The Children of the Holocaust

The most famous child of the Holocaust is Anne Frank but around 1.2 million Jewish children died during this period. The children who were killed were Romani Gypsies, Polish, German children who were disabled and Jewish. These children were either killed when they arrived at the camps, killed immediately after birth, killed when they were born in the camps and those over the age of 12 were used for medical experiments. Other children died of starvation or from illnesses they caught from living in unhygienic conditions in the camps.

There is very little recorded of the children's experiences of the Holocaust but some have been reported and tell about how these children struggled from losing their families, having to move to strange places they had never lived in before and having to adapt to new cultures. The children who lived in hiding like Anne Frank had to do couldn't play with toys or move for hours on end because neighbours might have become suspicious. They lived in constant fear.

As a child myself, I know how hard it would have been for them to not be able to play with toys or to remain still. Jewish children had to adopt new religions to hide the fact that they were Jews. They couldn't make a single mistake by saying a word or making a movement that would have marked them out as Jews. Ethnic Cleansing still goes on around the world despite the Holocaust. We need the acceptance of diversity in our world.