Witnesses of War: Children's Lives Under the Nazis [Hardcover]

Nicholas Stargardt (Author)

Book Description

Already hailed as “magnificent . . . some of the best historical writing about the aftermath of the war I have ever read . . . stunning” (The Guardian), Witnesses of War breaks new ground in its exploration of the lives and the fate of children of all nationalities under the Nazi regime.

Children were at the center of Nazi ideology; now we have their history of those years. Their stories open a world we have never seen before. War came home to children as a set of events without precedent, spectacular and terrifying by turns. As the Nazis overran Europe, children were saved or damned according to their race. Precious few remained unscathed during the war, and most suffered a moment that overturned their lives. For some, it was the evacuation to become junior colonists in the East; for others, it was the onset of heavy bombing, the separation of families or learning to keep their parents alive by smuggling food, creating black markets and devising their own escape networks. Some herded women waiting to be shot. Girls manned flak batteries; boys confronted Soviet tanks.

Drawing on an untouched wealth of original material – school assignments; juvenile diaries; letters from evacuation camps, reformatories and asylums; letters to fathers at the front lines; even accounts of children’s games — Nicholas Stargardt breaks stereotypes of victimhood and trauma to give us the gripping individual stories of the generation Hitler made.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Handicapped German children taken from their families before WWII, girls of all nations raped by marauding soldiers, Jewish children shoved into ghettos: as Stargardt shows in this well-researched and horrific history, the lives of children were ravaged by Hitler's goals and the war he produced. Like Lynn Nicholas in her recent and also excellent Cruel World: The Children of Europe in the Nazi Web, Stargardt, a historian at Oxford, tells his story through the children's eyes using diaries and oral histories as well as other documentary sources. To be a child during the war, he notes, could be both easier and harder than it was to be an adult. Children often proved more resilient in overcoming physical and mental injuries. At the same time, they lacked the ability to directly express the pain that was haunting their dreams. Perhaps most unusual is Stargardt's illumination of how the Nazi regime affected German children, from those (who today would be called at-risk children) sent away to be "re-educated" to the idealized Hitler Youth sent to die in battle; it's a sharp and taut account of misery. 16 pages of b&w photos, 6 maps.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* First published in Great Britain in 2005, Stargardt's riveting account draws on original material from children's schoolwork, juvenile diaries, letters from evacuation camps, letters to fathers at the front, letters from reformatories and psychiatric asylums, children's artwork in the Jewish ghetto of Theresienstadt and German villages in the Black Forest, as well as adult accounts of children's games. The children include a Czech-Jewish boy in Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, a German teenager from East Prussia, two Jewish girls in the Warsaw ghetto, a German schoolgirl from a socialist family in Berlin, two teenage members of the Hitler Youth, and a Jewish boy in Lodz. Stargardt posits that as children's memories of Nazi Germany divided between those who remembered it as a time of normality and those who recalled it with fear and horror, the exact events they recollected mattered. He shows that at some point--as their parents broke down in the starving Jewish ghettos, or as they fled before the Red Army in the snows of 1945, or hid in cellars during bombing raids--many children shouldered premature responsibilities. Such dutifulness, Stargardt believes, tied them to their families, especially their mothers, long after they would normally have gone their own way. These touching stories provide a unique and important view of the Holocaust. With 16 pages of photographs and 60 pages of notes, a meticulously documented study. George Cohen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 512 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1st US Edition edition (January 17, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400040884
• ISBN-13: 978-1400040889
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,308,226 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Children in War, Children at War, February 14, 2006

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Witnesses of War: Children's Lives Under the Nazis (Hardcover)

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.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A different perspective on the effects of life under the Nazis, June 22, 2006

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Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Witnesses of War: Children's Lives Under the Nazis (Hardcover)

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

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars unbelievable, June 3, 2006

By 

Kathylene Privitera (Augusta, WV United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Witnesses of War: Children's Lives Under the Nazis (Hardcover)

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.