Children in the Shoah, 1933 – 1945

Heinrich Himmler in a speech delivered at Posen in October 1943 declared: "I did not feel indeed the right to exterminate men [...] and to let grow children who would take revenge on our children and descendants. It was necessary to make the serious decision to make this people disappear from the earth.

From the beginning of the persecutions implemented by the Nazis and their collaborators, most children fall from a protected world, that of their family, into an unknown world, which despite their sufferings they have to face: exile, exclusion, confinement, fear, hunger, isolation, assassination.

Their fate, whatever the country of Europe in which they find themselves, is subject to particularly dramatic situations. 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 affective, educational, or moral environment. Letters, stories, newspapers, drawings have come to us from these children; intimate and spontaneous testimonies, oh so precious and of incredible maturity, of their hopes, their struggles, their feelings, left before the silence.

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