Category:Street Children (subject)

Street Children of the Holocaust

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.

Bibliography

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