The Fate of Jewish Children

A boy selling Jewish newspapers in the Warsaw ghetto, 1941. Source: Willy Georg Collection/ Bundesarchiv
The Fate of Jewish Children

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.’ 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.

The introductory essay
‘Interrupted Childhood: the Fate of Jewish Children during the Second
World War’ by Martyna Grądzka-Rejak


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Interview with Elżbieta Ficowska

Elżbieta Ficowska was born in Warsaw ghetto in 1942 to Henia and Jossel Koppel. She survived because she was smuggled to the "Aryan side" and hid from Germans by Stanisława Bussold – a 56-year-old midwife and member of the underground helping Jews. The only thing left from her Jewish parents is a little silver spoon bearing the girl's name and birth date. Her story is among those presented at the traveling exhibition "Between Life and Death".

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