Children’s Voices and Viewpoints in Holocaust Literature

Abstract

In this essay I will discuss some examples of Holocaust writing by, or about, Jewish children during the Holocaust years. These two categories consist respectively of contemporary material written by children, including diaries and testimony or memoirs by adult survivors looking back at their childhood selves; and fiction. In the latter, literary and narrative techniques used to convey children’s experience are very varied and are often designed to present what is distinctive about a child’s viewpoint. Both kinds of text, contemporary and retrospective, may include such elements as misunderstanding, gaps in memory and varieties of irony, but, I will argue, do not – and indeed cannot – include any representation or sample of a child’s own language or voice.