Interrupted Childhood: the Fate of Jewish Children during the Second World War

Martyna Grądzka-Rejak, PhD

The introductory essay

During the Second World War, the Jewish community as a whole was condemned to extermination by the German Nazis. No distinction was made either by gender, origin or age of the victims. However, among these categories, the experience of children is of particular note. For the Germans during the Second World War, as one survivor reported, a Jewish child ‘was a being who not only had no right to life, but even no right to death […]. The Germans’ war against Jewish children began already in the womb of their mothers.’¹

It is estimated that of the approximately one million Jewish children (up to the age of 14) living in Poland (Second Polish Republic) before the war, about 5,000 survived the occupation, or about 0.5 per cent.²

Holocaust researcher Raul Hilberg, pointed to four stages in the Germans’ policy towards Jewish children during the Second World War: ‘The first was the initial restrictions. The second was life in the ghetto. Then came the selections for deportation or execution. Finally, the children were murdered.’³ The stages detailed by Hilberg can also be indicated when describing and analysing the extermination of adults. It should be noted, however, that the objectives of the policy of extermination of Jewish children set out by the Germans – to a large extent – were already implemented at the stage of life in the ghetto. First in the indirect aspect, as the group that was most exposed to the negative consequences of ghetto living conditions. The daily life of Jewish children in the ghettos of the General Government⁴, depended on many factors, such as age, gender, family wealth, having parents or other relatives at all, etc. The fate of Jewish children in ghettos called open or semi-open, in smaller towns, and in closed ghettos, located in large urban centres, also differed. For one, the type and size of the ghetto influenced, among other things, the possibilities of obtaining food.

Furthermore, the age of the child was important too; the older and more resourceful the child was, the easier it was for him or her to adapt to changing realities and to take on new roles forced by conditions. The fate of new-borns and infants was particularly difficult. For example, in the Warsaw Ghetto between autumn 1940 and July 1942, an average of about 230 babies were born each month⁵. One of these was Elżbieta Ficowska, née Koppel. Under the conditions of war and ghetto life, the roles played in the family changed, hence many young Jewish men and women from the ghettos were forced to take care of the material means necessary for survival. Often it was the children – for reasons such as their small build or ‘good looks’, which made them less recognisable outside the ghetto walls – who were better able to provide their families with food.

Crucial to the fate of Jewish children in the General Government was the Germans’ commencement of Operation Reinhardt in 1942, its goal being the murder of all Jews in the General Government and Bezirk Bialystok (Bialystok District). Children were treated on an equal footing with the elderly or sick, or pregnant women, and were classified as unproductive, with the result that they were sent to die in extermination camps in the first instance. A chance of survival was given to those whose loved ones managed to guide them to the so-called Aryan side and there, under a false identity, or after being baptised, or in permanent hiding places, efforts were made to save them. Their experiences on the Aryan side also varied. The other group that could survive the selection during the deportation were older children, particularly teenagers deemed fit for work.

Footnotes

1
AŻIH, file ref. 301/1369, Relacja zbiorowa – do audycji „Dzieci oskarżają” [Collective report: for the ‘Children Accuse’ programme], k. 1. ↩︎
2
Dzieci żydowskie w czasach Zagłady. Wczesne świadectwa 1944-1948. Relacje dzieci ze zbiorów Centralnej Żydowskiej Komisji Historycznej, elaborated by O. Orzeł, Warszawa 2014, p. 10. ↩︎
3
R. Hilberg, Sprawcy, ofiary, świadkowie. Zagłada Żydów 1933-1945 [orig. Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933–1945], Warszawa 2007, p. 209. ↩︎
4
The General Government (German: Generalgouvernement, GG) – territorial unit in Poland created by the Nazis on 26 October 1939. When the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, they split the country into three parts: the western third was annexed to the Third Reich; the eastern third was occupied by the Soviet Union; and the central third was made into the General Government. The main goal of Nazi Germany was the total germanisation of the territory of the General Government through the direct and indirect extermination of the population and the destruction of the Polish cultural heritage. Sources: https://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%206246.pdf; https://sztetl.org.pl/pl/slownik/generalnegubernatorstwo ↩︎
5
B. Engelking and J. Leociak, Getto warszawskie. Przewodnik po nieistniejącym mieście, Warsaw 2013, pp. 71–72. ↩︎