Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Illustrations Introduction: Search and Research PART ONE: The Recognizable World Chapter One At Home Chapter Two Into Hiding Chapter Three In Secret PART TWO: A World Without Precedent and Without Parallel Chapter Four Transit Camps Chapter Five Ghettos PART THREE: The Unrecognizable World Chapter Six Death and Slave Labour Camps PART FOUR: Conclusion and Epilogue Chapter Seven My War Began in 1945 Notes Bibliography Glossary Map Index

Reviews

YA-- A poignant and gripping story by an author who writes with a heart. Dwork begins her history by reiterating the grim statistic that only 11 percent of European Jewish children survived the war and that over one and a half million children were killed. She documents her narrative by weaving personal recollections of survivors and entries from their diaries. Readers will be transfixed by the children's daily lives--the ordinariness as well as the atrocities. A new dimension in books about the Holocaust. --Mary Quinn, Fairfax County Pub . Lib . , VA

The Nazis' murder of 1.5 million Jewish children is the focus of this pioneering study. Expelled from school, forced to wear the yellow star, Jewish children in German-occupied Europe had their family lives shattered by anti-Semitic legislation prior to the outbreak of war. Later some hid in attics or forests; others concealed their identities but remained visible, constantly threatened by starvation, disease or selection for the gas chambers. Yet, Yale scholar Dwork demonstrates, Jewish children created their own mental space, where play, love and relationships continued amid the evil and horror. Tapping letters, diaries, drawings and oral histories of survivors, Dwork adds a poignant new dimension to Holocaust studies. (Apr.)

By focusing on the shattering experiences and daily routines of children during the period of Nazi domination in Europe, Dwork succeeds in illuminating a previously unexplored chapter of social history. Relying heavily on quotations from diaries, letters, and interviews, garnered through extensive research, Dwork de scribes daily living as seen through the eyes of children. She plumbs the sorrows of parents desperately trying to save their children by placing them with foster Christian families through various formal and informal networks that operated throughout Europe. And she chronicles the pitiful attempts to cling to some semblance of normalcy amidst the inhuman, bizarre conditions in the ghettos and the concentration camps. Only ten percent of Jewish children survived the Nazi onslaught. Dwork's powerful book gives new meaning to this numbing statistic.--Carol R. Glatt, VA Medical Ctr. Lib., Philadelphia