Jewish Childhood in Kraków: A Microhistory of the Holocaust by Joanna Sliwa

Abstract

Reviewed by: Jewish Childhood in Kraków: A Microhistory of the Holocaust by Joanna Sliwa Sean Martin Joanna Sliwa. Jewish Childhood in Kraków: A Microhistory of the Holocaust. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2021. 218 pp. Joanna Sliwa has written a comprehensive and detailed account of the experiences of Jewish children in Kraków during the Holocaust. This meticulously researched yet brief study delivers on the promise of its title. Focusing tightly on sources from the children themselves, Sliwa outlines what happened to them from the occupation in 1939 to the immediate postwar years. The great contribution of her work is her excavation of the voices of these children. In addition to published testimonies and memoirs, Sliwa makes extensive use of the oral histories of the Visual History Archive of the Shoah Foundation at the University of Southern California and the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University. In Sliwa’s work, the children speak of their daily lives under the most tragic of circumstances, teaching us both more about what happened and about how they survived. Sliwa’s presentation of children’s lives and memories can sometimes make for challenging and compelling reading; the author does not shrink from sharing the disturbing details of the children’s worst experiences. But the author’s sensitive tone combines with her mastery of the sources to yield a volume that is at once respectful of its subjects and informative for its readers. Sliwa’s approach is chronological and loosely thematic. In six brief chapters, she addresses shifts in the city immediately following occupation, adaptation to life in the ghetto, the clandestine activities children participated in, the work of the local child welfare associations, followed by the experiences of children hiding in the Płaszów concentration camp, and those who survived by hiding and fleeing. An even briefer epilogue addresses the immediate postwar circumstances the children faced and the fate of child survivors living in Kraków today. The story Sliwa tells concerns just under 19,000 children, according to a census conducted by the Jewish Council in November 1939. Her story narrows tragically in its final chapters on the comparatively small number of children concealed in Płaszów and those who hid on the “Aryan” side or fled to other towns after the destruction of the ghetto. It also opens up, though, as the accounts of these children involve places and people beyond the ghetto and Płaszów. The strength of Sliwa’s narration is the details from the testimonies she has mined to learn more about her topic. Of note are interactions between parents and children. For example, she describes how, upon the impending dissolution of the ghetto in March 1943, Renate Leinkram’s mother cut her thirteen-year-old daughter’s hair and dressed her in adult clothes, hoping she would pass as an adult worker in Płaszów. Sliwa also notes often how children could help adults, for example, through smuggling, such as in the testimony of Janka Warszawska. The final chapters on hiding are also of great interest. Sliwa’s summary of the testimonies of street children who survived outside of Płaszów illuminates their relationships with other children and the dangers of public environments such as the train station. Sliwa’s structure resembles the many memoirs written by child survivors that, regardless of the child’s age, begin in 1939. While this lends focus, it also obscures the history of Jewish childhood before the war. Additional background on the history of the topic, both generally and in Kraków, would have given the [End Page 226] reader an even greater sense of both the continuity and rupture of the wartime period. For example, greater attention to questions of the languages used by children and adults could illuminate further the specific characteristics of daily life. In addition, the question of class could have been addressed more forthrightly. Sliwa does well to point out often that those whose parents worked in advantageous positions were more likely to be protected in a given situation. But is there anything else one might conclude about class from the qualitative and quantitative data Sliwa...