Child survivors of the Holocaust seeking to recover their past face particularly serious and unique difficulties. This article describes a little-known but highly valuable resource for such research, the Kinder Archiv (Children’s Archive) of the International Tracing Service of the Red Cross (ITS) in Bad Arolsen, Germany, the world’s single largest repository of Holocaust-era documents.¹ This, the first article written about these archives, is based on three consecutive visits to ITS, interviews with ITS staff members, and the author’s presentation at the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS) conference in Philadelphia, August 2009.

The Kinder Archiv developed as a separate entity within the ITS archives, the result of postwar inquiries from parents and/or relatives seeking information about specific children—or from children survivors seeking information about parents and other relatives. In the process, ITS created a card catalogue for these inquiries that is separate from the ITS Central Name Index (CNI). The CNI includes more than 50 million scanned and indexed reference cards that reflect documentary holdings on more than 17.5 million individuals—purportedly, every name on every document that ITS holds. Many names in the separate Kinder Archiv index also appear on the CNI. Thus, to conduct thorough research about a specific child survivor, it is necessary to look in the CNI and to make direct contact with ITS for them to conduct an in-depth search into the holdings of the Kinder Archiv.

Children and the Holocaust

According to Helmreich (1992), Kestenberg (1998), and Sigal (1989), the term “child survivors” applies to those who survived the Holocaust with one or both parents or alone, as well as to uprooted children in occupied countries and those who lived in Shanghai or Siberia during the war years. Krell (1985) defines a child survivor as an individual who survived in Nazi-occupied Europe between 1941 and 1945 by whatever means and was younger than 16 at the end of the war.

Complete statistics on the number of children who died during the Holocaust do not exist. According to Dvorzetzki (1972, p. 162), approximately 1.8 million Jewish children were alive before the Holocaust, 280,000 of whom survived. Others claim that a total of 1.5 million children under the age of 14 were killed by the Nazis, including more than 1.2 million Jewish children, tens of thousands of gypsies, and thousands of handicapped children institutionalized in Germany and in occupied Europe. What is clear is that more than one million Jewish children perished in the Holocaust.

Valent (1998, p. 109), notes that the Holocaust posed the greatest threat to children’s lives ever known. They were the most vulnerable group marked for extermination by the Germans. Many healthy parents with a chance of survival looked upon their children as a death sentence. Children who did not remain silent during searches and selections endangered the lives of those around them (Dwork, 1991, p. xxi). The Nazis automatically killed children together with their mothers.

First in Germany and later in occupied Europe, Jewish children were very much affected by communal persecution. In Germany, they were not allowed to join clubs and organizations attended by Aryan children and were banned from public recreational facilities and playgrounds. Childhood and adolescence, usually a time for expanding horizons, became frightening and isolated. Children were subjected to traumatic loss and separation from their homes and familiar terrain. With the outbreak of war in occupied Poland and later throughout Europe and the Baltic States, Jewish children with their families were confined to overcrowded ghettos and transit camps, where they were exposed to malnutrition and disease.

The survival of any Jewish children in the Holocaust was remarkable. The International Red Cross estimates that 13 million children in Europe lost their natural protectors during World War II (Wyman, 1989). When the International Refugee Organization (IRO) took over the displaced persons camps in 1948, about 25 percent of the inmates were under the age of 17 (Wyman, 1989). A few months after V-E day, about 50,000 unaccompanied children were under the care of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Commission (UNRRA).

Children caught up in the Holocaust should be considered as a single unified group but may be divided into three age groups according to their differing needs:

• Infants and toddlers up to the age of 6 years
• Children between the ages of 7 and 12 years
• Adolescents between the ages of 13 and 18 years

Chances of survival and ability to do physical labor varied greatly with age. The survival of infants and toddlers depended on their parents’ competence in hiding them or sneaking them out of a ghetto into the hands of strangers. Their safety was dependent on the fate of their families. Young children and adolescents lied about their age to increase their chances of survival by being assigned to forced labor in concentration camps and ghettos.

After 1939, many Jewish children in Europe were killed as babies, incarcerated in ghettos and transit camps, killed upon arrival in concentration camps, utilized as slave labor, and subjected to medical experiments. Jewish families in the cities and villages were torn apart by deportation, which for the first time included stripping political rights and confiscating property and possessions (Warhaftig, 1944).

Children who were once part of a cohesive family unit were abruptly separated from their families. As Hogman notes (1985), last looks and words were remembered forever. Many homeless children had witnessed the murder of parents, siblings, and relatives. They faced starvation, sickness, hard labor, and other indignities. Hunger was rampant. Theft became a tool for survival, and stealing a piece of bread or a potato often meant the difference between life and death. Many children became the breadwinners. While they apparently had less chance of survival than the adults, they were often more flexible and adaptable.

Documentary evidence on the lives of children during the Holocaust is fragmentary. The young children could not yet write, and older ones who were literate did not have the necessary instruments and also feared for their lives. Some children wrote poems, kept diaries, and made drawings. Some information about children is available in diaries kept by adults and in ghetto archives discovered after the war, including the Ringelblum Archive from the Warsaw Ghetto and the Bialystok Ghetto Archive. Child survivors have now begun to record their impressions.

The survival strategies of children varied widely. Children were placed in the care of strangers, concealing their true identity and religion; hidden in cupboards, lofts, and pits; or they hid in forests and sewers. Some survived in ghettos and concentration camps.

After the war, child refugees and survivors faced the loss of their families and friends. Those who were orphaned depended on the goodwill of distant relatives, foster families, or institutions and some were rejected in their new surroundings. Others encountered anti-Semitism from former neighbors on returning to their homes to search for remnants of their previous lives.

Kinder Archiv

When searching for documents relating to children, the ITS staff noticed that in its documents children were registered as orphans—without parents or relatives. The staff noticed also that when children made inquiries (or when inquiries were made on behalf of children) these children often were unable to supply information about themselves. As a result of these observations, ITS staff made two major decisions. First, they defined a child as anyone born in and after 1927, and secondly, that any and all documents relating to children, based on their definition, would be extracted from the main archival materials and grouped together–with one exception. These actions resulted in the establishment of the Kinder Archiv. The exception is that concentration camp material related to children was not extracted and, therefore, is not held in the Kinder Archiv.

In addition to the Kinder Kartei (children’s index) of about 160,000 cards, Kinder Archiv holdings fall into the following categories:

• Birth and baptismal certificates of approximately 1.2 million children born in Germany during the war; scheduled to be scanned
• Death certificates of children of various nationalities born in and after 1927
• Lists and correspondence with about 257,000 names, also scheduled to be scanned. Included in the lists and correspondence are:
• Approximately 16,000 individual records and files called Kinder Akte (children’s files) issued after the war by the IRO and UNNRA for children born in and after 1927 who either were alone or were being sought; includes lists of children registered in Displaced Persons camps after the war; cards in the Kinder Kartei include reference to these documents
• Publications from 1946 containing photographs of missing children from Lidce and Prague
• Children repatriated to their home country, reunited with their parents, or adopted; called “E list”
• Missing children of different nationalities, includes lists of parents who made inquiries; called “G list”
• Lists of children in various countries, including countries where children were sent after the war and lists of children cared for by the American Joint Distribution Committee (AJDC)
• AJDC material on children
• Polish Red Cross material on missing children
• Miscellaneous materials pertaining to children such as court documents and registrations and radio announcements
• Lebensborn files² including children’s homes, some of which were Lebensborn birth houses; Polish children who came to Germany; and information about Czech and Yugoslavian children
• Material relating to children in the American, British, and French zones of occupation
• Children born in Poland and Russia before or during the war who died in Germany

Searching for Children

Everyone searching for children should make direct contact with the archive in Bad Arolsen <email@its-arolsen.org>. Do not rely solely on the CNI when searching for a child; many, but not all names from the Kinder Archiv appear in the CNI. Some documents in the children’s archive have not yet been scanned and are researched only by the staff of this archive.

Finally, when searching for Holocaust-era information about specific children, remember that ITS, although the largest relevant archive, does not hold all information. In Israel, Yad Vashem, the Lochamei HaGetaot (Ghetto Fighters Museum), and the Central Zionist Archives also have documentation about children. Researchers may also find relevant data at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, and in the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, Poland.

Notes

1. The International Tracing Service archive, situated in Bad Arolsen, Germany, holds 50 million references, 3 million correspondence files, and almost 26,000 meters of files of Holocaust-era related records. The alphabetically and phonetically arranged Central Name Index (CNI) includes more than 50 million reference cards on 17.5 million individuals and is the key to the documents and correspondence files.
2. The Lebensborn program was founded by Heinrich Himmler in 1935 in part as a response to declining birth rates in Germany and in part to promote the Nazi policy of eugenics. The program provided maternity homes and financial assistance to the wives of SS members and to unmarried mothers and also ran orphanages and relocation programs for children. Initially established in Germany, the program expanded into occupied countries in western and northern Europe.

References

Dvorzetzki, M. (1972) “Yeladim Lelo Yaldut: Yeladim Betkufat Hashoah” (Children deprived of childhood: children during the Holocaust). [Hebrew]. Tadpis Metoch Betefutzat HaGolah 14, 1/2 60/61.

Dwork, D. (1991) Children with a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe. New Haven: Yale University Press

Helmreich, W.B. Against All Odds: Holocaust Survivors and the Successful Lives They Made in America. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992.

Hogman, F. (1983), “Displaced Children during World War II,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 23, (1) p.51-66

    Kestenberg, J. J. and C. Kahn, (eds). Children Surviving Persecution: An International Study of Healing. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1998.

Krell, R. “Therapeutic Value of Documenting Child Survivors.” Journal of the American Child Psychiatry, 24, p. 397-400, 1985.

Lerer Cohen, R. and S. Issroff, The Holocaust in Lithuania: A Book of Remembrance. Gefen: Jerusalem, 2002.

    Lerer Cohen, R. PhD dissertation. “Resilience and Achievement: The Case of Jewish Lithuanian Child Holocaust Survivors,” 2005.

Sigal, J.J. and Weinfeld, M. (1989) Trauma  and Rebirth: Intergenerational Effects of the Holocaust. New York: Praeger

Valent, P. (1998) “Resilience in Child Survivors of the Holocaust: Toward the Concept of Resilience.” Psychoanalytic Review 85 (4) p.517-535

Warhaftig, Z. (1944) in From War to Peace No.1 Relief and Rehabilitation: Implications of UNRRA  Program for Jewish Needs. Institute of Jewish Affairs of the AJC and the WJC NY, 1944.

Dr. Rose Lerer Cohen, born in South Africa and a resident of Jerusalem, is a professional researcher and member of the Association of Professional Genealogists. She specializes in Holocaust and Israeli research as well as research in Eastern Europe and South Africa. Cohen is editor of Sharsheret Hadorot, the Journal of the Israel Genealogical Society, and coordinated the International Slave Labour Interviewing Project for the University of Hagen, Germany, in South Africa and Lithuania. She is cofounder of the Lithuanian Names Project.