Nazis came to Texas in the 1960s. We could hear them just around the corner. My older sister Rosi would make the sound of their footsteps—would tap her hands on the pink carpet of the walk-in closet in her room (just like the one in mine). She would look up and say, "Listen, do you hear them?" I would hold my breath. We were in the woods with the partisans. Though we didn't know the exact meaning of the word. We sat around our (invisible) campfire. We were hiding from the Nazis. They would take us away. We had saltines and olives to live on.

Sometimes I would be the one to tap tap tap slap my palms against the pink carpet: "Listen, do you hear them?" Nazis coming through the woods. They had been tipped off, perhaps by paid informers, like the ones who had turned in Anne Frank.

I had read her diary. We had seen the end of the movie on TV though my mother had said, "Don't you think they should go to bed?" My father had said, "They have to learn." What we had to learn about was life. What had happened to the Jews crouched in silence.

On TV we heard the big Nazi boot against the door of the Secret Annex where the Franks had hidden. The Nazis bashed in the door the way ours had never been bashed, or my father's or my mother's. My father had fought the Nazis in the ocean. My mother had stayed home. She'd been a schoolgirl.

Once I asked her, "Have you ever had a raw potato?" I imagined her digging them from a field, getting through the war. She'd grown up in Dallas. She said, "Maybe once" — when her brother's barbecue project in the back yard hadn't turned out. Potato half-raw, half-burned. There was no starvation, no SS in Texas. No hiding with partisans. Nothing but two daughters in the 1960s with saltines and green olives stuffed with pimientos, and sometimes a strand or two of raw spaghetti to munch on.

For years I kept a getaway bag in my closet — saltines and a notebook, a change of clothes. An alarm clock, so I would know the time. I liked the big, friendly white and gold face of that alarm clock. One summer night the air conditioning didn't work and we opened the widows and I heard Nazis, scratching to get in to take me away and steal my glasses. In the morning my father claimed the noise had been mosquitoes, other night insects. June bugs. The same June bugs I would watch at night on the porch. I would turn over the June bugs that had landed on their backs, skittering. I wanted to right all the June bugs.

We liked playing in the closet. We liked the thrill of hiding. We were victims but we were never caught. Sometimes we played secretary instead. Sometimes we played that we were lizards on a ship hiding from the Nazis. The Nazis would take us to a concentration camp. They would take my glasses and asthma drugs and let death just come up and kill me, like that. At Hebrew school the teachers talked about Nazis. They showed us a film on a small screen. They showed us the small bodies and the striped prison outfits. But we didn't think of it as prison. It was a death camp and the Nazis took people there. Jews.

They didn't take us because we were quiet in the woods, we sprinkled sand and dirt over our fire in the closet in the woods before they were close enough to smell the smoke. The Nazis were stupid. They were thick and dumb like animals and wore big heavy boots up to their hips. We were good so the Nazis would never find us. We were smarter and darker than the Nazis. But we were bad, something bad about us or the Nazis wouldn't be after us in the first place.

When we played secretary, our office was out in the hall and we would hold papers up to the air vents that would suck them so they stuck. When we played school, the air vents held up the pretend tests we gave each other. Sometimes we would just play without having a name to it and slide across the terrazzo floor in our stocking feet. We didn't wear shoes when we hid from the Nazis. They would find us; shoes would make too much noise.

Sometimes at dusk we played capture-the-flag with the neighbor kids in the Shelbys' front yard. After a rain we'd play stand-in-old-shoes-in-the-mud-in-the-side-yard. Sometimes we'd go to the houses still being built and stand on the extra lumber and play island-in-the-ocean. There were brown rabbits in the "empty" lot behind the house and once policemen came with horses back there on a search for someone — a criminal hiding in the overgrown weeds.

At some point we stopped playing Nazi. It wasn't my idea to start or stop. Maybe Rosi stopped playing with me, started playing with her own friends, and no more Nazis. We outgrew Nazis. When I was twenty-one I went to Amsterdam and went, alone, to the Secret Annex. It was on the tourist map. Each room was small and there was a guest book to sign with a fancy gold pen, unattached to anything, no string or chain. There were the books Anne Frank had read while she was in hiding and her movie star pictures pinned to the wall. The place was small, it had no power, too many people walking through.

Ten years after that, on a layover in the Amsterdam airport, a Greek man saw me borrow someone's tour book of the Anne Frank house. The Greek man said to his American wife: "Of course she's interested in Anne Frank — she's Jewish." The man who'd bought the book wasn't Jewish. I said nothing. The Greek had been able to tell that I was Jewish.

There is a statue of Anne Frank in front of a church in Amsterdam. In the walk-in closets in Houston now are full-length mirrors and the shelves that Rosi and I covered in our favorite pink contact paper, ruffles that we tacked along the edges. The closets are shrines, and storage. In Rosi's closet are my mother's mink coat and the large bride doll too big to play with and the felt board with felt numbers.

Where I live now I don't sit in closets. The closets are full. I'm on the third floor. No Nazis bang against my screens at night. Around the world people are defacing Jewish graves, threatening pogroms. In my neighborhood Jewish Community Center I watched a slide show of someone's trip to Europe — pictures of Auschwitz-Birkenau, rust-colored gas chamber. "It was cold," the traveler told us, "so very very cold. Everyone told us to bring our sweaters, even though it was a warm day." Ghosts breathing out cold air, having absorbed the force of someone's bare hatred. About 175 miles from the camp, the traveler had seen two young boys spray-paint on a memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto. She said, "There is hatred for Jews where there are not even Jews any more."

Anne Frank was shipped from Auschwitz-Birkenau to Bergen-Belsen. I read about her all through my childhood. She never seemed like a child to me. At parties I eat olives and crackers. Alone at night, shadows brush against my face. At the JCC, one of the slides showed words in a foreign language carved into a wall at the concentration camp. The traveler thought it said to never forget. In my late twenties when I felt sad I would go to the public library and read Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. It was warm and familiar. It would sooth me.

Reproduced from Holocaust Girls: History, Memory, and Other Obsessions by S. L. Wisenberg by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. © 2002 by the University of Nebraska Press.

The exhibit No Child's Play at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem presents the photos, drawings, toys, dolls, and board games of children who were victims of the Holocaust. Of the ca. 6 million persons killed, one and a half million were children. The intent of the site is to provide viewers with insight into the lives of children during the Shoah by focusing on the personal stories and material culture of those few who survived. The children's stories are presented here with texts and images, written and edited by Yehudit Inbar, curator of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum.

This collection of narratives and artifacts reveals that children found comfort and companionship in the material culture of their childhood that also enabled them to create a reality different from that which surrounded them. Moreover, the array of child-centered documentary sources demonstrates how children provided their parents with encouragement, hope, in addition to money and food, that enabled them to continue their desperate daily fight for survival. The introduction is followed by a sequence of chronologically-organized links: the world of children before the war; in the shadow of the war; in the ghettos and the camps; in hiding, and in their new life. The viewer can easily click through the individual pages of each chapter—which contain between three to 15 images—while maintaining direct access to the chapter titles located in the left-hand navigation bar.

The texts that accompany the images offer useful explanations and clearly highlight their significance in a broader context. As the author emphasizes about the photographs in the "Before the War" section, all children lived their own individual lives, and none of the images present anything unusual or extraordinary. These images of ordinary children's lives underscore, however, the horror that was to come. During the war, many parents tried to save their children by sending them abroad. Youth Aliyah, for instance, successfully sent some 5,000 children to Palestine, while 9,000 left Germany after Kristallnacht for Great Britain. The rising tide of anti-Semitism, however, forced the return of refugees such as Liesel Joseph, a passenger on the ill-fated Saint Louis. The ocean liner depicted in Liesels colorful drawing that was prevented from disembarking Jewish passengers in Cuba returned to Europe.

The chapter, "Ghettos and Camps," includes illustrations of pre-ghetto life by Czech artist Bedrich Fritta created in celebration of his son's third birthday. Also included are several illustrations of the Theresienstadt ghetto drawn by an artistically talented teenage boy and dolls owned by two survivors whose stories also shed light on the enormous importance of toys to children living in ghettos and camps. There are even photos of a monopoly-like board game created in a graphics workshop engaged in underground activities that sought to provide children with useful information about how to survive the ghetto. (Unfortunately, much of the text printed on the game board and playing cards is frustratingly illegible in the site's magnified version.)

For the section "In Hiding" the curator/editor included a selection of photographs of children with classmates and toys, as well as the teddy bear that belonged to a boy while hidden in Holland by a Christian family. The recollections of survivors included throughout the site provide unique insight into the personal meanings of children's possessions in a historically-specific context. The final section, "Toward a New Life," consists of only three black and white photos of groups of children and one boy who did not want to let go of a toy gun once he had been liberated from Buchenwald.

However small the selection of sources, No Child's Play is sure to provide students with a deeper understanding of the impact of the Holocaust on children by giving voice to its victims. Teachers might find the need to include supplementary sources (both primary and secondary) due to the site's scant documentation of the horrors of the Holocaust. There is no guide to additional resources, however. And, in the absence of useful teaching strategies, instructors might find it helpful to discuss with their students the different methods of analysis needed to unpack the variety of documentary sources—photographs, artifacts, narratives, etc.—that were created by and for children of the Holocaust.

Why I Taught the Source

Undergraduates enrolled in the 100-level course I teach on the Holocaust find the topic both compelling and overwhelming especially given the array of topics that cover the background to and mechanisms of destruction. In order to enable students to go beyond the countless facts and deeply disturbing details, I utilize survivors' narratives that provide a fuller understanding of the complexity of war and genocide. In my experience I have found that children's testimonies—diaries, memoirs, and documentaries—provide an unusual angle of vision into childhood, the family, everyday life, and survival. Using the oral histories of children provides a child-centered view of the Holocaust in which young people were not only victims and witnesses, but also historical agents.

Originally published in Polish by the Jewish Historical Commission in Cracow in 1946 and republished in English in 1996 by the British publisher Vallentine Mitchell, The Children Accuse is required reading about the early postwar testimonies of Jewish children in Poland. 1 The book consists of 55 children's testimonies and 15 adult testimonies. The latter testimonies focus on children's experiences in various ghettos in Nazi-occupied Poland, whereas the children's testimonies are divided into six thematic sections: the ghettos, the camps, on the Aryan side, in hiding, the resistance and prison. The children's testimonies can be characterized as 'unliterary,' simple descriptive reports, close in time to the events they describe. They convey diversity of individual experiences, but, at the same time, they revolve around common themes and shared wartime experiences. They all are based on oral interviews with child survivors that were conducted according to the official guidelines on how to research Jewish children's wartime experiences that were issued in 1945 by the Historical Commission of the Central Committee of Polish Jews. These interviews were carried out in Jewish children's orphanages, dormitories, and places of daily care that were established in various Polish cities and towns immediately after the end of war.

How I Introduce the Source

I introduce students to the testimonies by discussing the historical background and by posing a question about what we can learn from the close reading of children's testimonies. My main objectives are to teach students that children's testimonies are a rich documentary source useful for the reconstruction of the history of Jewish children and Jewish family in Poland during the Second World War, and for the reconstruction of the multi-dimensional histories of Polish-Jewish and also Ukrainian-Jewish relations of the period. My specific aims are to demonstrate the ways in which testimonies: (1) shed light on the patterns of Jewish family life (e.g., the reversal of the roles between children and their parents) and in the ghettos; (2) map out social relations between the children and other individuals in the ghettos and camps (e.g., between children and individuals on the Aryan side in wartime and early post-war Poland as well as with their Christian Polish rescuers); (3) inform us about children's particular methods of survival and their role in the process of their own survival; and (4) reveal the emotional, intellectual, and physical state of young people emerging from the conditions of war, genocide, and a deep-seated fear of being exposed as Jewish.

Students also learn about the differences between children's testimonies and other primary sources—the official documents—which they also read and discuss in the classroom prior to our discussion on Jewish children's wartime experiences. This is achieved through a two-page take-home assignment in which they answer the following key questions: How and in what ways do the testimonies differ from official documents? Describe the similarities and differences. What are, in your opinion, the shortcomings of the children's testimonies and what are their strengths as a historical evidence?

The subject is discussed in two 75-minute course periods during a week. In preparation, I show students a 15-minute clip from the film Undzere Children (Our Children). Afterwards, I ask them questions about the images of Jewish childhood during the war presented in the film and about representations of Jewish children during the Holocaust in Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda material discussed the previous week in the context of the Warsaw ghetto. This is conducted in the form of a "15-minute buzz discussion," aimed at the overview and categorization of acquired historical knowledge.

Reading the Source

Next, I provide a 10-minute general historical background (e.g., information and explanations about the various localities) and short definitions of unusual terms and vocabulary encountered in the testimonies. Students then form working groups—numbering between 5 and 6 individuals—that are assigned one or two children's testimonies from The Children Accuse. The final part of the first session is dedicated to going over the first homework assignment. Students read the testimony and answer the following questions: Does the child—she/he—remember his/her prewar childhood? What kind of social background does she/he have? Does the child remember his parents? What does she/he remember? What kind of wartime experience did the child undergo? What are the main recollected individuals, events and developments? What image of the life in a ghetto emerges from the testimony? How did the child survive? Was he/she assisted/helped by a rescuer and, if so, by whom? Who are the rescuers and how did they behave towards the child? What do we learn about the life of the child after the end of the war? How does she/he view their present situation? What feelings and reflections does she/he express? Are these feelings and reflections typical of a childhood age? What information appears to be absent from the child's testimony?

These questions are written on the weekly outline posted on blackboard and circulated in class at the beginning of the first session. I ask the students to provide written answers in the form of notes. At the beginning of the second class session, students in each group are asked to compare their written notes, discuss their individual answers, and prepare the comprehensive group answer to the abovementioned questions. I ask each of the groups to select the most striking passages from testimonies to exemplify their answers. This takes place during the first 15-20 minutes and is followed by each groups' 10-minute oral presentation about its child's/children's testimony. This is followed by a general class-wide discussion that builds on issues raised in each of the presented cases. This discussion aims at a differentiation of the children's wartime experiences and at making analogies between "ordinary" childhood and childhood under the conditions of war and genocide. These discussions are usually animated.

The second homework assignment—the above mentioned two-page essay—asks the students to discuss and reflect on the value of a child's testimony in Holocaust history. This assignment offers students the chance to wrestle with salient questions about a variety of primary sources in an historical investigation.

The two sessions are essential preparation for working on their final group assignment, a poster about Jewish children's life during the war. (The poster represents 15% of the final grade.) Through the final assignment, the students expand their knowledge about and understanding of the subject by building on their previous work and by further investigating the subject outside the classroom. Students usually are quite enthusiastic about the poster project. It allows them to demonstrate not only historical knowledge but also their creativity with written and visual images, as well as artistic and aesthetic talents.

Reflections

Having used children's testimonies in a range of courses, I have learned to adapt them according to the course level and subject matter. In all classes, I have founded that students' responses to this material is very positive.

The testimonies, together with diaries, memoirs and documentary films such as Undzere Children (Our Children, Poland, 1948, Yiddish with English translation) allow students insight into the everyday life of the historical actors: the Jewish child survivors, family members, their Christian rescuers and other individuals whom children encountered in a ghetto and on the Aryan side. These primary sources allow students to follow in the footsteps of young Jewish children and see them as human beings who went through various wartime experiences and who harbor particular child-focused memories of the war. Students confront, in these testimonies, the uncontrived story of personal experience. From the testimonies, students gain not only an understanding of the variety of wartime experiences and survival, but also an understanding of the particular pain and perplexity of the children, who lost their families, were forced to assume Christian identities, and to fend for themselves though children.