Children and Childhood in the Holocaust in Eastern occupied territories

For many children war and persecution meant the end of their childhood in “conventional sense” now and then. About 1,1 million Jewish children lost their lives in the Holocaust. Approximately 400,000 further underage victims from other ethnicities should also be acknowledged. The lives of those who survived were shaped by the traumatic experiences.

The research field of childhood experience in Eastern Europe under German occupation faces complex questions and moral dilemmas concerning the capacity of children to act and their liability. Approaches in Holocaust research with a socio-historical perspective therefore require an in-depth analysis of the society in the territories in which the Holocaust took place. Micro-historical approaches are developing increasingly complex analyses of individual crime scenes and more and more include the local community as an “actor”. Beyond the categories of “perpetrators, victims and bystanders” (Hilberg) emerges a “grey zone”, which reveals a range of choices for locals under German occupation.

Coping strategies with the German occupation were entangled with gender, material preconditions and, to a greater extent, age. The complex of childhood in the Second World War and the Holocaust has been portrayed heterogeneously in the post-war period. Children were generally excluded from history or memorized as vulnerable and inactive martyrs. From a historical perspective, this imagined passivity cannot be maintained. While Jewish children were marginalized, exploited, and murdered as victims of the nazi extermination policy soon after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, there were other conditions for children who belonged to the majority society in which they had to ensure their survival. Beyond German extermination policy in Eastern Europe, recent research shows a wide range of policies in treatment of children, such as the enslavement as forced worker (Ostarbeiter), the colonization of ethnic German children in what is now Ukraine, the forced Germanization of Polish children, the mobilization of Belarusian children in the White Ruthenian Youth Work, the penal camps and extermination for young Roma in Estonia, to name fates of children under German occupation in their various forms without claiming to be exhaustive.
This prompts us to ask how children navigated their choices for action under the constraints, demands and dangers they faced under occupation. And it seems like being a child was not solely a deprivation in the struggle for survival but could be used even more as a “resource” as the historian Yulia von Saal puts it. By focusing more on the “agency” of the child, completely new research perspectives emerge.
Beyond the genuinely historical perspective, newer research approaches, particularly from the memory studies, can be used to take an analytical look at the oral history testimonies of children and point out their special features. How do childhood experiences and narratives differ from those of adults? How can testimonies of children be interpreted with the right hermeneutics? Oral history is now considered to be the most versatile medium of children's memories, additionally autobiographies, drawings and all other material and immaterial cultures of children would be an interesting object of research. Furthermore, psychological research of children in the Holocaust and its aftermath concerning traumatic experiences are appreciated.

Given this background, a special issue of Eastern European Holocaust Studies will focus on the complex of children and childhood in the Holocaust in Eastern occupied territories. Articles of 7,000 words (including references) in English or Ukrainian are invited on any of the following themes:

- Relationships between Jewish and non-Jewish children before, during and after the war
- “Daily life” of Jewish children in camps and ghettos
- Means of survival. Hiding, evasion and help for Jewish children
- Means of resistance. Jewish and non-Jewish children's activity in the resistance
- Commemoration and Memorization. Representation of children in the Holocaust in memorial landscapes and collective memory
- Forced labor, captivity, reprisal and deportation. Nazi policy towards children in the occupied territories of Eastern Europe
- Germanization, colonization, politicization. Mobilization of children in the occupied territories of Eastern Europe
- Memory Studies and Oral History. Perspectives on childhood memories in relation to trauma and reliability
- Differences and perceptions. Comparative analysis of childhood and adult narrative
- Adultification. Children as family providers and as heads of families
- Perception of Gender. Normative expectations of “girls” and “boys” shaping their means and limitations for action
- Vulnerable bodies. Children as victims of sexual violence
- Orphanages as ambivalent spaces for survival and persecution
- In the “grey zone”. Children between forced requisition and collaboration
- Witnessing the Holocaust. Children as eyewitnesses of atrocities, shootings and violence
- Object history and immaterial legacies. Products of children during the Holocaust like drawings, magazines, games, diaries and jokes
- Justifying the Unjustifiable. The perpetrators' narratives of the murder of children during and after the Holocaust

Please submit abstracts of 500 words and a short bio until the first of November 2024. The language of submission can be English or Ukrainian. Article proposals can be submitted to Eastern European Holocaust Studies at eehs@degruyter.com to the guest-editors, Aiko Hillen (University of Cologne), Albert Hytry (Sorbonne University / Yahad - In Unum), and the editor Andrea Peto (CEU). Authors will be notified of acceptance shortly after. Part of the publication process will be an online workshop for the authors, where they have the opportunity to present their articles in advance and receive productive feedback.