The Children of the Holocaust: One and a Half Million Lives

Of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, an estimated one and a half million were children. The number resists comprehension, and so it helps to make it concrete: entire school systems, entire generations of entire towns, disappeared. In many Jewish communities of Eastern Europe, not a single child survived. When historians speak of the Holocaust as an attack on the Jewish future, this is what they mean — the deliberate destruction of the people who would have carried that future forward.

Children were not incidental victims of the Nazi genocide. Precisely because they represented continuity, they were targeted with particular thoroughness. Understanding what happened to them — in the ghettos, in the camps, in hiding, and in the fragile world after liberation — is essential to understanding the Holocaust itself.

Targeted From the Beginning

From the Nazi rise to power in 1933, Jewish children in Germany were pushed step by step out of ordinary life. They were expelled from public schools, barred from playgrounds, swimming pools, and cinemas, and subjected to daily humiliation in the streets. The world of a German Jewish child narrowed year by year until, by the time of the November pogrom of 1938 — Kristallnacht — it had all but closed entirely.

With the outbreak of war and the German occupation of Poland and later the Soviet territories, exclusion became annihilation. In the logic of the Nazi genocide, children were of no economic use. At the killing centers of Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, children were murdered on arrival alongside their mothers. In the occupied East, the mobile killing squads — the Einsatzgruppen — shot children beside their parents in pits at places like Babi Yar. The German administration made no secret of the reasoning among themselves: a generation of survivors, they argued, would grow up to be avengers.

Childhood in the Ghettos

In the sealed ghettos of occupied Poland, children lived at the very bottom of a starving world. In the Warsaw Ghetto, where the official ration amounted to a few hundred calories a day, children died of hunger and typhus in the streets. Yet children were also among the ghetto's most daring providers. Small enough to slip through gaps in the wall, boys and girls of eight, nine, and ten smuggled bread and potatoes back to their families, risking their lives at every crossing. German and Polish police shot child smugglers as a matter of routine.

Even in these conditions, adults fought to preserve something of childhood. Clandestine schools operated in cellars and soup kitchens. Youth movements ran study groups and theater performances. In Warsaw, the educator Janusz Korczak maintained his orphanage's rituals of dignity until August 1942, when he accompanied his two hundred children to the deportation trains rather than abandon them. In Theresienstadt, imprisoned artists secretly taught children to paint and write; thousands of their drawings and poems survived the war. Most of the children did not.

The Camps

For the children deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, survival past the first hour was rare. On the arrival ramp, SS physicians conducted "selections," sending those judged unfit for labor — the elderly, mothers with young children, and virtually all children under fourteen — directly to the gas chambers. Of the more than 200,000 children deported to Auschwitz, only a few thousand were still alive when the camp was liberated.

Those who were registered as prisoners endured the same starvation, disease, and brutality as adults, with smaller bodies and fewer defenses. Some were subjected to worse: the SS physician Josef Mengele used twins and other children in pseudo-scientific experiments that killed or maimed most of his victims. When Soviet soldiers entered Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, among the roughly 7,000 surviving prisoners they found several hundred children — including the group photographed behind the barbed wire in the image at the top of this article, filmed by a Red Army cameraman in the days after liberation.

In Hiding

For Jewish parents, the last means of protecting a child was often separation. Roughly ten thousand children escaped the Reich before the war on the Kindertransport to Britain, most of them never to see their parents again. Tens of thousands more survived in hiding across occupied Europe — concealed in attics and barns, placed with Christian families under false names, or hidden in convents and orphanages. A hidden child's survival demanded silence and pretense far beyond their years: a new name, a new religion, a new history, recited without error to any stranger who asked.

Some hidden children, like Anne Frank in Amsterdam, were eventually discovered and deported; of the roughly 28,000 Jews who hid in the Netherlands, about a third were betrayed or found. Others survived the war only to face a second loss — young children who no longer remembered their parents, their language, or that they had ever been Jewish. Rescue networks like that of Irena Sendler in Warsaw buried lists of children's true names in hopes of restoring them after the war. In most cases, there was no family left to restore them to.

Liberation

When Allied soldiers reached the camps in 1945, they were unprepared for the children they found. At Buchenwald, American troops discovered more than 900 boys who had survived the camp's final months, among them sixteen-year-old Elie Wiesel and seven-year-old Yisrael Meir Lau, who would become Chief Rabbi of Israel. These "Buchenwald boys" were sent to recuperate in France, Switzerland, and Britain, carrying with them the task of learning to be young again.

In the displaced persons camps of occupied Germany, child survivors and orphans gathered in children's homes and kibbutz groups preparing for emigration. Searches for surviving parents were organized across Europe; most ended in confirmation of what the children already feared. The birth rate in the DP camps soon became among the highest in the world — an answer, survivors said, to everything that had been done to them.

What Remains

At Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the Children's Memorial is a darkened hall in which five candle flames, reflected endlessly in mirrors, become a firmament of stars. A recorded voice reads the names of murdered children, one by one, with their ages and the places they came from. Reading the names continuously takes months; then the recording begins again.

The memorial makes an argument in light and darkness: that one and a half million is not a number but a list, and that the list is made of individual children — each with a name, a face, a family, and a future that was taken. To remember the children of the Holocaust is to hold on to that specificity. It is the difference between knowing the statistic and understanding, even for a moment, what was lost.