Overview

Through the Eyes of Jewish Child Survivors from Poland offers an intimate social history of Jewish childhood during and after the Holocaust. Centered on children from German-occupied Poland but informed by experiences across Nazi-occupied Europe, the book highlights the child's own perspective to illuminate rescue, survival, and relationships with adults under the Nazi occupation. In the first part, Joanna Beata Michlic examines children's wartime experiences, showing how agency, gender, class, and religious or social background shaped their chances of survival. The second part traces the complex efforts of these young survivors to reclaim both childhood and Jewish identity, revealing the gap between their hopes and the actual opportunities of the immediate postwar period. Drawing on children's diaries, letters, testimonies, and memoirs, Michlic illuminates how children experienced and remembered trauma: the destruction of their families, the loss of their prewar worlds, and the struggle to adapt to a new reality, challenging myths that sentimentalize the children's endurance and portray the Holocaust as neatly concluded. This powerful study shows why the history of Holocaust child survivors remains a vital resource for understanding vulnerability, agency, and the enduring impact of war and genocide.

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9781496226075

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Reviews

""A remarkable and moving study [that] sheds a great deal of new light on the complex problems of rescue and survival under Nazi occupation in Poland. It will have a major impact on our understanding of the Second World War and the more general problem of children subjected to the stress of conflict and loss.""--Antony Polonsky, author of The Jews in Poland and Russia, volumes 1-3 ""An enormously significant contribution to our understanding of the way children experience, adapt to, and remember trauma, the loss of childhood, the destruction of their families and their prewar world. Joanna Michlic has made superb use of archives to bring to light many fascinating case studies. The topic is not only very important in its own right but also quite timely, considering the plight of millions of children in the world today.""--Samuel D. Kassow, editor of Listen and Believe: The Ghetto Reportage of Peretz Opoczynski and Jozeph Zelkowicz and translator of Rokhl Auerbach's Warsaw Testament ""This timely, moving, and sometimes painful book illuminates the lives of Hitler's youngest victims: Jewish children. It shows what it meant for children to become Holocaust victims, how a small minority survived against all odds, and what happened to children once the war ended. Invaluable as a contribution to Holocaust studies, this volume likewise serves as a cautionary tale for our own times.""--Jonathan D. Sarna, distinguished university professor at Brandeis University and chief historian of the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History

Author Information

Joanna Beata Michlic is a social and cultural historian of the Holocaust and its aftermath. Her research focuses on Jewish childhood, rescue, and the long-term impact of genocide. Michlic is author, editor, and coeditor of numerous books, including Poland's Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present (Nebraska, 2006) and Bringing the Dark Past to Light: The Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe (Nebraska, 2013).

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