Document 7-3. Young women remember the League of German Girls, 1946, in Gisela Miller-Kipp, ed., “Auch Du gehörst dem Führer”: Die Geschichte des Bundes Deutscher Mädel (BDM) in Quellen und Dokumenten. Forschungsreihe Materialien zur Historischen Jugendforschung (Weinheim: Juventa Verlag, 2001), 315–16 (translated from the German).
Nonconformity and Dissidence: The Edelweiss Pirates
Document 7-4. Report of the Gestapo, Düsseldorf, December 10, 1937, in Detlev Peukert, Die Edelweisspiraten: Protestbewegungen jugendlicher Arbeiter im Dritten Reich. Eine Dokumentation, 2nd ed. (Cologne: Bund-Verlag, 1983), 28–30 (translated from the German).
Document 7-5. Handwritten flyer distributed by the Wuppertal troop of the Edelweiss Pirates, “To the Subjugated German Youth,” c. 1942, in Detlev Peukert, Die Edelweisspiraten: Protestbewegungen jugendlicher Arbeiter im Dritten Reich. Eine Dokumentation, 2nd ed. (Cologne: Bund-Verlag, 1983), 81 (translated from the German).
Document 7-6. The “Cologne Navajos’ Fight Song,” c. 1944, in Detlev Peukert, Die Edelweisspiraten: Protestbewegungen jugendlicher Arbeiter im Dritten Reich. Eine Dokumentation, 2nd ed. (Cologne: Bund-Verlag, 1983), 51 (translated from the German).
Hearts and Minds: Nazi Propaganda
Document 7-7A. Excerpt from a children’s textbook in the Third Reich: “You Are Carrying the Load!” (“Hier trägst Du mit!”), in Jacob Graf, Biologie für höhere Schulen (Biology for Secondary Schools) (Munich: Lehmann Verlag, 1943), table 25.
Document 7-7B. Excerpt from a children’s textbook in the Third Reich: A story problem in Arithmetic for Volksschulen: Governing District Cologne and Aachen, School Years in Seven and Eight, 1941, quoted in Ute Hoffmann, Todesursache “Angina”: Zwangssterilisation und “Euthanasie” in der Landes-Heil- und Pflegeanstalt Bernburg (Magdeburg: Eigenverlag des Ministeriums des Innern des Landes Sachsen-Anhalt, 1996), 24 (translated from the German).
Document 7-8. German school children read the antisemitic children’s story Der Giftpilz (The Poisonous Mushroom), c. 1938, USHMMPA WS# 69561, E39 No. 2381/7, courtesy of the Stadtarchiv Nürnberg.
Document 7-9. Game board “Juden raus!” (“Jews, Get Out!”), Günther & Co., 1938, USHMMPA WS# 11894, courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute.
Perpetrators and Victims
Document 7-10. Letter from the director of the Trade and Vocational School for Boys to the Department of Education, Frankfurt am Main, October 1, 1935, in Kommission zur Erforschung der Geschichte der Frankfurter Juden, eds., Dokumente zur Geschichte der Frankfurter Juden, 1933–1945 (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Waldemar Kramer, 1963), 111 (translated from the German).
Document 7-11. Report of the Centralverein Landesverband Pommern (Pomerania), signed Michelsohn, to the Central Office of the Centralverein, in re Schivelbein, August 16, 1935, USHMMA, RG-11.00, Osobyi Archive Moscow, 721-1-3019, Centralverein Records, 91 (translated from the German).
Document 7-12. Decision of the State Court, Karlsruhe, concerning the appeal of Franz Josef Seitz against the removal of parental custody, Karlsruhe, April 15, 1937, USHMMA, RG-32.008*01, Willi Seitz Collection (translated from the German).
German Children and the War
Document 7-13. Members of the Hitler Youth practice donning gas masks during an air raid drill, c. 1937, USHMMPA WS# 31512, courtesy of Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz.
Document 7-14. School essay of an eleven-year-old girl, Nuremberg, 1946, in Emmy E. Werner, Through the Eyes of Innocents: Children Witness World War II (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), 49.
Document 7-15. Interview with Harry Bahrmann, Völkischer Beobachter, c. March 1945, in Franz Seidler, Deutsche Volkssturm: Das letzte Aufgebot, 1944–1945, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Herbig, 1991), 322.
Document 7-16. Journal of Lili G., entries for April 15 through May 9, 1945, in Reinhard Rürup, ed., Der Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion, 1941–1945: Eine Dokumentation zum 50. Jahrestag des Überfalls auf die Sowjetunion (Berlin: Argon-Verlag, 1991), 257–58 (translated from the German).
Document 7-17. A German mother shields the eyes of her young son as American troops force her and other townspeople to view the bodies of Soviet civilians from a mass grave near Suttrop, Germany, May 3, 1945, USHMMPA WS# 08197, courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration.
8 The World of the Child
Escape into Learning
Document 8-1. Diary/memoir of Miriam Wattenberg, entry for July 12, 1940, in Mary Berg, Warsaw Ghetto: A Diary by Mary Berg, ed. S. L. Shneiderman, trans. Norbert Guterman and Sylvia Glass (New York: L. B. Fischer, 1945), 32–33.
Document 8-2. Diary entry of Pola Rotszyld (Yad Vashem Archives, sign. 03/438) in Barbara Engelking-Boni, “Childhood in the Warsaw Ghetto,” in Children and the Holocaust: Symposium Presentations of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies (Washington DC: USHMM, 2004), 35.
Document 8-3. Three girls study at a clandestine Jewish school in Prague, c. 1942, USHMMPA WS# 37424, courtesy of the Jewish Museum of Prague Photo Archive.
Document 8-4. Diary of Yitskhok Rudashevski, Vilna ghetto, entry for March 14, 1943, in Alexandra Zapruder, ed., Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 223.
At Play during the Holocaust
Document 8-5. Children at play in a field in Marysin, Łódź ghetto, c. 1941, USHMMPA WS# 33844, courtesy of the Archiwum Panstowe w Łódźi, sygn. 1120, fot. 27-832-6.
Document 8-6. Oskar Rosenfeld, entry in The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto, August 25, 1943, in Lucjan Dobroszycki, ed., The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto, 1941–1944, trans. Richard Lourie et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 373–74.
Document 8-7. Painted wooden butterfly toy, Small Fortress, Theresienstadt ghetto, 1941–1945, USHMMPA WS# N00049, original reposited in Pamatnik Terezin Narodni Kulturni Pamatka.
Document 8-8. Testimony of Dr. Aharon Peretz, May 4, 1961, in The Trial of Adolf Eichmann: Record of Proceedings in the District Court of Jerusalem (Jerusalem: Trust for the Publication of the Proceedings of the Eichmann Trial in cooperation with the Israel State Archives and Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, 1992–1995), 1:478–79.
Document 8-9. Personal testimony of Hanna Hoffmann-Fischel, c. 1960, in Inge Deutschkron, Denn ihrer war die Hölle: Kinder in Gettos und Lagern (Cologne: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1965), 52–55 (translated from the German).
Document 8-10. An eight-year-old resident of the Vilna ghetto describes the game “Jews and Germans” (Genia Silkes Collection, YIVO Institute), quoted in George Eisen, Children and Play in the Holocaust: Games among the Shadows (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 72.
Document 8-11. In the Łódź ghetto, children, one dressed as a ghetto policeman, play a peculiar version of cops and robbers, 1943, USHMMPA WS# 80401, courtesy of Beit Lohamei Haghetaot.
Innocence and Knowledge
Document 8-12. Excerpt from Josef Zelkowicz’s essay “The Optimist in the Potato Queue,” Łódź ghetto, September 5, 1942, in Josef Zelkowicz, In Those Terrible Days: Writings from the Lodz Ghetto, ed. Michal Unger, trans. Naftali Greenwood (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2002), 306–7.
Document 8-13. Young children from the Marysin colony wait to be conveyed to the deportation assembly point during the Gehsperre, Łódź ghetto, September 1942, USHMMPA WS# 50334, courtesy of the Instytut Pamieci Narodowej.
Document 8-14. Watercolor by Helga Weissová, Birthday Wish I (Pŕání k narozeninám I), Theresienstadt ghetto, December 1941, USHMMPA WS# 60926, courtesy Helga Weissová.
Document 8-15. Diary of Elisabeth Block, entry for March 8, 1943, in Elisabeth Block, Erinnerungszeichen: Die Tagebücher der Elisabeth Block, ed. Haus der Bayerischen Geschichte/Historischer Verein Rosenheim (Rosenheim: Wendelstein-Druck, 1993), 265–66.
In Hopes and Dreams: Coping with the Holocaust
D
ocument 8-16. Personal testimony of Hanna Hoffmann-Fischel, c. 1960, in Inge Deutschkron, Denn ihrer war die Hölle: Kinder in Gettos und Lagern (Cologne: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1965), 52–55 (translated from the German).
Document 8-17. Just as youngsters at Birkenau reenacted Snow White, children in the Novaky labor camp perform a play about another popular Disney character, Mickey Mouse, Slovakia, 1944, USHMMPA WS# 40080, courtesy of Mira Frenkel.
Document 8-18. Drawing of Ilona Goldman (Alona Frankel) for her parents in hiding, Marcinkowice, Poland, 1942, USHMM Collections, gift of Alona Goldman Frankel.
Document 8-19. Abram Koplowicz, “When I Am Twenty,” Łódź ghetto, c. 1943, in Institute of Tolerance/State Archives in Łódź (in cooperation with the Centre de Civilization Française and the Embassy of France in Poland), eds., The Children of the Łódź Ghetto (Łódź: Bilbo, 2004).
Document 8-20. Watercolor by Nelly Toll, Teacher with Children Wearing Black Uniforms, Lvov, Poland, c. 1943–1944, USHMMPA WS# 94466, courtesy of Nelly Landau Toll.
9 Children and Resistance and Rescue
Youth and Armed Resistance
Document 9-1. Emmanuel Ringelblum, “Little Stalingrad Defends Itself,” c. April 1943, in Joseph Kermish, ed., “To Live with Honor and Die with Honor”: Selected Documents from the Warsaw Ghetto Underground Archives “O.S.” (Oneg Shabbath) (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1986), 601–3.
Document 9-2. Oral history of Berel Dov Freiberg, recorded by Bluma Wasser, 1945, in Isaiah Trunk, ed., Jewish Responses to Nazi Persecution: Collective and Individual Behavior in Extremis (New York: Stein and Day, 1982), 283–87.
Document 9-3. Members of the Bielski partisan family camp, including several small children, shortly before liberation, Naliboki Forest, Belorussia, 1944, USHMMPA WS# 77654, courtesy of the Yad Vashem Photo Archives.
Document 9-4. Oral history of Rachmiel Łozowski, Tel Aviv, 1947, USHMMA RG 15.084, Holocaust Survivor Testimonies, 301/540 (translated from the Yiddish).
Unarmed Resistance: The Children’s War
Document 9-5. “Let the Jewish Youth Remember,” Słowo Młodych (Young People’s Voice), Warsaw ghetto, spring, 1942, USHMMA, RG-15.070M, Zespół podziemie–prasa konspiracyjna [Clandestine Publications], 230/13/1.
Document 9-6. Arrested at a checkpoint, a Jewish boy holds a bag of smuggled goods, Warsaw ghetto, c. 1941, USHMMPA WS# 60611B, courtesy of the YIVO Institute.
Document 9-7. Henryka Łazowertówna (Lazowert), “The Little Smuggler,” Warsaw ghetto, c. 1941, in Michał Borwicz, ed., Pieśń ujdzie cało: Antologia wierszy o Żydach pod okupacją niemiecką (Warsaw: Centralna Żydowska Komisja Historyczna w Polsce, 1947), 115–16 (translated from the Polish).
Document 9-8. Historians believe the girl in the center of the photograph to be teenage resistance member Masha Bruskina, being marched with her comrades Kiril Trus and Volodya Shcherbatsevich to their place of execution by German soldiers, Minsk, October 26, 1941, USHMMPA WS# 14101, courtesy of the Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-197-026-43.
Document 9-9. The hanging of teenage resistance figures, believed to be Masha Bruskina and Volodya Shcherbatsevich, by an officer of the German 707th Infantry Division, Minsk, October 26, 1941, USHMMPA WS# 25136, courtesy of Ada Dekhtyar.
In Hiding
Document 9-10. Emmanuel Ringelblum, “Jewish Children on the Aryan Side,” 1943, in Emmanuel Ringelblum, Polish-Jewish Relations during the Second World War, ed. Joseph Kermish and Shmuel Krakowski (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1974), 140–45.
Document 9-11. Oral history of Szepsel Griner by the Central Jewish Historical Commission in Poland, c. 1947, USHMMA RG 15.084, Holocaust Survivor Testimonies, 301/2284 (translated from the Polish).
Document 9-12. Louise Israels celebrates her second birthday in hiding, Amsterdam, July 30, 1944, USHMMPA WS# 16427, courtesy of Louise Lawrence-Israels.
Children and Aid Organizations: The Politics of Rescue
Document 9-13. Child identification card of Helmuth Ehrenreich, Police Presidium of Frankfurt am Main, June 16, 1939, USHMMA, Acc. 2006.396, Ehrenreich Family Papers (translated from the German).
Document 9-14. Letter of Gilbert Kraus to George Messerschmidt, assistant secretary of state, February 3, 1939 (National Archives and Records Administration, RG-59, General Records of the Department of State, Decimal File 150.6265/610).
Document 9-15. Aided by philanthropists Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus, a group of Austrian Jewish children finds safe haven in the United States, June 3, 1939, USHMMPA WS# 96464, courtesy of Anita Willens.
Document 9-16. Child’s drawing of Château de la Hille, La Hille, France, c. 1942, USHMMPA WS# 45699, courtesy of Vera Friedlander.
When Rescue Fails
Document 9-17. Jewish refugee children pose at a children’s home in Izieu, France, summer 1943, USHMMPA WS# 15513, courtesy of Serge Klarsfeld.
Document 9-18. Telex from Klaus Barbie, commanding officer of the Security Police and Security Service IV B, Lyon, to Department IV B 4, Paris (Barbie Telex), April 6, 1944, in Serge Klarsfeld, The Children of Izieu: A Human Tragedy, trans. Kenneth Jacobsen (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1985), 95 (translated from the German).
10 Elsewhere, Perhaps?
“Over This Field of Death, Peace Breaks Out”: Liberation
Document 10-1. David P. Boder, interview with Gert Silberbart, Geneva, August 27, 1946, USHMMA RG-50.472, spool 9-82 and 83 (translated from the German).
Document 10-2. Young boys join adult survivors in cheering their U.S. Army liberators at Dachau, April 29, 1945, USHMMPA WS# 45075, courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration, College Park.
Document 10-3. Oral history testimony of P. H. by the Canadian Jewish Congress, Montreal, February 1946, in Isaiah Trunk, ed., Jewish Responses to Nazi Persecution: Collective and Individual Behavior in Extremis (New York: Stein and Day, 1982), 326–28.
Document 10-4. Diary of Alice Ehrmann (Alisah Shek), entries for May 10, 11, and 18, 1945, in Alisah Shek, “Tagebuch,” in Theresienstädter Studien und Dokumente, 1994, ed. Miroslav Kárný, Raimund Kemper, and Margita Kárná (Prague: Verlag Academica, 1994), 196–99 (translated from the German).
The Search for Family Members
Document 10-5. Hedvig Dydyna holds a name card intended to help surviving family members locate her at the Kloster Indersdorf DP camp, Germany, c. May 1945, USHMMPA WS# 06677, courtesy of Lilo Plaschkes.
Document 10-6. Interview with Maria Straucher by the Central Jewish Historical Commission, Kraków, December 2, 1947, USHMMA, RG-15.084, Holocaust Survivor Testimonies, 301/3292/1-2, 1949 (translated from the Polish).
Document 10-7. Renée Pallarés (right) and her family helped save Diane Popowski, an infant who had been with her mother at the Agde internment camp in France. In 1949, nine-year-old Diane reluctantly returned to her widowed father. She reunited with the Pallarés family some years later. USHMMPA WS# 13346, courtesy of Diane Popowski Fenster.
Document 10-8. Interview with Gizela Szulberg by the Central Jewish Historical Commission, Bytom, September 3, 1947, USHMMA RG 15.084, Holocaust Survivor Testimonies, 301/2731/2-3 (translated from the Polish).
Where Is Home?
Document 10-9. An exercise class for preschoolers in the Bergen-Belsen DP Camp, Germany, 1947, USHMMPA WS# 11811, courtesy of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
Document 10-10. Report card of Regina Laks from the Herzel Hebrew Public School, Schlachtensee DP Camp, Berlin, January 18, 1947, USHMMPA WS# 96426, courtesy of Regina Laks Gelb.
Document 10-11. Diary of Michal (Michael) Kraus, handwritten with illustrations, 1945–1947, 2, 23–28, USHMMA, Acc. 2006.51, Michael Kraus Collection (translated from the Czech).
Document 10-12. “Where are our parents, you murderers?” a young survivor of Buchenwald writes on the side of the train car that will take him and other “Buchenwald Boys” from Germany to an orpha
nage in France, June 1945, USHMMPA WS# 44251, courtesy of Willy Fogel.
Document 10-13. Page of convoy list of Buchenwald’s orphaned children taken from Germany to Écouis, France, June 8, 1945, in Judith Hemmendinger and Robert Krell, The Children of Buchenwald: Child Survivors of the Holocaust and Their Post-War Lives (Jerusalem: Gefen Press, 2000), 180.
Document 10-14. Judith Feist Hemmendinger remembers the “Buchenwald Boys,” 1984, in Judith Hemmendinger and Robert Krell, The Children of Buchenwald: Child Survivors of the Holocaust and Their Post-War Lives (Jerusalem: Gefen Press, 2000, 27–31).
The Process of Remembering
Document 10-15. Elie Wiesel, Un di Velt hot Geshvign, trans. Vera Szabó (Buenos Aires: Tsentral-Farband fun Poylishe Yidn in Argentine, 1956), 66–71 (translated from the Yiddish).
Document 10-16. Aharon Appelfeld, Beyond Despair: Three Lectures and a Conversation with Philip Roth, trans. Jeffrey M. Green (New York: Fromm International Publishing Corporation, 1994), 36–37.
Documents 10-17 and 10-18. Halina Birenbaum, “There Is My Soul” (1994) and “My Life Started from the End” (1983), in Halina Birenbaum, Sounds of a Guilty Silence: Selected Poems, trans. June Friedman (Kraków: Centrum Dialogu, 1997), 5, 35–36.
Document 10-19. A boy displays his Auschwitz tattoo as other children from the Neu Freimann DP camp look on, USHMMPA WS# 29314, courtesy of Jack Sutin.
Bibliography
Published Primary Sources
Adelson, Alan, and Robert Lapides, eds. Łódź Ghetto: Inside a Community under Siege. New York: Viking, 1989.
Archives of the District Museum in Konin. Chełmno Witnesses Speak, edited by Łucja Pawlicka-Nowak, translated by Juliet Golden. Konin: Council for the Protection of Memory of Combat and Martyrdom in Warsaw/District Museum in Konin, 2004.
Berg, Mary. Warsaw Ghetto: A Diary by Mary Berg, edited by S. L. Shneiderman, translated by Norbert Guterman and Sylvia Glass. New York: L. B. Fischer, 1945.
Children during the Holocaust Page 58