Category:Holocaust Children Studies--2010s

Holocaust Children Studies, 2010s

2011

Patricia Heberer. Children during the Holocaust (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2011).

"This compelling book, from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, tells the story of the Holocaust through the eyes, and fates, of its youngest victims. Following the arc of the persecutory policies of the Nazis and their sympathizers and the impact these measures had on Jewish children and adolescents, the chapters begin with the years leading to the war, to the roundups, deportations, and emigrations, to hidden life and death in the ghettos and concentration camps, and to liberation and coping in the wake of war. This volume examines the reactions of children to discrimination, the loss of livelihood in Jewish homes, and the public humiliation at the hands of fellow citizens and explores the ways in which children's experiences paralleled and diverged from their adult counterparts. The author also reflects upon the role of non-Jewish children as victims, perpetrators, and bystanders ... The ten chapters follow the arc of the persecutory policies of the Nazis and their sympathizers and the impact these measures had on Jewish children and adolescents--from the years leading to the war, to the roundups, deportations, and emigrations, to hidden life and death in the ghettos and concentration camps, and to liberation and coping in the wake of war. This volume examines the reactions of children to discrimination, the loss of livelihood in Jewish homes, and the public humiliation at the hands of fellow citizens and explores the ways in which children's experiences paralleled and diverged from their adult counterparts."--Publisher description.

Patricia Heberer, PhD, museum historian, Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, is a specialist on medical crimes and eugenics policies in Nazi Germany.

2013

Bruno Maida. La Shoah dei bambini: La persecuzione dell'infanzia ebraica in Italia (Turin: Einaudi, 2013).

<Italy> <Intro>

"La storia della persecuzione degli ebrei attuata dal fascismo tra il 1938 e il 1945 ci è ormai ben nota, ma raramente ci si è soffermati a riflettere su cosa abbiano significato quei tragici sette anni per i bambini italiani. Per i bambini «ariani», cresciuti nell'educazione al razzismo e alla guerra, e, soprattutto, per i bambini ebrei, allontanati da scuola, testimoni impotenti della progressiva emarginazione sociale e lavorativa dei genitori, e in moltissimi casi della distruzione e dell'eliminazione fisica della propria famiglia. Da questa prospettiva la storia che abbiamo alle spalle assume nuovi significati e stratificazioni. Il regime fascista iniziò ad attuare la discriminazione proprio dal mondo della scuola, e i bambini ebrei - prima espulsi, poi separati, esclusi e infine internati - furono vittime tra le vittime. Una parte di essi fu poi deportata, gli altri dovettero fuggire e nascondersi per molti mesi. Bruno Maida ne ripercorre la storia attraverso i progressivi stadi della persecuzione, attento a cogliere non solo lo sguardo che l'infanzia ebbe di fronte al turbinio dei fatti, ma la portata politica di una ferita impossibile da sanare."--Publisher description.

2014

Steven Pressman. 50 Children: One Ordinary American Couple's Extraordinary Rescue Mission into the Heart of Nazi Germany (New York, NY: Harper, 2014).

"This is the astonishing true story of how one American couple transported fifty Jewish children from Nazi-occupied Austria to America -- the single largest group of unaccompanied refugee children allowed into the United States. In early 1939, America's rigid immigration laws made it virtually impossible for European Jews to seek safe haven in the United States. As deep-seated anti-Semitism and isolationism gripped much of the country, neither President Roosevelt nor Congress rallied to their aid. Yet one brave Jewish couple from Philadelphia refused to silently stand by. Risking their own safety, Gilbert Kraus, a successful lawyer, and his stylish wife, Eleanor, traveled to Nazi-controlled Vienna and Berlin to save fifty Jewish children. Steven Pressman brought the Kraus's rescue mission to life in his 2013 HBO documentary, 50 Children. In this book, he expands upon the story, offering additional historical detail and context to a portrait of this ordinary couple and their extraordinary actions. Drawing from Eleanor Kraus's unpublished memoir, rare historical documents, and interviews with more than a dozen of the surviving children, and illustrated with period photographs, archival materials, and memorabilia, 50 Children is a tale of personal courage and triumphant heroism that offers a unique insight into a critical period of history."--Publisher description.

2016 (a)

Simone Gigliotti and Monica Tempian, eds. The Young Victims of the Nazi Regime: Migration, the Holocaust and Postwar Displacement (London and New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2016).

"During the Nazi regime many children and young people in Europe found their lives uprooted by Nazi policies, resulting in their relocation around the globe. The Young Victims of the Nazi Regime represents the diversity of their experiences, covering a range of non-European perspectives on the Second World War and aspects of memory. This book is unique in that it places the experiences of children and youth in a transnational context, shifting the conversation of displacement and refuge to countries that have remained under-examined in a comparative context ... Featuring essays from an international range of experts, this book analyses the key themes in three sections: the migration of children to countries including England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Kenya, and Brazil; the experiences of young people who remained in Nazi Europe and became victims of war, displacement and deportation; and finally the challenges of rebuilding lives and representing traumas in the aftermath of war. In its comparisons between Jewish and non-Jewish experiences and how these intersected and diverged, it revisits debates about cultural genocide through the separation of families and communities, as well as contributing new perspectives on forced labour, families and the Holocaust, and Germans as war victims."--Publisher description.

Simone Gigliotti is Senior Lecturer in Holocaust Studies.

Monica Tempian is a Senior Lecturer in German.

2016 (b)

Tilar J. Mazzeo. Irena's Children: The Extraordinary Story of the Woman Who Saved 2,500 Children from the Warsaw Ghetto (New York, NY: Gallery Books, 2016).

"From the New York Times bestselling author of The Widow Clicquot comes an extraordinary and gripping account of Irena Sendler—the “female Oskar Schindler”—who took staggering risks to save 2,500 children from death and deportation in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II ... In 1942, one young social worker, Irena Sendler, was granted access to the Warsaw ghetto as a public health specialist. While she was there, she began to understand the fate that awaited the Jewish families who were unable to leave. Soon she reached out to the trapped families, going from door to door and asking them to trust her with their young children. Driven to extreme measures and with the help of a network of local tradesmen, ghetto residents, and her star-crossed lover in the Jewish resistance, Irena ultimately smuggled thousands of children past the Nazis. She made dangerous trips through the city’s sewers, hid children in coffins, snuck them under overcoats at checkpoints, and slipped them through secret passages in abandoned buildings ... But Irena did something even more astonishing at immense personal risk: she kept a secret list buried in bottles under an old apple tree in a friend’s back garden. On it were the names and true identities of these Jewish children, recorded so their families could find them after the war. She could not know that more than ninety percent of their families would perish ... Irena’s Children, “a fascinating narrative of…the extraordinary moral and physical courage of those who chose to fight inhumanity with compassion” (Chaya Deitsch author of Here and There: Leaving Hasidism, Keeping My Family), is a truly heroic tale of survival, resilience, and redemption."--Publisher description.

2017

Anne Nelson. Suzanne's Children: A Daring Rescue in Nazi Paris (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2017).

"This is one of the untold stories of the Holocaust. Suzanne Spaak was born into the Belgian Catholic elite and married into the country's leading political family. Her brother-in-law was the Foreign Minister and her husband Claude was a playwright and patron of the painter Renée Magritte. In Paris in the late 1930s her friendship with a Polish Jewish refugee led her to her life's purpose. When France fell and the Nazis occupied Paris, she joined the Resistance. She used her fortune and social status to enlist allies among wealthy Parisians and church groups. Under the eyes of the Gestapo, Suzanne and women from the Jewish and Christian resistance groups "kidnapped" hundreds of Jewish children to save them from the gas chambers. In the final year of the Occupation Suzanne was caught in the Gestapo dragnet that was pursuing a Soviet agent she had aided. She was executed shortly before the liberation of Paris. Suzanne Spaak is honored in Israel as one of the Righteous Among Nations"--Publisher description.

2018

Beth B. Cohen. Child Survivors of the Holocaust: The Youngest Remnant and the American Experience (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018).

"The majority of European Jewish children alive in 1939 were murdered during the Holocaust. Of 1.5 million children, only an estimated 150,000 survived. In the aftermath of the Shoah, efforts by American Jews brought several thousand of these child survivors to the United States. In Child Survivors of the Holocaust, historian Beth B. Cohen weaves together survivor testimonies and archival documents to bring their story to light. She reveals that even as child survivors were resettled and "saved," they struggled to adapt to new lives as members of adoptive families, previously unknown American Jewish kin networks, or their own survivor relatives. Nonetheless, the youngsters moved ahead. As Cohen demonstrates, the experiences both during and after the war shadowed their lives and relationships through adulthood, yet an identity as "survivors" eluded them for decades. Now, as the last living link to the Holocaust, the voices of Child Survivors are finally being heard."--Publisher description.

2018

Francoise S. Ouzan, How Young Holocaust Survivors Rebuilt Their Lives: France, the United States, and Israel (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2018).

"Drawing on testimonies, memoirs, and personal interviews of Holocaust survivors, Françoise S. Ouzan reveals how the experience of Nazi persecution impacted their personal reconstruction, rehabilitation, and reintegration into a free society. She sheds light on the life trajectories of various groups of Jews, including displaced persons, partisan fighters, hidden children, and refugees from Nazism. Ouzan shows that personal success is not only a unifying factor among these survivors but is part of an ethos that unified ideas of homeland, social justice, togetherness, and individual aspirations in the redemptive experience. Exploring how Holocaust survivors rebuilt their lives after World War II, Ouzan tells the story of how they coped with adversity and psychic trauma to contribute to the culture and society of their country of residence."--Publisher description.

Francoise S. Ouzan is Senior Researcher at the Goldstein-Goren Diaspora Research Center of Tel Aviv University. Ouzan has published widely on displaced persons, antisemitism and American Jewry and recently co-edited Holocaust Survivors, Resettlement, Memories, Identities and Postwar Jewish Identity and Rebirth.

2019

Samantha Bell. Children in the Holocaust (Lake Elmo, MN: Focus Readers, 2019).

Nonfiction <juvenile audience>.

"Describes the experiences of children during the Jewish Holocaust, including those that escaped to England or elsewhere, those that went into hiding, and those interned in concentration camps. Personal narratives, informative infographics, and historical photos make this title a compelling and thought-provoking read for young history lovers."--Publisher description.

Samantha S. Bell is the author and/or illustrator of more than 100 books for children.

2019

Mikhal Dekel. Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019).

"Fleeing East from Nazi terror, over a million Polish Jews traversed the Soviet Union, many finding refuge in Muslim lands. Their story―the extraordinary saga of two-thirds of Polish Jewish survivors―has never been fully told ... Author Mikhal Dekel’s father, Hannan Teitel, and her aunt Regina were two of these refugees. After they fled the town in eastern Poland where their family had been successful brewers for centuries, they endured extreme suffering in the Soviet forced labor camps known as “special settlements.” Then came a journey during which tens of thousands died of starvation and disease en route to the Soviet Central Asian Republics of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. While American organizations negotiated to deliver aid to the hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews who remained there, Dekel’s father and aunt were two of nearly one thousand refugee children who were evacuated to Iran, where they were embraced by an ancient Persian-Jewish community. Months later, their Zionist caregivers escorted them via India to Mandatory Palestine, where, at the endpoint of their thirteen-thousand-mile journey, they joined hundreds of thousands of refugees (including over one hundred thousand Polish Catholics). The arrival of the “Tehran Children” was far from straightforward, as religious and secular parties vied over their futures in what would soon be Israel ... Beginning with the death of the inscrutable Tehran Child who was her father, Dekel fuses memoir with extensive archival research to recover this astonishing story, with the help of travel companions and interlocutors including an Iranian colleague, a Polish PiS politician, a Russian oligarch, and an Uzbek descendent of Korean deportees. The history she uncovers is one of the worst and the best of humanity. The experiences her father and aunt endured, along with so many others, ultimately reshaped and redefined their lives and identities and those of other refugees and rescuers, profoundly and permanently, during and after the war ... With literary grace, Tehran Children presents a unique narrative of the Holocaust, whose focus is not the concentration camp, but the refugee, and whose center is not Europe, but Central Asia and the Middle East. 10 illustrations"--Publisher description.