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
