The death of one child is difficult to comprehend. The murder of one child is even harder. The murder of one and a half million children is impossible to understand. And yet Nazi leaders decreed that, along with all Jewish adults, all Jewish children were to be exterminated.

The annihilation was near complete: less than ten percent of Jewish children survived in Nazi-occupied Europe. Children were not spared any of the suffering and torture meted out to adults. On the contrary, because they could not obey orders and work, they were dealt with more harshly. For instance, in round-ups they were thrown out of windows and hauled by their hair into trucks. Children were not spared segregation, stigmatisation, having to wear a star, overcrowding, hiding, round-ups, mass shootings, deportations, slave labour, concentration camps, torture, medical experimentation, humiliation and murder. Many died through deliberately induced starvation, cold and disease.

From Valent, P. (1994) Child Survivors: Adults Living with Childhood Trauma, Port Melbourne, William Heinemann Australia. (Dr Paul Valent was born in 1938 in Bratislava, Slovakia and immigrated to Australia in 1949. He is a child survivor of the Holocaust.)

The experiences of Jewish children (aged under 13) in Europe during the Holocaust were varied. What was common to all of them, however, was the overwhelming and constant sense of fear that those children would have faced every day. In the early years Jewish children faced all the same humiliations as their parents did; racial discrimination and abuse from peers (and adults, with State backing), segregation from mainstream society, expulsion from their schools and all public life.

Some Jewish children were hidden from the Nazis. They were given for safekeeping to non-Jewish friends or neighbours who pretended they were their own. Sometimes these non-Jews hid the children out of conscience or charity; sometimes (quite often) they demanded payment for doing so. Some of them abused the Jewish children in their care verbally, physically and/or sexually.

Some of the children who were hidden this way were allowed to mix in non-Jewish society, though naturally disguised as Christians. As Jewish boys were circumcised, they were always in great danger because it was a simple matter to check their religious identity. To protect their sons, some Jewish mothers disguised them as girls and taught them to sit on the toilet so that others wouldn't suspect that they were boys. In every such case, however, the Jewish child would have to maintain the façade of non-Jewishness, take a new name, learn Christian prayers, and so on. By the end of the war, some of them had forgotten who their original families had been and even their original names.

Other children were physically hidden for the duration of the war. They survived in attics, cellars, barns and other hiding places, sometimes with the knowledge of the owners of those places and sometimes completely unknown to them. There were children who saw no light or ate proper meals, and had to scrounge or beg for scraps of food for years on end.

Small boy captured during the Warsaw revolt

…‘How do children cope with such terror?’ I ask my Israeli cousin years later as we sip our coffee on a sunny terrace high above the Mediterranean Sea… ‘In those times, children weren’t children,’ she says quietly. ‘We stopped being children in the face of death.’ (from Armstrong, D. (1998) Mosaic: A Chronicle of Five Generations, Sydney, Random House Australia)