Sliwa, Joanna. 2021. Jewish Childhood in Kraków: A Microhistory of the Holocaust. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. 218 pp. ISBN 978-1-978822-94-8

Denisa Nešťáková

doi:10.1515/eehs-2022-0019

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Sliwa, Joanna. 2021. Jewish Childhood in Kraków: A Microhistory of the Holocaust. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. 218 pp. ISBN 978-1-978822-94-8

Denisa Nešťáková

Published/Copyright: November 21, 2022

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From the journal Eastern European Holocaust Studies Volume 1 Issue 1

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Joanna Sliwa, Jewish Childhood in Kraków: A Microhistory of the Holocaust, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2021, 218 p. ISBN 978-1-978822-94-8.

Joanna Sliwa’s book Jewish Childhood in Kraków: A Microhistory of the Holocaust sheds light on the lives of Jewish children in Kraków during the Holocaust, beginning with the occupation of Kraków on September 6, 1939. By exploring a remarkable range of sources such as written and oral testimonies, memoirs, diaries, and newspapers, this book presents a great variety of Jewish children’s experiences in the time of extremes: persecution, hiding, living under false identity, as well as their life in the Kraków ghetto and the Plaszow camp. In her book, Sliwa argues, that while for the Jews, Jewish children represented the future, for the Nazis, Jewish children were either useless as they were not able to work, or an enemy who had no place in Nazi Germany’s plan for a New Order (Neuordnung), therefore a threat to the imagined purity of Aryan society. Such clashing views on the place and role of Jewish children, Sliwa claims, formed how Jewish children experienced the Holocaust. Sliwa also examines how children experienced the Holocaust as witnesses and victims, how Jewish leadership and adults reacted to the persecution of their children, and what the responses of non-Jews in wartime Kraków were.

By presenting a social history of Jewish children in Kraków during the Holocaust, Sliwa’s book contributes not only to the history of the Holocaust, and the history of children’s experiences, but it also adds to the micro-historical research of Kraków, which served as a strategic, historical, cultural, and religious hub, a place with flourishing Jewish life prior to the war. By focusing on the defined geographic area with various spatial notions, Sliwa considers the role of site, space, place, landscape, and topography; and thus explores different functions of the city. Sliwa also introduces the intersectionality of numerous identities of Jewish children, such as gender, age, religiosity, presence of their parents, “Jewish” appearance, pre-war societal and economic background, as well as their relations with Catholic Poles before the war, but also other categories, such as luck. These identities and categories at the time had a direct or secondary impact on children’s experiences and on their own survival strategies or those strategies used by their parents or other caregivers. While focusing on the geography of Kraków and emphasizing the importance of places, Sliwa’s book tells numerous stories of those few who survived, and through their testimonials she manages to offer a glimpse of the experiences of those who were murdered or died due to the conditions created by the Nazis.

Through the six main chapters Sliwa describes the Jewish children’s diverse fates in occupied Poland during the Holocaust, with their distinct experiences in Kraków. The first chapter of the book looks into the first year and a half of the Nazi occupation, before the creation of the ghetto, when the Jewish leadership and adults understood the importance of not only assisting Jewish refugees entering Kraków, but also the need to protect children from the Nazis. The second chapter shows the ghettoization, and the responses of the Jewry to such Nazi policies. It thus investigates what life in a confined space meant for children. Describing the coping mechanisms, Sliwa shows how important it was to maintain normality for children in the ghetto. By playing games and with toys, children experienced a certain stability and continuity of their known life. Parents and other adults were able to offer a sense of normality through education, religious rituals or celebrations, too. In the third chapter, Sliwa demonstrates how some children managed to serve as a contact between the ghetto and the outside world, by becoming smugglers, breadwinners, resisters and even rescuers. This chapter lists the various clandestine activities in which children were involved: on occasions because the family requested, and at other times the children initiated the activity themselves. Thus, children’s agency is represented under the Nazi occupation. The fourth chapter brings attention to child welfare, and the care provided by adults to children in the ghetto, for the worsening conditions in the ghetto led Jewish leaders and activists to organize care for the children. Sliwa shows that the child welfare in the extreme conditions of the ghetto represented the adults’ belief in a future; the future, which for them was embodied by the children. The following, fifth chapter focuses on the Plaszow camp, where children were banned by the Nazis, accordingly, the camp was to accommodate only adults and youth over 14 years of age, in short, those capable of work. Yet, also in the Plaszow camp there were children either as workers pretending to be 14, or older; or they were hidden there by their parents, family members or other adults. In this chapter, Sliwa locates the Plaszow camp in the system of Nazi camps, and explains how children were able to enter the camp, what their experiences were and how they survived there. In the last chapter, Sliwa analyses individual and organized efforts to save Jewish children on the Aryan side, as well as individual stories of those who managed to live clandestinely outside the ghetto thus representing the Jewish children’s agency. In the Epilogue, the book enters the post-war history and discusses the life and challenges of children in Kraków immediately after the war, in addition to the most current events forming Jewish life in the city.

Undoubtedly, Sliwa’s book is an important contribution to the Holocaust scholarship. The six chapters follow a chronological and thematic aspect of the Jewish children’s fate. By doing so, Sliwa offers a microhistory of Jewish childhood experienced in Kraków by those few who survived. While Sliwa’s book touches upon the most current historical, methodological and theoretical works, it omits to further theorize and discuss methodologies therefore it simply remains a solid historical work providing a social history of Jewish childhood in Kraków during the Holocaust. Yet, by offering an in-depth analysis of children’s experiences, Sliwa’s book fills a gap in the Holocaust literature which has only recently started to include research on childhood in the Holocaust. Through a multitude of sources, Sliwa’s work includes complicated stories of persecution, betrayal, killing, and death, but also humanity, resistance, and heroism. Sliwa provides a multi-layered story of children’s experience, as well as a deeper understanding of children’s lives during the Holocaust.

Corresponding author: Denisa Nešťáková, Department of General History, Comenius University in Bratislava Faculty of Arts, Bratislava, 811 02, Slovakia, E-mail: denisa.nestakova@gmail.com

Published Online: 2022-11-21

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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