Did the Children Cry?: Hitler's War Against Jewish and Polish Children, 1939-1945 - Hardcover

Lukas, Richard C.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0781802423 ISBN 13: 9780781802420

Publisher: Hippocrene Books, 1994

Synopsis

An unprecedented aspect of Nazi genocide in World War II was the cold and deliberate decision not to spare the children. Jewish children, first driven into the ghettos, were marked for total destruction as part of the "Final Solution" once it was put into effect, in 1942. Gentile children were starved, killed, or Germanized in order to reduce the Polish nation to a small complement of semi-literate slaves tending the Herrenvolk in their thousand-year Reich.
This record also includes accounts of how they fought back by working for the underground, smuggling food into the ghettos, attending secret classes to continue their forbidden education. Included are stories of villains like Mengele who selected children for execution during Jewish religious holidays; Rudolph Hoess, Auschwitz's commandant who admitted his own discomfort when he witnessed the gassing of prisoners with the excuse: "I was a soldier and an officer"; a heroic Dr. Janusz Korczak who was in charge of an orphanage in the ghetto, but refused to leave his orphans, and at the head of a contingent of 192 children and 8 staff members, erect, his eyes looking into the distance, held the hands of two children as he led them to the railroad platform where trains took them to certain death.
Based on vast research in the United States, Great Britain, and Poland, many interviews, theses and other papers, documents and official histories, memoirs, autobiographies, articles, periodicals and newspapers, Did the Children Cry? stands as a monument to millions of children who were bombed, wounded, deported, raped, starved, maimed, subjected to "medical" experimentation, and killed in German-occupied Poland.

About this title

About the Author:

Richard C Lukas has authored and co-authored nine books. He earned his Ph.D. in history from Florida State University, and in recognition of his scholarship, Alliance College granted him the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters in 1987. He resides in Florida.

About this edition

• Publisher: Hippocrene Books
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0781802423
• ISBN 13: 9780781802420
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 263