Witnesses of War: Children's Lives Under the Nazis (review)

Although the experiences of adult Second World War witnesses have received a great deal of critical attention in recent years, far less attention has been given to the accounts of children of this epoch, and to their memories of war-time. If discussed at all, children's memories have tended to be written about from "without"—reflecting on the political and sociological changes which were implemented during the Nazi era, and the effects that these ideological systems had on children, both corporeally and psychologically—rather than from "within," from the children's own viewpoints. Nicholas Stargardt's Witnesses of War breaks from this tradition of speaking on behalf of the child witness. Instead, Stargardt examines the lives of children during the Nazi era from a child-centric perspective in this volume, chronicling the rise and fall of the Nazi epoch and the effects that the dictatorship had on children's lives, through the prism of their own experiences. To achieve this, Stargardt has drawn on a mass of primary source material and testimony, examining resources as varied as children's school papers, letters written to relatives from evacuation zones, and the medical records of disabled children and of those deemed "biologically inferior" or "ineducable" by the Nazi regime. Stargardt even looks at children's artwork from the ghetto at Theresienstadt and adult accounts of children's war-time games in his "search for historical empathy and understanding."

In Witnesses, Stargardt's main aim has been, as he states, "to recapture what it felt like to be a child under German rule in the Second World War," and to examine children's "experiences and emotions in the form they were expressed at the time—not just as they were remembered later" in his work. With great originality, Stargardt examines the history of the "children's war" in Witnesses, by following the individual life-stories of children and rooting the progression of the Nazi regime in the ways in which it had an impact on children's lives. Perhaps the greatest strength of this volume is the deftness and fluidity with which Stargardt attains this balance, exploring the personal stories of individual children, while simultaneously providing his reader with a comprehensive and detailed overview of the political decisions which shaped their positioning during the war. Thus, when he is exploring the running of authoritarian establishments such as orphanages, for example, Stargardt dextrously scrutinizes this institution both from the perspective of the regime and from the point of view of the children who lived there. "We cannot grasp the extent of the transformations wrought upon the colonisers and the colonised," Stargardt reminds us, "unless we bring their lives and viewpoints within the same frame."

In order to fully explore these different standpoints, Stargardt's study is not focused solely on one social or national "group." Instead, Witnesses examines the lives of a variety of children of different religions and nationalities, from German children living in the Reich to those living in war-ravaged Poland. In this way, Stargardt is able to investigate children's memories of "terror bombing" and evacuation, Jewish children's experiences of living in the ghetto, and the ideals of the Hitler Youth, and to explore, in juxtaposing one to another, how children's perceptions of place and identity changed as the war progressed.

Witnesses of War re-aligns the child witness, bringing the lives of those who have tended to be underrepresented in traditional Second World War discourse to the fore. Stargardt does this both literally, by placing children's experiences at the heart of his study, and figuratively, by highlighting the fact that the molding of "Aryan" children, as well as the extermination of "non-Aryan" progeny, were at the very core of Nazi ideology. But perhaps most significantly, Stargardt has told these forgotten histories in an extremely engaging and empathic way, that effectively deconstructs any simplistic or stereotyped notions his readers may have of the children of war. As Stargardt states...