Children Who Survived the Final Solution

The literature about the Holocaust is vast and includes the stories of survivors. While most such memoirs have dealt with experiences in concentration camps, those in this collection are by survivors—children who overcame the Nazi persecution while they were very young. The stories, collected in this book, bubbled up spontaneously, without an interviewer’s guidance; hence they represent the most permanent memories of their authors’ childhood experiences. The survivors wrote their own stories; hence this book provides a rare vantage point for the reader to look into the diverse lives of children during the Holocaust. Both professionals and adult survivors have often said, “The children were too young to remember.” They could not have been more wrong about that. “…the reader will find evidence that children were spared nothing in the Holocaust. The stories will describe children separated from parents to be sent to safe, though not nurturing, countries; of children who survived concentration camps; children who were hidden; children who survived starvation, ghettoes, bullets, bombs, murder, separation, everything the shoah threw at adults… “I was struck by the fact that the stories were not bitter, they did not seek revenge. I found the underlying thread in the purpose of the stories to be gifts to the world, given in the hope that the stories and the anthology would contribute to other children not having to suffer such events in the future” —Paul Valent, M.D., Melbourne, Australia Dr. Valent is a psychiatrist and author of Child Survivors of the Holocaust (1994, 2002)

“These testimonies disclose in poignant detail the devastating agony Jewish children throughout Europe experienced during the Holocaust: separation from families, frequent abandonment, starvation and illness, psychological isolation, and the loss of innocence. Each survivor’s story offers not only powerful evidence of Nazi brutality but also conveys the lasting trauma