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Witnesses of War. Children's Lives Under the Nazis

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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 changes of governments and accepted the inevitability of such change. The children and teenagers had known nothing else but the righteousness of the Nazi movement. The moment when children "had to tear off their Hitler Youth badges and throw away their daggers was often particularly bitter and undermined all they had ever been taught about duty, obedience, and honor." The readjustments would be hard, and in many cases never complete. This is a meticulous book, though a heartbreakingly sad one. It has a few stories that show that young people were resourceful in stealing or smuggling food for their families. Among the most uplifting parts are stories of rebellious youth, girls who risked being sent to reform schools because they liked staying out late against all the reproaches of their elders and peers, German teens who celebrated English swing music and rebelled by dressing in English fashion, kids who insisted on taking joyrides on stolen bicycles, or the "Navahos" or "Edelweiss Pirates" who formed youth gangs in opposition to the Hitler Youth. There are only a few such stories here. As the twenty-first century seems as if it will be no more free of war than the twentieth, let _Witnesses of War_ remind us of what war is really about.

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

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.

As has become more recently of common knowledge, thousands of minor German Jews left Germany to spend the war, and in many cases the rest of their lives, in Great Britain and elsewhere with foster families, and at times, in group homes. This was the subject of an award-winning documentary recently.

The other side of this story--the story of German and other youths and the course of the war on their developemnt and life histories has almost been a subject of PC silence, lest the "suffering" of Germans or children of Nazis be considered with versimilitude. This book proves these issues must be discussed and considered--they affect geopolitics today as much as they did in the 1930s and 1940s until the German reunification.

Some of the issues invovled--protecting young Germans from the young "criminal element"--those youngsters being the seeds of the Third Reich post-war. Also important became protecting children during the RAF by night and USAAF by day bombing of German cities. As H. Goering said early in the war, should Berline be bombed, "you can call me Meier." Well, by 1940, some people were doing just so--quietly.

Nicholas Stargardt uses his excellent understanding of German to bring as a truly deep and unique perspective into the young lives of children in the Reich, reminding us that FORTY PERCENT of men born in German in 1920 were dead by 1945. This is even more astounding than the currently fashionable debate about the incendiary bombing and casualties at Dresden.

I believe it is long overdue that the effects of the war on Germans as well as the millions of Jews, Christians, Sinti and Roman, criminals, and enemies of the state be considered worthy of scholarly study. I also feel this book has set a standard to meet--including some of the most revealing photographs of childrens' art and children DOING art that I have yet seen. A masterpiece of scholarship!

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.

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.

The innocent are always the greatest victims in any war. To throw the children and youth into battle at the last minute against overwhelming odds only follows the cruel and selfishness of the Nazi party. Informative and objectively written.