Dolls in Holocaust Children’s Literature: From Identification to Manipulation

In first-wave children’s Holocaust literature, dolls symbolize loss primarily through the toy’s identification with its owner and her peacetime childhood. Subsequent texts subject dolls to increasingly complex manipulations—both physical and conceptual—through which dolls fulfill adaptive, strategic, and subversive functions. Dolls’ uses in Shoah stories are both mimetic (characters are shown interacting with dolls) and diegetic (narrators use dolls both to teach young readers about the Holocaust and to shield them from some Shoah knowledge). Doll play thus illustrates children’s Holocaust literature’s conflicting imperatives to instruct and protect readers.