UC Santa Barbara > History Department > Prof. Marcuse > Courses > Hist 133D Homepage > 133D Book Essays Index page > Student essay
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“Evaluating the Benefits of Studying Children’s Experiences in the Holocaust” Book Essay
on:
Deboarh Dwork,
Children with a Star: Jewish Children in Nazi Europe
by Lindsey Schwartz for Prof. Marcuse's lecture course |
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& Abstract |
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Bibliography |
Plagiarize! |
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About Lindsey Schwartz I am a senior sociology major with a minor in history. My minor includes an emphasis in 20th century American History. I have studied World War II and the Holocaust from the American perspective and therefore decided to research the Holocaust from a European perspective. I am very interested in child development and experiences in times of crisis or war. Therefore, I decided to research the experiences of children during the Holocaust. Abstract (back to top) Debórah Dwork’s book, Children With A Star, discusses the benefits of studying children’s experiences in the Holocaust. Children’s experiences reveal a new perspective against scornful criticism, which argues victims of the Holocaust were a part of their own demise through their participation in the Jewish faith and/or their lack of resistance towards the Nazis. Further, studying the children’s experiences in the Holocaust shines light on entire networks and organizations who risked their lives to protect and save children from the persecution of the Nazis, such as Zegota and the NV. Another benefit that Dwork illuminates, is the “ideology of the stranger”, the ideology of the other, that these children were forced to learn as the Nazis restricted and condemned their lives. By studying children rather than informed adults, one is able to see how purely evil the Holocaust was through its persecution of the innocent and defenseless children, who were ignorant of their Jewish religion and its history of political genocide |
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Essay (back to top)
Deborah Dwork’s book Children With A Star illuminates the benefits of researching the children of the Holocaust. Dwork argues that we see society as the realm of adults, “our dominant paradigm is that society consists of productive, or voting, or participatory members (Dwork, 253).” Therefore, the majority of historical accounts of the Holocaust are of adults. She argues that with this narrow historical perspective we fail to acknowledge key elements of the Holocaust. Children’s experiences reveal a new perspective against scornful criticism, which argues victims of the Holocaust were a part of their own demise through their participation in the Jewish faith and/or their lack of resistance towards the Nazis. Further, studying the children’s experiences in the Holocaust sheds light on entire networks and organizations whose sole purpose was to protect and save children from the persecution of the Nazis. Another benefit discussed in Dwork’s book that studying children illuminates, is the “ideology of the stranger”, a phenomenon where children were forced to learn their positions in society as outcast or strangers rather then members of their community. By studying children rather than informed adults one can see how purely evil the holocaust was through its persecution of the innocent and defenseless children, who were ignorant of their Jewish religion and its history of political genocide. Although all points are very valid to why it is important to study childrens’ experiences in the Holocaust, Dwork fails to explore the long-term effects that growing up in genocide have on these young, vulnerable, impressionable minds. Studying the children’s experiences in the Holocaust sheds light on entire networks and organizations whose sole purpose was to protect and save children from the persecution of the Nazis. Majority of children who went into hiding did so through familial connections, although a large number of underground networks, as well as legal organizations were found to help rescue children throughout Nazi Europe. The Society for the Health of the Jewish Population (OSE), Zegota, the NV and the Piet Meerburg were all organizations and networks both underground and legal that were created to secure the safety and security of Jewish children. The NV is a good example of how these networks and organizations began and functioned throughout the war. Two brothers Gerard and Jacob Musch started the NV. These brothers came into contact with Marianne Marco-Braun through the Dutch Reformed Church, Marianne and her brother had been called to Germany for work, the Musch brothers felt the need to help and began a search to find them an address to hide (Dwork, 42). This marked the beginning of their underground network in which they established contact with families who needed to hide their children and connected them with addresses of families willing to help. The brothers teamed up with the crèche, which was a childcare center and worked with the directors who knew the fate of the children and “were determined to smuggle the children out of the crèche and pass them on to others who would take them to safe addresses” (Dwork, 46). The NV provides a rough framework of how some of these underground networks began and functioned. Organizations were also formed, specifically in France, to assist children in the transit camps. Social workers were allowed to enter the camps and give food and clothing rations as well as set up schools.
These networks’ and organizations’ primary goal was to help children because the possibility of these children coming of out the Holocaust alive was dismal. However, after the war these groups did not get recognition because they were seen as politically insignificant: Many of these groups, which were organized specifically to protect human lives, did not receive either honor or attention after the war. Indeed, while much is known about the armed resistance, the history of the organizations, which helped children, has only recently become part of the legitimate past. […] For many years after the war, each country’s “Resistance Movement” was defined in terms of those groups which undertook activities of a more public nature: armed defiance, underground newspapers, lightning attacks to destroy records or steal documents, tactical maneuvers, sabotage. These more “heroic” operations were clearly patriotic and nationalistic, and they became part of the history of the honor of the country. […] The business of saving lives during the war was not politically useful in reconstructing a national consciousness and patriotic pride when the hostilities ended (Dwork, 40). Further, children directly after the Holocaust were very young, and as Dwork argues our perception of acceptable witnesses of society is that of “productive, or voting, or participatory members,” thus children’s accounts directly after the Holocaust were ignored and child rescue groups were ignored as well. It was not until these children are seen as responsible adults that they were able to tell their stories and call attention to these organizations and networks that saved them.
Children’s experience in the Holocaust illuminates the “ideology of the stranger”, a phenomenon where children were forced to learn their positions in society as outcast or strangers rather then members of their community. The Nuremberg Laws and similar legislation in other countries can be identified as the first step in “the pattern of dispossession from the destruction of their place in society that all children suffered (Dwork, 8).” These laws defined who was a Jew and defined Jews as a race rather than a religion. The definitions did not affect the children until they were put into legislation which affected their normal lives; changes in family structure due to changes in parental occupation, expulsion from their schools and moved into segregated Jewish schools, going into hiding and finally for the overwhelming majority work and death camps. The antisemitic legislation made the Jewish children question their existence, why they were being persecuted, what was wrong with them, why they were being ostracized, and what was it about them that made them different. Through this process they were forced to learn the “ideology of the stranger”. Dwork argues that “These legal laws […] reflected a perception of Jews as the other, the stranger who because of his or her own birth never could become apart of the ‘Aryan’ community (Dwork, 10).” The account below of Alexander Ehrmann discusses the process of learning the ideology of the stranger, learning the new system that placed him as the other, placed him against who he thought were loyal friends: When the Hungarians came in [to occupy the area of Czechoslovakia in which I lived] and we witnessed beatings for no apparent reason, that started the process, which ultimately resulted in, fear, and feeling terrorized, and helpless…I couldn’t understand why. That was the constant question. Why? Why do they impose this kind of authority on us? Why do they have a right to beat us? Within two months, the local boys who were so friendly to me before, who called me by my Jewish name [which indicated the degree to which they had accepted him, as a human being and as a Jew] suddenly started to turn their backs on me… Ultimately they too started beating us and pulling on our peyes [earlocks], and calling us ‘dirty Jew’ (Dwork, 24). As Alexander witnessed the unmerited beatings of this people, and was criticized by his friends, he learned the ideology of the stranger. He learned his new place in society as the outcast and the other. He was being forced to be a stranger in his own community. It is very important to study the effect this had on children because as hard as it was for adults to grasp the discrimination, these children had not yet lost their sense of innocence and had not been exposed to the world of violence and corruption. These children unlike adults grew up as the stranger and as the other. Dwork explains this process below: The violent separation from the community they shared with their gentile friends raised two distinct but obviously related sets of issues, and engendered a two part reaction. The immediate response was related to the trauma of ostracism and expulsion. Suddenly, from one week to the next, a basic structure of their experience collapsed – and collapsed for them alone. Their subsequent reaction centered on the question of Jewish identity. For the first time in many of these children’s lives, they were forced to confront the concept of what being a Jew meant to them and to the society in which they lived (Dwork,15). Dwork argues that learning ones status in society as a stranger, the other, or the outcast, played an important role in the lives of the children throughout the Holocaust but predominantly while in hiding. For example, a young girl Milano-Piperno displays how these laws and actions that were taken to eliminate the Italian Jews caused her to feel ashamed, “I remember that I was ashamed before my companions, to tell them: I cannot come because I am a Jewish girl (Dwork, 15).”
Hidden children had to adapt to the different religion, class, and culture of the families who were hiding them, they had to learn the ideology of the stranger. Dwork argues these children were trapped between being thankful of their hosts and giving up their own religions and morals to appease their hosts: They were hard pressed: safe for a moment, but also in the trap of gratitude and self-abnegation. They lived with people whom they felt obliged to please and towards whom they were beholden because they, the gentile adults, allowed the children to live, because they risked their lives also (Dwork, 80-81). These children “never felt welcomed, only tolerated (Dwork, 80).” They felt as if they were a burden and had to prove that they were “a good Jew” exemplifying the effects that the “ideology of the stranger” had on them. These children were robbed of a normal childhood, and were robbed of the childhood and culture that their parents had wanted them to grow up in. Many had to read the bible and attend Catholic Church; others had to work on farms and in the domestic sphere, others felt scrutinized due to their class differences. In short, a lot of children constantly felt uncomfortable, and unacceptable in their hiding places, not to mention the fear and anxiety of whether their lives would ever return to normal. The experience of the children learning their role as strangers and how it pertained to their experiences in hiding is a facet of history that can only be told by the children who experienced it. Lastly, Dwork argues that it is important to study Jewish childrens’ experiences in the Holocaust because it disables the scornful criticism that has been applied to adults of the Holocaust. Dwork argues scornful criticisms are stereotyped statements that apply part of the blame to the victims. Statements like, “The Jews kept to themselves” or “Why did you allow this to happen to you?” or “The Jews were disproportionately involved in banking, the professions and the arts” are what I define to be scornful criticism. They attempt to alleviate blame from the perpetrator. Dwork argues, “Their purpose was to divert attention from the enormity of the crimes committed against the victims to a scrutiny of the ability of inability of those victims to resist the system of murder in which they were trapped (Dwork, xxxiv).” Studying the maltreatment of children eliminates the possibility for these outrageous comments and “clarif[ies] and crystallize[s] horror and the evil of the Nazi genocide of Europe’s Jews (Dwork, xlv).” Dwork argues that if one were to see a two month old being stripped from their parents’ arm by a Nazi, there is no way to argue that the two month old did something wrong.
This is one of Dwork’s strongest arguments. Through looking at the experiences of children we are able to see how purely genocidal and evil the holocaust was through its persecution of the innocent and defenseless, who were ignorant of their Jewish religion and its history of political genocide. Although I believe that the scornful criticism has no merit, unfortunately it does exist, therefore research surrounding children becomes that much more effective and significant.
Studying children as Dwork argues enables us to learn a different viewpoint of the Holocaust, along with this different viewpoint we are able to discover new events, organizations, conditions, and feelings that would be unknown without child accounts. Additionally, I would argue we are better able to comprehend the extremity, and devastation of the Holocaust because when we are discussing these innocent children, it becomes a lot more personal and relevant to the lives of many. Reading and learning about the Holocaust through people who were children at the time allows me to comprehend the Holocaust better because I would consider myself just as naïve as they were. Although I am aware of the result of the Holocaust and these children were not, I still have this sense of naivety because as much as I have learned about the Holocaust it is still inconceivable, like it must have been for these naïve, innocent children.
Finally, I think it is also very important to study the long-term effect the Holocaust has had on the lives of these children. How differently do these survivors see the world now having been through something that is inconceivable by most? Although I believe Dwork does an excellent job outlining the children’s histories during the Nazi occupation and at the end of the war when the lucky few returned home and began to understand their reality, I believe that Dwork fails to explore the long-term effects that growing up in genocide have on these young, vulnerable, impressionable minds. I can imagine that these children who were directly affected by the Holocaust have issues trusting the government, even their close friends. I imagine that at times most of them questioned their faiths and either neglected Judaism or embraced it. Further, I wonder how these people chose to deal with the trauma, or have they dealt with it at all? Have they spread the word about their experiences? What are their feelings and or actions towards other genocides that exist today? All the above questions, I believe, are important to understand the genocidal impact of the Holocaust on the impressionable mind of children.
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Annotated Bibliography and Links (back to top)(links last checked 11/21/10) Book Reviews
Books and Articles
Relevant Websites
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Any student tempted to use this paper for an assignment in another course or school should be aware of the serious consequences for plagiarism. Here is what I write in my syllabi:
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