Witnesses of War: Children's Lives Under the Nazis

by Nicholas Stargardt

Book Overview

Witnesses of War is the first work to show how children experienced the Second World War under the Nazis. Children were often the victims in this most terrible of European conflicts, falling prey to... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1400040884
• ISBN13: 9781400040889
• Release Date: January 2006
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Length: 493 Pages
• Weight: 1.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.7" x 6.5" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

A different perspective on the effects of life under the Nazis

WITNESSES OF WAR: CHILDREN'S LIVES UNDER THE NAZIS is a riveting, involving survey which uses original material from children's schoolwork, diaries, letters from evacuation camps and more to recreate the child perception and experience during the war. Many of these children had to take over when parents couldn't: their stories provide a different perspective on the effects of life under the Nazis, and should be added to the chronicles of any serious Holocaust representation. Diane C. Donovan California Bookwatch

unbelievable

This book was one of many I have read about Nazi inhumanity. The difference is that this one was centered on children. I was so astonished to read about the cruel and inhumane way the Nazis treated their own children that did not "conform" to the current political climate. My question, after reading this book is, are the traits that the German people seem to have had during the Nazi period part of the human condition, or part of Europe, or part of the first part of the 20th century, or what?? Is it in all of us to act and react as the people described in this book? This book is a MUST READ for anyone trying to understand the authoritarian, parochial and nationalistic actions of the Nazis and all Germans during the third reich.

Detailed exploration of Nazi rule on childrens' lives

Mr. Stargardt brilliantly explores how Nazi rule affected the lives of children of all nationalities in wartime Europe during WWII. Through extensive research, the author shows how children thought and acted when faced with horrific experiences. Great historical writing and not a dull paragraph therein.

War and children

This is an excellent study of the affect World War II had on children, both German and their oppressed contemporaries in other countries. It's certainly most poignant when discussing the Jewish children, who were the ones who bore the brunt of the evils of the Nazi regime. There were also the so-called "sub-humans" (to the Nazis), the children of Poland, Russia, Czechoslovakia and others, whose fate, in some instances, was as terrible as the Jews. It's a very sad book, but an important one for us to realize that war has a most profound affect on the youngest of us, who have no say in what occurrs around them, or in what happens to them. What impressed me the most was the feeling of "victimhood" that the German people, young and old, adopted after the War. They knew, in many cases, that the Jews were being exterminated, but it didn't appear to bother them until the war, in all its horror, reached them where they lived. I grieve for the bad things that happened to the children of both sides, but assuming the mantle of victim by the Germans really is pushing sympathy to the breaking point. I won't say that I feel that they deserved what happened to them, what intelligent person would, but there is "war guilt" that was ignored right after the war, and only in the late 60s did the country as a whole own up to its responsibility. Better late than never, I suppose.

Children in War, Children at War

Soldiers fight wars, and suffer in them; it's their duty, but theirs is not the only suffering. "In all wars, children are victims," writes Nicholas Stargardt in the introduction to _Witnesses of War: Children's Lives Under the Nazis_ (Knopf). "The Second World War differed only in the unprecedented extent to which this is true." Stargardt's book is a massive compilation of horrors and sadnesses of what happened to children mostly in Germany and occupied Poland. Children were shot, killed by starvation and disease, frozen, and incinerated in firestorms. They witnessed mass shootings and mass rapes, especially by the conquering Red Army. Some of them were devoted to the Nazi cause and became among the last fighters for it. Some saved their families from starvation by smuggling. To tell the different facets of this painful story, Stargardt has not concentrated on memoirs written in the post-war years (although these are included, along with reflections on what the memoirists have left out), but has instead extensively used children's drawings, letters, schoolwork, and diary entries to provide immediate views of what the war did to them and meant to them. The horror is lightened, a little, by stories of amazing resilience. It is pathetic to read about children trying simply to be children in these monstrous circumstances. A five-year-old comforted her doll: "Don't cry, my little doll. When the Germans come to grab you, I won't leave you," and she wiped the doll's tears away. Another girl writes not about her own sufferings, but that of her doll, who was ripped open by SS goons when she was on her way to Auschwitz and then lost in the tumult of the camp's infamous ramp. A German girl fleeing from her home remembered hiding her doll along with the valuables of the family, and another sought comfort in her doll when the rest of her house had been destroyed. Children could not stop playing. Children of all sides hated their enemies, but also envied those in power. Polish boys acted roles as Gestapo officers, and Jewish boys played at being SS officials or ghetto guards rounding up prisoners or searching for contraband. There was a game of gas chamber, in which children threw stones into a hole in the ground and imitated the cries of the people within. German children in the last days pretended to be Russian soldiers with machine guns. Jewish kids made fun of death, daring each other to touch their camp's electrified fence. When the crematorium chimney emitted white smoke, the joke was, "This time it's fat people." A pediatrician once saw three boys playing horse and driver in the Warsaw ghetto; the only time they noticed a dead or dying child was when his body got caught up in their reins. Stargardt's ambitious book does not end with capitulation, but examines how Germany and its young people came to terms with what their nation had wrought during the war. Adults burned their old uniforms, but many of them had been through change