Heinrich Himmler in a speech delivered at Posen in October 1943 said: "I did not feel entitled to exterminate men [...] and to let grow up the children who would take revenge on our children and descendants. A serious decision had to be taken to make these people disappear from the earth.”
From the very beginning of the persecutions carried out by the Nazis and their collaborators, most children were turned away from a protected world, that of their families, into an unknown world to which, despite their sufferings, they had to face: exile, exclusion, imprisonment, fear, hunger, isolation, assassination.
Their fate, whatever the country of Europe in which they are, is a particularly dramatic situation. Yet, as early as 1938, networks and individuals mobilized to try to save them, by hiding them, for example, or when saving them was impossible, by providing them with an emotional, educational, or moral environment. From these children, we have received letters, stories, newspapers, and drawings; intimate and spontaneous testimonies, oh so precious and of incredible maturity, of their hopes, their struggles, their feelings, left before the silence.
