Missing Identities and Children During the Shoah

Elizabeth Kirkley-Best,PhD
copyright 2000
under construction

Imagine growing up and not knowing who you really were. Occasionally in our world today this happens when someone's parents die or leave early. In the Shoah, it happened over and over, not just among the Jews, but among the other persecuted peoples and among the more priviledged Germans as well.

Saying Goodbye

The most common occurence and the most tragic of course, was of the separation of Jewish parents and children. Hitler and Goebbels discussed often in their writings the need to be utterly ruthless in war. Normally, even in war time, women and children were given a sort of unspoken special dispensation to be left out whenever possible of brutal conflict. Hitler at one point decries as a weakness of the German people their inability to hate completely. ¹ Over the course of the 2nd World War, that 'weakness' was erased: children became both victim and soldier. ² Early separations were sometimes reluctant but voluntary: as parents heard news of impending deportations, they sent their children to live in safer climes with relatives, or even in orphanages. The reasoning was that they would be re-united after the war. In the early days of the war, while there was still not pervasive knowledge of the killing centers and Hitler's plan for the Jews, deportations were couched as re-locations; history of course has shown that as far from the truth.

to be continued