Jewish Children During the Holocaust

Children deemed as “Aryan” by Nazi ideology epitomized the future of a unified and pure “Aryan” racial community. On the other hand, Nazi ideology and policies targeted “non-Aryan” children, such as Jewish, Roma, and Slavic children, as well as children with disabilities. The Nazis and their collaborators murdered an estimated 1.5 million Jewish children under the age of sixteen. A child’s age during the Holocaust determined his or her experiences, identities, and understandings of the events, as well as child survivors’ memories. The Nazi definition of a Jewish child differed geographically and temporally. Jewish children endured the same patterns of Nazi-inflicted persecution as adult Jews, such as restrictions on freedom of movement, confinement in ghettos, incarceration in camps, and forced and slave labor. Jewish children embodied the continuity of the Jewish people and as such were among the first to be murdered in mass shootings and in killing centers. The Nazis considered the youngest children dispensable because they could not work. To survive, Jewish children employed the same strategies as adults, such as flight, life under a false identity, and life in hiding. Fewer than one in ten Jewish children survived the Holocaust. Initially, analyses of the voices and experiences of children were mostly absent from Holocaust scholarship, except to illustrate the extent and consequences of the Nazi genocide. A scholarly turn that began in the 1990s, including as a result of child survivors’ endeavors, recalibrated the focus to scrutinize the voices and texts of Jewish children and child survivors as valid historical sources. Doing so has led to a multidisciplinary investigation of the many dimensions of Jewish child life during the Holocaust, including forms of young people’s agency. An ongoing interest in children’s experiences during the Holocaust and in responses to the plight of young people have offered new insights into Holocaust history and memory, as well as contributed to efforts to provide compensation for Jewish child Holocaust survivors. The scholarly output on Jewish children during the Holocaust has also inspired studies on non-Jewish child victims of Nazism. This article focuses on the experiences of Jewish children, meaning those born in 1928 or later, during the Holocaust. It highlights some of the many works, both scholarly and popular, that have emerged over the years and that aim to expand our understanding of what and how Jewish children endured during the Holocaust.