Overview of Children's Voices of the Holocaust

When we think of children’s voices we think of laughter, song, the innocence of childhood. The voices in this section depict a time of horror, deprivation and silencing. The words on these pages represent their protest in the raising and recording of their voices as witnesses of the Holocaust.

In the Introduction to Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust, Alexandra Zapruder writes:
During the Holocaust, from one end of Europe to the other, from before the outbreak of war until the liberation, young people kept journals and diaries. They wrote in leather or clothbound books, or in albums embossed in gold that had been received as gifts for birthdays and holidays; they carried their journals with them from their homes to hiding places, from transit camps to ghettos. When times grew difficult, they smuggled and stole scraps of paper, found pencil stubs and worn ink pens; the scribbled by carbide lamp or candlelight in school notebooks, address books, calendars, and ledgers, on the backs of cheap paper notices and thin brown bags, and in the margins of the published works of other authors. Despite fear and repression, despite hunger, cold, exhaustion, and despair, despite crowded living spaces and a lack of privacy, and despite separation from home and loved ones, young people documented their experiences and their impressions of their lives, and in so doing marked their places in the world. (p. 1)

When World War II ended in 1945, six million European Jews were dead, killed in the Holocaust. About 1.5 million of the victims were children. Of the millions of children who suffered persecution at the hands of the Nazis and their Axis partners, only a small number wrote diaries and journals that have survived. Each diary reflects a fragment of its author’s life. Taken together, the diaries provide readers with a varied and complex view of young people who lived and died during the Holocaust.

The clarity and directness of these young witnesses to horrendous acts amid unrelenting uncertainty and fear is most admirable. The Nazis took everything from them but could not silence their voices. The harmony of their reportage adds even more validity to the crimes they describe. The children being taught about the Holocaust are around the same age and may relate to the personal issues described.

These young testimonies were faithfully written during unspeakable times and carefully hidden, to be liberated after their death (sometimes many years later) by friends and family. Their loved ones honored their painstaking efforts by publishing these diaries so the world may become aware of their plight. Below are two voices less known than Anne Frank but no less poignant and articulate: Rutka Laskier and Yitzkhok Rudashevski.