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- Title
Exploring political rupture through Jewish children's diaries: Kindertransport children in France, 1938-1942.
- Authors
Hobson Faure, Laura
- Abstract
This article focuses on France as a refuge for unaccompanied Central European Jewish children on the eve of World War II. Contrary to the United Kingdom, which accepted 10,000 Jewish children through Kindertransport, only 350-450 children entered France. This article utilizes children's diaries and organizational records to question how children perceived and recorded their displacement and resettlement in France, a country that would soon be at war, and then occupied, by Nazi Germany. By questioning how these events filtered into and transformed children's lives, I argue that the shifting political environment led to profound transformations in these children's daily lives long before their very existence was threatened by Nazi–Vichy deportation measures. Most children were cared for in collective children's homes in the Paris region in which left-oriented educators established children's republics. Yet the outbreak of war triggered a series of events in the homes that led to changes in pedagogical methods and new arrivals (and thus new conflicts). The Nazi occupation of France led to the children's displacement to the Southern zone, their dispersal into new homes, and the reconfiguration of their networks. This analysis of children's contemporaneous sources and the conditions under which they were produced places new emphasis on the epistemology of Kindertransport sources and thus contributes to larger theoretical discussions in Holocaust and Childhood studies on children's testimony.
- Subjects
KINDERTRANSPORTS (Rescue operations); JEWS in Nazi Germany, 1933-1945; RESCUE of Jews, 1939-1945; JEWISH children; HOLOCAUST, 1939-1945
- Publication
Journal of Modern European History, 2021, Vol 19, Issue 3, p258
- ISSN
1611-8944
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1177/16118944211017765