Caption: "Woman, and a Boy running after her."
"The Boy wears a Necklace of Runtees, in his right hand is an Indian Rattle, and in his left a roasting Ear of Corn. Round his Waste is a small string, and another brought cress thro his Crotch, and for decency a soft skin is fastn'd before."

See: Robert Beverley, The History and Present State of Virginia, In Four Parts. London: Printed for R. Parker, MDCCV. 8–9.

328

Vibrant color painting by Flemish painter, Pieter Bruegel, titled "Children's Games" (1560). This summer townscape that is devoid of adults and rich in detail about Medieval children—especially at play. The painting provides a window into amusements and recreations in the past in its detailed depiction of some 200 children engaged in nearly 80 different games and play activities. Many (although not all) of the outdoor activities included in this visual compendium of 16th-century children's play will be recognizably familiar. Physically energetic and imaginatively engaged girls and boys are everywhere in Bruegel's busy painting. Some are using their bodies, others are playing with children and/or with toys (e.g., windmill; hoops). Here are some examples: Three boys mounted on a red fence are pretending to race horses. A few are playing leapfrog and others playing "horsey" and "tug of war." Another is straddling a hobbyhorse. Two girls are playing a medieval form of jacks but with a bone instead of a ball. A group of children playing dress-up are staging a wedding. A small group of boys are spinning tops (a popular toy). A girl is playing musical instruments, another with a doll. A few boys are balancing on barrels. Some children are engaged in solitary play (e.g., blowing bubbles; dollmaking). While some are playing gently, there are rough bullies here as well.

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.

Die Geschichte vom Daumenlutscher

"Konrad," sprach die Frau Mama,
"ich geh aus und du bleibst da.
Sei hübsch ordentlich und fromm,
bis nach Haus ich wieder komm.
Und vor allem, Konrad, hör!
lutsche nicht am Daumen mehr;
denn der Schneider mit der Scher
kommt sonst ganz geschwind daher,
und die Daumen schneidet er
ab, als ob Papier es wär."

Fort geht nun die Mutter und
wupp! den Daumen in den Mund.

Bauz! da geht die Türe auf,
und herein in schnellem Lauf
springt der Schneider in die Stub
zu dem Daumen-Lutscher-Bub.
Weh! jetzt geht es klipp und klapp
mit der Scher die Daumen ab,
mit der großen, scharfen Scher!
Hei! da schreit der Konrad sehr.

Als die Mutter kommt nach Haus,
sieht der Konrad traurig aus.
Ohne Daumen steht er dort,
die sind alle beide fort.

---

Story of the Thumb-Sucker

"Konrad!" cried his mamma dear,
"I'll go out, but you stay here,
Try how pretty you can be
Till I come again," said she.
"Docile be, and good and mild,
Pray don't suck your thumb, my child,
For if you do, the tailor'll come
And bring his shears and snip your thumb
From off your hand as clear and clean
As if paper it had been."

Before she'd turned the south,
He'd got his thumbkin in his mouth!

Bang! here goes the door ker-slam!
Whoop! the tailor lands ker-blam!
Waves his shears, the heartless grub,
and calls for Dawmen-lutscher-bub.
Claps his weapon to the thumb,
Snips it square as head of grum,
While that lad his tongue unfurled
And fired a yell heard 'round the world.

Who can tell mother's sorrow
When she saw her boy the morrow!
There he stood all steeped in shame,
And not a thumbkin to his name.

Graffiti stencil in black paint on yellow wall. Stencil of Pippi Longstockings-eque character (face and shoulders - smiling with pigtails) above text: "2 x 3 = 4")

http://feeds.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar/categories/c1162/index_5.shtml

BBC

August 2009

Childhood and Evacuation forms part of a large-scale project, the WW2 People’s War, undertaken by the British Broadcasting Corporation between 2003 and 2006. It is billed as an archive of World War Two memories "written by the public, gathered by the BBC." Its core consists of 47,000 stories and 15,000 images provided by ordinary people from all parts of Britain. They are grouped into 64 categories that cover the home front as well as the military side.

To help with the daunting task of knowing where to start in such a vast array of material, there is a list of recommended stories in each category, chosen for reasons such as their vivid storytelling or their dramatic content. With its 14,336 stories, Childhood and Evacuation is by far the largest single category in the archive. Doubtless this is largely because most of those who were adults during the 1930s and 1940s would have died during the 60 or so years since the end of the war. None the less, it does also highlight the importance of the childhood dimension to any armed conflict.

The supporting documentation for the project is excellent. An Archive List helps readers find their way around the various categories, whilst a Timeline contains 144 fact files covering some of the key events in the war. These files are concise and accessible, though inevitably their authors find it difficult to explore in any detail the complex issues surrounding, say, the evacuation or the strategic bombing of enemy cities.

About this Site contains a mass of information on how the project was conceived, the house rules for moderating the stories (mainly to refuse copyright material), and the way the stories were gathered. At the outset, the project designers assumed that people old enough to have lived through the war would shy away from the new-fangled Internet, so the idea was that their children and grandchildren would research the family’s history and recount the stories. In the end, approximately 80 percent of the material came directly from people over 60 years of age, with some help from outreach volunteers and others to enter the accounts.

This section also includes a Learning Zone, featuring lesson plans on selected themes for teachers, families, and community groups. The latter includes one on Young People and War, pitched at both primary and secondary school pupils, with curriculum links to history, english, religious education, citizenship, and media studies.

The three lessons proposed for teachers focus on evacuation, bombing and rationing. These appear to be a reasonable reflection of the interests of the young. They draw on extracts from the stories and other resources specified for each lesson. The activities suggested for the class, and the supporting questions for the teacher to pose, make effective use of the website resources.

Firstly, they invite reflection on the nature of the source material, a useful exercise now that historians make extensive use of the childhood reminiscences of men and women at all levels of society. The organizers of the project note that they deliberately avoided any attempt to check the factual accuracy of the stories, as they attempted to convey "how the wartime generation remembered these years" rather than the received ideas of historians. The contributors themselves sometimes draw attention to the perils of a fading memory in old age: in the words of David Millar, "Flashes of incidents occur, but before they can be recorded they have disappeared."

Secondly, to demonstrate the positive contribution of the stories, the lessons use them to give a child’s perspective on well-known wartime events. They reveal, for example, the chaos and distress underlying the immense evacuation of 3 million people from the cities to safety in the countryside. Many of the city children settled in comfortably enough with their foster parents, while others struggled with the uprooting from their families. Exploring the site, one finds the case of Audrey J, who exasperated her host by constant bed-wetting:

One particular morning we awoke to find the bed drenched as usual, and Mrs Taylor was more angry than usual. It was a shear icicle day and she shoved me first into the back yard – naked, and threw a pail of freezing water over me, then proceeded to break the ice in the water butt to throw at me. It was like shards of glass hitting my body and of course drew blood.

Thirdly, the website gives an insight into the way children turned wartime conditions to their own advantage, as they explored bomb sites or swapped pieces of shrapnel.

Most of the contributions are long and full of detail on humdrum daily routines during the war, which may try the patience of young people today. Yet the website surely achieves its objective of providing a monumental learning resource for future generations.

Children of WW2 is another BBC website, covering similar ground, though this one is more specifically aimed at schools. It complements two TV programs, but claims to work also as a stand-alone resource – one suspects that it works more effectively in the former role. It does however have a section for Teachers and Parents, providing printable worksheets to support activities concerned with the rationing of food, a wartime home, and letters written by evacuees.

Interactive learning is encouraged in a Research Room where children can explore various types of source material under these three headings. The exercises on the computer are entertaining and informative, allowing the child to find out, for example, what would have happened if you tried to order a pizza in Britain in 1943, or to see how a ration book worked. There is also a series of pictures of a typical house of the period, with features of each room explained through a mouse click. The supporting documents are easy to access, though they emerge very much as little snippets of information. Doubtless it is a useful asset for schoolchildren in the second or third grade.

Colin Heywood

The University of Nottingham

The exercises on the computer are entertaining and informative, allowing the child to find out, for example, what would have happened if you tried to order a pizza in Britain in 1943, or to see how a ration book worked.

These images of swaddled infants come from a series of 10 glazed terra cotta bas-reliefs known as the "bambini." Andrea della Robbia sculpted them between 1463 and 1466 to adorn the Ospedale degli Innocenti, or Foundling Hospital, in Florence, Italy. The images show a sequence of childhood stages, from a tightly swaddled newborn to a child liberated from bindings that gradually loosen and fall aside. The images reflect the practice of confining infants’ bodies in tightly wound strips of cloth, which can be found on images of infants in many world regions and cultures.