Children with a Star

The book is based on hundreds of oral histories, conducted in Europe and North America, with survivors who were children in the Holocaust, primary documentation uncovered by the author (including diaries, letters, photographs and family albums), and archival records. Drawing on these sources, Dwork reveals the feeling, daily activities, and perceptions of Jewish children who lived and died in the shadow of Holocaust. She reconstructs and analyzes the many different experiences the children faced. In the early years of Nazi domination they lived at home, increasingly oppressed by rising anti-Semitism. Later some went into hiding while others attempted to live openly on gentile papers. As time passed, more and more were forced into transit camps, ghettos, and death and slave labour camps. Although nearly 90 percent of the Jewish children in Nazi Europe were murdered, we learn in this history not of their deaths but of the circumstances of their lives. "Children With a Star" explains how European society functioned during the war years, how the German noose tightened, and how the Jewish victims and their gentile neighbours responded.
It expands the definition of resistance by examining the history of the people - primarily women - who helped Jewish children during the war.