Witnesses of War. The Life of Children Under the Nazis

The book by Nicholas Stargardt, an Oxford professor and one of the most authoritative historians of Nazism, is a unique study that presents the social history of Nazi Germany through the eyes of children for the first time. This serious historical work is based on original documents — diaries of adolescents, school assignments, children's drawings from the Jewish ghetto of Terezin and a German village in the Black Forest, letters from evacuation camps, correctional institutions, psychiatric homes, letters to fathers at the front, and even memories of childhood games. Among the characters in the book are a Czech Jewish boy from Terezin and Auschwitz, a German teenager from East Prussia, two Jewish girls from the Warsaw Ghetto, a German schoolgirl from a socialist family in Berlin, two teenagers from the Hitler Youth, and a Jewish boy from Lodz.
Professor Stargardt argues that memories of Nazi Germany divided children into two groups: those who perceived life in it as normal and those for whom it evoked horror. That is why the precise events they remembered are of immense significance. The author breaks down stereotypes of victimhood and trauma to share with us captivating personal stories, the stories of a generation created by Hitler.