <Hebrew>.

Abstract

"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 ... His work with children began after a chance meeting at the headquarters of the Hashomer Hatsair in Poland at 18 Narutowicz Street in Ło´dz´, one of the first addresses he visited ... Tenenbaum was captivated by the children, who had “aged prematurely,” but had, despite the horrors they had experienced, come back to life “with no less force then a tree whose roots split rocks” ... He spent his nights traveling by train to children’s homes all over Poland ... On his hbehalf, Marian Klinowski collected hundreds of additional testimonies in the DP camps in Austria and Germany ... In 1947, after his return to Palestine, Tenenbaum published a compilation of the testimonies he had collected ... Tenenbaum's book contained eighty testimonies. Some were given in full, some were broken down into two parts, and some were excerpted. The testimonies were organized geographically and thematically. One chapter each was devoted to Warsaw and Wilno, and the remaining chapters were “Ghettos,” “In Villages and Woods,” “Camps,” and “Partisans” ... The testimonies, which he had translated into Hebrew, had undergone a process of editing ... Although the book is about children’s experiences in the Holocaust, it has a clear Zionist slant ... Tenenbaum collected many testimonies from children who had survived the war in relative safety in Siberia or Soviet Central Asia. These testimonies feature harrowing stories of hunger, disease, deaths of parents and siblings, and antisemitism. Not one of these testimonies however were included in the book."--Boaz Cohen.

[Picture: Barukh and Izik Zviklik were found in a Polish orphanage and entrusted to the Zionist Coordination Committee. Their father Yaakov Zviklik was killed in the German conquest of Poland. His wife, Feige, fled with their two sons to Russia and died there. (PHAL\1618339)]