Did the Children Cry?: Hitler's War Against Jewish and Polish Children, 1939-1945An unprecedented aspect of Nazi genocide in World War II was the cold and deliberate decision not to spare the children. Jewish children, first driven into the ghettos, were marked for total destruction as part of the "Final Solution" once it was put into effect, in 1942. Gentile children were starved, killed, or Germanized in order to reduce the Polish nation to a small complement of semi-literate slaves tending the Herrenvolk in their thousand-year Reich. This record also includes accounts of how they fought back by working for the underground, smuggling food into the ghettos, attending secret classes to continue their forbidden education. Included are stories of villains like Mengele who selected children for execution during Jewish religious holidays; Rudolph Hoess, Auschwitz's commandant who admitted his own discomfort when he witnessed the gassing of prisoners with the excuse: "I was a soldier and an officer"; a heroic Dr. Janusz Korczak who was in charge of an orphanage in the ghetto, but refused to leave his orphans, and at the head of a contingent of 192 children and 8 staff members, erect, his eyes looking into the distance, held the hands of two children as he led them to the railroad platform where trains took them to certain death. Based on vast research in the United States, Great Britain, and Poland, many interviews, theses and other papers, documents and official histories, memoirs, autobiographies, articles, periodicals and newspapers, Did the Children Cry? stands as a monument to millions of children who were bombed, wounded, deported, raped, starved, maimed, subjected to "medical" experimentation, and killed in German-occupied Poland. |
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Did the Children Cry?: Hitler's War Against Jewish and Polish Children, 1939 ... Richard C. Lukas No preview available - 2001 |
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adults AGKBZHP aiding Jews Allied annexed lands anti-Semitic Armia Krajowa Auschwitz Bartoszewski boys and girls chil child survivors Christian concentration camps death camps deported died Dobraczynski dren Emmanuel Ringelblum Fate of Polish Forgotten Holocaust gas chamber Germans Gestapo Helped Jews hiding Himmler HIPPOCRENE Holocaust Hrabar Ibid inmates Irena Sendler Jewish boy Jewish children Judenrat Kestenberg killed Konspiracyjna Rada Pomocy Kopec Korbonski Krakow labor large number later Lewin lived Lodz Ghetto Lublin Lukas Majdanek Mengele ment mother murdered Nazi nuns officer operations organizations parents partisan percent Pilichowski Poland Poles and Jews Polish boys Polish children Polish families Polish government Polish underground Polsce postwar Prekerowa prisoners racial Rada Pomocy Zydom Ringelblum sent shelter shot Sister soldiers Soviet survived teenage tion took Treblinka UNRRA uprising victims village Warsaw Ghetto Warsaw Uprising Wladyslaw Bartoszewski woman Yad Vashem YIVO York young Jewish youngsters youth Zamosc Zbrodnie Hitlerowskie Zegota