Essay On Holocaust Children

The Holocaust was a time of tragedy and painful despair that even now has a strong burden on our society. Memories from that disturbing event in our past still haunt people worldwide. For my exhibit, I chose to showcase images from the Holocaust that illustrate the perspective of children, based off a quote from Age of Innocence: “It’s far more unusual to have the whole story unfold from the child’s point of view” (Age of Innocence, pg. 35). It is hard to imagine the Holocaust from a child’s point of view due to the fact that people assume children are too innocent to be aware of the calamities happening around them. I selected photographs that reveal the Holocaust from several perspectives of children who were placed in various situations.

Birkenau, also known as Auschwitz II, was intended for Russian prisoners of war, but later became the center of mass destruction for European Jews. Birkenau was one of the main camps at Auschwitz and usually held the most prisoners. It had four gas chambers that could each hold over four thousand people. When trains of Jewish prisoners arrived at the camps, guards and physicians used a selection process to decide which prisoners were ready for labor, and which should be sent straight to the gas chambers. Around three-quarters of the train’s prisoners were deemed “unfit for labor” and sent to the chambers, which were usually the ill, most of the women, the elderly, and young children. The children that were put to slave labor had their heads shaved, were often starved, and they had to deal with temperatures so cold that it often led to amputations. The children in this image are seen bundling up in their thin clothing and hats, looking morose and disheartened. They are living as slaves, always anxious over being punished or possibly executed for being perceived as unfit or as troublemakers; it didn’t take as much as a second thought for guards to be physically