Jewish Child Soldiers in the Bloodlands of Europe

David M. Rosen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000552133
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book is about the experiences of Jewish children who were members of armed partisan groups in Eastern Europe during World War II and the Holocaust. It describes and analyze the role of children as activists, agents, and decision makers in a situation of extraordinary danger and stress. The children in this book were hunted like prey and ran for their lives. They survived by fleeing into the forest and swamps of Eastern Europe and joining anti-German partisan groups. The vast majority of these children were teenagers between ages 11 and 18, although some were younger. They were, by any definition, child soldiers, and that is the reason they lived to tell their tales. The book will be of interest to general and academic audiences. There is also great interest in children and childhood across disciplines of history and the social sciences. It is likely to spark considerable debate and interest, since its argument runs counter to the generally accepted wisdom that child soldiers must first and foremost be seen as victims of their recruiters. The argument of this book is that time, place, and context play a key role in our understanding of children's involvement in war and that in some contexts children under arms must be seen as exercising an inherent right of self-defense.

1I Flew Like an Arrow

DOI: 10.4324/9781003193487-1

Nathan Schacht was ten or eleven years old in March 1942, when the Germans began deporting the Jewish population of Lvov, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine) to the Belzec death camp about fifty miles away.¹ As young Nathan and his family were forced into trucks, his mother told him and her other children to run. He was the only one of her children who fled and he was the only one of his family who survived. Nathan found temporary refuge working for a peasant, but when the peasant grew afraid of hiding him, Nathan ran off and managed to join a Soviet partisan group. There he served as a scout, planted mines, and engaged in armed action. He was severely wounded by an exploding landmine near some German trench lines, had shrapnel wounds all over his body and face, and part of one ear was torn off.

When the Red Army defeated the Germans in his area, Nathan was evacuated to a Russian hospital. At the end of the war, he was demobilized and made his way to a children's residence in Krakow, Poland. There he was discovered by Lena Kuchler, who had founded a home for surviving Jewish orphans in the rural town of Zakopane about sixty-five miles south of Krakow.² In 1946, Kuchler left Poland and took about hundred children with her, including Nathan and other young fighters. They travelled to Bellevue, France, where most hoped to gain passage to Israel. There in France, in 1946, the now fifteen-year-old former partisan became one of the first survivors of the Holocaust to tell his story.³

Jewish children in German-occupied Europe were hunted like prey and ran for their lives. Some of these children survived, but most did not. Among those who survived and lived to tell their tales were children like Nathan who joined anti-German partisan groups in the forests of Eastern Europe during World War II (1939–1945). The vast majority of these children were teenagers, although some were younger. They were, by any modern definition, child soldiers, and because they joined these partisan resistance groups, they survived.

This book tells the stories of these children, using their own words and memories. Beginning with the terrifying moments of the destruction of their homes and villages and the murder of their families and friends, to their harrowing escape and search for safety, and finally, to finding both shelter and purpose in armed resistance, these children's stories show that their unlikely survival came from a combination of circumstance, bravery, ingenuity, and pure luck. Because these children lived, and were able to rebuild their lives and tell their stories, we have a deeper understanding of the tragedies of those who did not.

Child Partisans/Child Soldiers: Dystopian and Utopian Narratives

This book is not simply a collection of memoirs. Although deeply embedded in the experiences of children during the Holocaust, it uses the experiences of former child partisans to directly address two contemporary concerns about children in the modern world: the role of child soldiers in warfare, and the agency of children more generally. Today, millions of people around the world are involved in wars, rebellions, insurgencies, and civil conflicts. It is widely asserted that between 250,000 and 300,000 child soldiers below the age of eighteen are involved in contemporary armed conflicts, although there are no reliable statistics to substantiate these numbers. Whatever the precise number, the fact remains that over the last several decades many thousands of children have experienced and continue to experience war as soldiers.

The contemporary discourse about child soldiers has largely been shaped by a single dystopian narrative of an extreme form of child abuse and vulnerability with little room for data-driven analysis.⁴ This narrative has conjured a world of powerful images that are indelibly fixed in our minds: a young boy, dressed in a tee shirt, shorts, flip-flops, holding an AK-47, a cap pulled down over too-old eyes; a girl with sticks of dynamite strapped under her clothing; a tough-talking twelve-year old in camouflage. The images disturb us because they confound two fundamental and unquestioned assumptions of modern society: war is evil and should be ended; children are innocent and should be protected. So, our emotional logic tells us something is clearly and profoundly wrong when children are soldiers.⁵

Humanitarian organizations throughout the world have used the power of these images to drive forward the argument that children should never bear arms, that their participation in war is a result of manipulation by unscrupulous recruiters who should be held accountable and prosecuted for war crimes. Thus, children's involvement in war becomes imagined as an adult criminal enterprise, neatly summed up in the humanitarian mantra: adult wars, child soldiers.⁶ Mobilizing public sentiment against recruiting children to be soldiers, even coining the term “child soldier,” is based in part on the desire of advocates to control the public discourse in which these issues are discussed.⁷

The term “child-soldier” itself was not created by historians or social scientists as a guide to empirical research and analysis. Rather, it is a legal and moral concept created by humanitarian and human rights organizations, law enforcement, criminal law codes, and political leaders to help secure a set of normative goals. The concept is intentionally constructed to conflate two contradictory and incompatible terms. The first, “child,” typically refers to a young person between infancy and youth, and connotes immaturity, simplicity, and an absence of full physical, mental, or emotional development. The second, “soldier,” in the context of contemporary professional armies, generally refers to men and women who are skilled warriors. The term “child soldier” melds together two very contradictory and powerful ideas – the “innocence” of childhood, and the “evil” of warfare. Framing the issue in this way renders the very idea of the child soldier both aberrant and abhorrent.⁸

Humanitarian groups basically seek to end the use of aggression – a worthy goal consistent with the United Nations Charter, which in its preamble weaves together human rights principles and hatred of warfare to call on the world to save future generations from the “scourge of war.” Both the creation of the category of child soldier and the criminalization of recruitment of anyone under age of fifteen (under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court) are part of this broader effort to regulate warfare. Other international human rights treaties and conventions expand these restrictions on recruiting children by forbidding recruitment of anyone under age eighteen.

But the child soldier concept results in a vast gap between empirical description and humanitarian advocacy. In practice, most child soldiers are adolescents who have been legally redefined as children. But the language of humanitarian discourse collapses all distinctions: the child soldier who volunteers is conflated with the child soldier who is kidnapped; the teenager is conflated with the vulnerable toddler. The real experiences of child soldiers are erased under this essentialist rubric.

Clearly, there are some terrible and fundamentally abusive cases of child recruitment, including the Islamic State in West Africa (Boko Haram), the Lord's Resistance Army in northern Uganda and, in the recent past, the Revolutionary United Front of Sierra Leone. In some of these instances, child soldiers have been turned into brutal murderers and slaves, and their recruiters are rightly regarded as criminal. The convictions of these abusers of children are appropriate and just. But it is problematic that these horrific cases often serve as proxies for the entire issue of child recruitment.

The language of deviancy is so deeply embedded in Western discourse about child soldiers that it is exceedingly difficult for historians and other researchers to acknowledge and challenge it as artificial codification, often divorced from the experiences of real children. These images epistemologically suffuse the imagined spaces of child recruitment; as a result, the language of advocacy subverts the language of inquiry and can thereby divorce researchers from understanding the experiences of real children and youth.

Children Speaking/Speaking for Children

Much of the reporting of the experiences of child soldiers illustrates this problem. It is extremely rare for any contemporary child soldiers to be able to speak for themselves. Indeed, the fact that they are considered to be “children” invokes a plethora of child protection mechanisms that ensure that their voices are channeled through a hierarchy of adult meditators such as courts, child protection agencies, and truth and reconciliation commissions, as well as through humanitarian organizations such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and UNICEF (United Nations Children's International Emergency Fund). Children's identities are hidden and their experiences collected, redacted and shaped, and presented to serve the norms and values of these institutions and organizations.⁹ Generally speaking, all the full statements of children are kept confidential and not shared with any outside body.¹⁰ The resulting redacted, anonymized data takes the form of a parade of horribles – a series of dystopian accounts that focus on the abuse of child soldiers by their recruiters or, alternatively, upon the abuses perpetrated by child soldiers who are innocent, vulnerable children who have been manipulated by their adult recruiters and commanders into participating in extreme forms of violence. There is no doubt that these reports are important in the effort to create regimens of child protection, but they have very limited value for historians and others who wish to understand the issues of child soldiers and the lived experiences of the children themselves.

A central issue in modern war is that soldiers often confront armed children who apply their own intelligence, strategize about situations, and act in other ways that make it hard to differentiate them from ordinary soldiers. The demand that the world community defines as “children” those youngsters who do not behave as children, and efforts to sustain these normative and legal narratives of childhood innocence distorted and subverted by adult culpability, entrap analysis in webs of self-created fictions. In this conceptually and rhetorically charged climate, there is a strong need to navigate the terrain of war in a way that neither patronizes nor demonizes child soldiers.

Child Partisans – An Alternative Narrative

The experience of child partisans offers an alternative narrative to this neat packaging of children under arms as victims of their recruiters. First, and most importantly, during the Holocaust all Jewish children were targeted for death. In situations of genocide, the civilian world is far more lethal than the relative safety of armed groups. In the end, about ninety percent of the Jewish children of Eastern Europe were murdered, and in some places, the death toll was even higher. Of the approximately one million Jewish children in Poland in 1939, only about 5000 survived.¹¹ Had it not been for their recruiters, the vast majority of child partisans, like other Jewish children, would likely have met the same fate.

Though the experiences of Jewish child partisans stand as an alternative to dystopian meta-narratives of child soldiering, their experiences do not replace these narratives with a utopian one. Rather, their prime narrative arc is one of tragedy and resilience. Partisan life was dangerous, brutal, and filled with cruelty, suf...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 I Flew Like an Arrow
• 2 Strangers in the Forest
• 3 From This Moment You Are My Son
• 4 The Night Was Our Mother
• 5 I Loved the Dynamite
• 6 I Was Alone
• 7 Bread Breaks Iron
• Index