Unsuspecting Children of the Holocaust
1.5 million children: dead. All the children of the Holocaust were affected by Hitler’s rule. Some were sent to war, some endured unnecessary hardships, while others perished. The children found ways to survive, dealt with what Hitler dealt them, and coped with death all while the world was falling to pieces around them.
The Jewish children did many things to survive the Holocaust. The main thing the children did was go into hiding. Many children faked being Christian. As a result of this, so Jewish children found it hard to switch back to being Jewish once they were allowed to begin practicing Judaism again. Along with changing religions, children in the ghettos would often smuggle food or medicine in
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Some children were split from their parents, some sent to the ghettos, and some sent to concentration camps. Immediately after arriving at the camp, children were sorted. The “useless eaters”, children who were either disabled or who looked to be younger than twelve, were directly sent to the gas chambers; the rest of the children were used as medical experiment subjects or laborers. As experimentation subjects, children had extremities amputated, were cut and left to bleed, or injected with strange chemicals to see how long they could survive. As laborers, children would work in the coal mines, munitions, and chemical plants. Occasionally, a child would get the job of tattooing new arrivals at the camp or throwing the gassed bodies into the crematorium.
The lives of the Aryan children were affected too. German children were recruited for Hitler’s Youth. At first, it was mainly boys and optional, but by the end of the war, both boys and girls of age ten were required to join. Hitler’s Youth then fought in wars. “In 1945 American soldiers reported fighting against entire units of Germans comprised of soldiers twelve years old and younger” (“A Teacher’s Guide” 4). Once the children were part of Hitler’s Youth, they frequently fought until their