Ebook: The Young Victims of the Nazi Regime: Migration, the Holocaust and Postwar Displacement

During the Nazi regime many children and young people in Europe found their lives uprooted by Nazi policies, resulting in their relocation around the globe. The Young Victims of the Nazi Regime represents the diversity of their experiences, covering a range of non-European perspectives on the Second World War and aspects of memory. This book is unique in that it places the experiences of children and youth in a transnational context, shifting the conversation of displacement and refuge to countries that have remained under-examined in a comparative context.
Featuring essays from an international range of experts, this book analyses the key themes in three sections: the migration of children to countries including England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Kenya, and Brazil; the experiences of young people who remained in Nazi Europe and became victims of war, displacement and deportation; and finally the challenges of rebuilding lives and representing traumas in the aftermath of war. In its comparisons between Jewish and non-Jewish experiences and how these intersected and diverged, it revisits debates about cultural genocide through the separation of families and communities, as well as contributing new perspectives on forced labour, families and the Holocaust, and Germans as war victims.
Marking a new direction in the field of Holocaust, exile and migration studies, The Young Victims of the Nazi Regime examines the numerous impacts that children and youth experienced after the inception of National Socialism in Germany and Europe through to the present day. These impacts are global, as contributors follow the footsteps of young children and youth as they made their way from danger to difficult refuge in the United States, Canada, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand and Kenya. Readers are introduced to the immigration policies that determined young refugees’ geographical routes and settlement in cities and towns that were rarely intended as permanent. Often separated from family, these children were an exiled generation whose lives in a new language, culture and homeland were challenged by anti-Semitism, indifference, and fear of the ‘other’.
Contributors show that the destruction of childhood was a lasting legacy of this totalitarian era. Children and youth lived itinerant lives, enduring violent and repeated movements to ghettos and camps during the Holocaust, and were extensively deployed as forced labour in the Nazi-Occupied East and the Soviet Union. Youth activism shaped the migratory destinies of Jewish Displaced Persons in postwar Europe, while humanitarian agencies struggled with mass displacement. Cultural memory in the form of film, literature and photography also negotiated the destruction of childhood and its attempted rebuilding as a critical expression of many countries’ commitment to postwar democratization.
This volume concludes that children and youth were no minor witnesses to the traumatic impacts wrought by the era of National Socialism.