Category:Holocaust Children Studies--1990s

Holocaust Children Studies (1990s)

The page: Holocaust Children Studies Studies--1990s includes (in chronological order) scholarly and literary works in the field of Holocaust Children Studies made in the 1990s, or from 1990 to 1999.

Highlights (1990s)

Interpreters (1990s)

Timeline (1990s)

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

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

1991

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Gerhard Durlacher. De zoektocht <Dutch> (Amsterdam : Meulenhoff, 1991).

English ed. The Search: The Birkenau Boys, trans. Susan Massotty (London ; New York : Serpent's Tail, 1998).

Also translated into German (Die Suche : Bericht über den Tod und das Uberleben, Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1995).

"Gerhard Durlacher was stunned to discover that he was not the only survivor who was assigned to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944. The Search follows his quest to find his fellow survivors and ends with a reunion of the Birkenau boys in Israel in 1990 ... A child survivor of the Holocaust, Durlacher long believed that he was the only person still alive from a group of 89 boys assigned to the Birkenau extermination camp in 1944. After he learned that he was wrong, he set himself the task of confronting his past by locating some of the others. As in many other Holocaust memoirs, the prose here is spare, and the lack of detail can be a little confusing. For example, the reader is thrown into the author's search without a description of the process that led him to take his journey. But some psychological truisms emerge in this gray travelogue that, while not fresh, are worth ruminating over. What the author, a professor of sociology at the University of Amsterdam who died in 1996, finds is that even though the survivors shared a common experience, how they have coped with their wartime suffering differs. Some, in particular those who have moved to Israel, meet regularly with other survivors; others keep their harrowing past buried deep in their psyches. Equally diverse are survivors' personal outlooks--despite what they have gone through, some of the "Birkenau Boys" still call themselves optimists, while others possess the bitterness one would expect. Not surprisingly, Durlacher, who wrote two previous books on the Holocaust, enjoyed the company of the former much more than the latter."--Publisher description.

Gerhard Durlacher (1928-1996) was a Holocaust child survivor and writer.

1993 (a)

Jane Marks. The Hidden Children: The Secret Survivors of the Holocaust (New York : Ballantine Books, 1993).

"They hid wherever they could for as long as it took the Allies to win the war -- Jewish children, frightened, alone, often separated from their families. For months, even years, they faced the constant danger of discovery, fabricating new identities at a young age, sacrificing their childhoods to save their lives. These secret survivors have suppressed these painful memories for decades. Now, in The Hidden Children, twenty-three adult survivors share their moving wartime experiences -- some for the first time ... There is Rosa, who hid in an impoverished one-room farmhouse with three others, sleeping on a clay pallet behind a stove; Renee, who posed as a Catholic and was kept in a convent by nuns who knew her secret; and Richard, who lived in a closet with his family for thirteen months. Their personal stories of belief and determination give a voice, at last, to the forgotten. Inspiring and life-affirming, The Hidden Children is an unparalleled document of witness, discovery, and the miracle of human courage."--Publisher description.

Jane Marks is an American author and journalist whose article in New York magazine became the basis for her book on children who survived the Holocaust in hiding.

1994 (a)

Ota B. Kraus. The Painted Wall / The Children's Block (Tel-Aviv : Yaron Golan Publ., 1994). Repr. London: Ebury Press, 2019. Also translated into German (2002).

A semi-fictional account, based on his own personal experience.

"In the novel The Painted Wall, Otto (Ota) B. Kraus writes about his own experience in Auschwitz during WWII. Otto was one of the instructors in the children's block and his (future) wife Dita, was the librarian for the children, of whom only a handfull survived. The book, which was originally named "The Diary", was written after the war. The story of a diary is but a literary introduction, yet the events described in the book are real. The Painted Wall tells the true story of 500 Jewish children who lived in the Czech Family Camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau between September 1943 and June 1944. The children were kept on a Children's Block supervised by the notorious Dr. Mengele, where their instructors organized clandestine lessons, singalongs and even staged little plays and charades. The Children's Block was intended to provide the Nazis with an alibi to refute the rumors of the Final Solution. As long as the Children's Block existed, it was a shelter and haven for the hundreds of children, who soon afterwards perished in the gas chambers."--Publisher description.

Ota "Otto" B. Kraus (1921-2000) was born and raised in Prague to a Jewish family. In May 1942 he was confined with his family to Ghetto Terezin . In December 1943 he was deported to Auschwitz, where at the time the Nazis had established a special family camps for those arriving from Terezin. Otto became one of the children’s counselors on the Kinderblock, a special barracks where the children were kept during the day. After a few months the camp was liquidated and the inmates were almost all sent to the gas chambers. Otto was one of the few selected to survive as labor force. A fervent Zionist, after the war he settled to Israel, where he was a teacher and writer.

1994 (b)

Richard C. Lukas. Did the Children Cry?: Hitler's War Against Jewish and Polish Children (New York, NY: Hippocrene Books, 1994).

"An unprecedented aspect of Nazi genocide in World War II was the cold and deliberate decision not to spare the children. Jewish children, first driven into the ghettos, were marked for total destruction as part of the "Final Solution" once it was put into effect, in 1942. Gentile children were starved, killed, or Germanized in order to reduce the Polish nation to a small complement of semi-literate slaves tending the Herrenvolk in their thousand-year Reich. This record also includes accounts of how they fought back by working for the underground, smuggling food into the ghettos, attending secret classes to continue their forbidden education. Included are stories of villains like Mengele who selected children for execution during Jewish religious holidays; Rudolph Hoess, Auschwitz's commandant who admitted his own discomfort when he witnessed the gassing of prisoners with the excuse: "I was a soldier and an officer"; a heroic Dr. Janusz Korczak who was in charge of an orphanage in the ghetto, but refused to leave his orphans, and at the head of a contingent of 192 children and 8 staff members, erect, his eyes looking into the distance, held the hands of two children as he led them to the railroad platform where trains took them to certain death. Based on vast research in the United States, Great Britain, and Poland, many interviews, theses and other papers, documents and official histories, memoirs, autobiographies, articles, periodicals and newspapers, Did the Children Cry? stands as a monument to millions of children who were bombed, wounded, deported, raped, starved, maimed, subjected to "medical" experimentation, and killed in German-occupied Poland."--Publisher description.

Richard C. Lukas (b.1937) is an American historian and author of books and articles on military, diplomatic, Polish, and Polish-American history. He specializes in the history of Poland during World War II.