Children: Saved The Lives Of Children In The Holocaust

It’s no secret that children perished in the Holocaust. As a matter of fact, more than 1.5 million children were murdered in this tragedy. What many people don’t know, though, is how many different paths each child took, even just between life and death at the end of the war. There are cases of children being killed, experimented on, hidden, stolen, saved, and so many others. What was it truly like to be a child in the Holocaust? With the following research, perhaps we can get one step closer to understanding.

One of the first occurrences that truly changed the lives of children in the Holocaust, for at least the Jewish children, was the control of overcrowding at German schools. As of April 25, 1933, public schools were to limit the number

Yes, the stories are true -- a majority of child survivors in the Holocaust stayed alive by hiding in cemeteries, in holes dug under floor planks, in cellars, closets, haylofts or attics. A lot of these hiding children didn’t see sunlight for days or even months at a time. But not all hidden children lived this way during the Holocaust. As many people don’t fit into the stereotypes of what a group of people looks like, many Jewish children did not look like the stereotypical Jew that was portrayed in Nazi propaganda. To keep themselves safe, a number of children pretended to be Christian, which put a heavy weight on their shoulders as if there was one slip up, their whole cover would be blown and they could be killed. With pretending to be a Christian came along the burden of false identity papers, which were difficult to obtain in German-occupied Europe. As police often checked these papers to classify citizens, many children were forced to bounce around from refuge to refuge, leaving behind their families as a result. In the particular case of boys, many were circumcised within the first 48 hours of their birth. Because of this, the use of public restrooms and participation in sports could expose their false identity. Many boys, as a result, went through painful procedures to hide the fact that they were circumcised or even dressed and acted as