it still seemed unlikely that the existence of the entire Jewish community was
threatened. Aside from the Bund, Ringelblum’s group was probably the first
in the whole ghetto to realise that the German policy of anti-Jewish persecution
was entering a phase of a different nature, the phase of mass destruction
of the Jewish population. However, it was still difficult to accept that it would
involve a total annihilation of all Jews under German rule.
The latest research indicates that until the summer and autumn of 1941
Hitler’s political staff were undecided about when the so-called “final solution
of the Jewish question” should be implemented. Until then, orders for mass
murder of the Jewish population had only been issued for the areas conquered
from the USSR. However, it is almost certain that even if Ringelblum’s associates
had known what awaited their young charges, Jewish social activists
and educators would not have changed anything in their approach to childcare.
Such were their moral imperatives and they tried to meet them under
those unimaginably dramatic conditions.
The fate of children became a symbol and the essence of survival. And
this is precisely the concern of the documents of this volume. The efforts
of social activists and educators in that field concerned both the existential
issues, i.e. the fight against hunger and disease, as well as the provision of
school education, psychological and moral support for children, including,
among others, mitigating the physical and mental effects of the increasing
orphanhood. Attempts to adapt children to life in the dramatically difficult
circumstances of the ghetto and to prepare them to return to the future,
expected normality – which would never come to be either for those children
or for their educators and care-givers – were some of the most moving acts of
civil resistance in ghettos.
The situations of children in ghettos, as well as the clandestine and official
education in the Warsaw ghetto, have already been described in historical
literature.¹ However, no study has been able to present those issues in such
an authentic and poignant way as do the documents collected in this volume.
It opens with texts written by children themselves. The cognitive and
emotional value is inestimable. These are partly materials (e.g. school essays)
1 See M. Hochberg-Mariańska, Dzieci oskarżają (Kraków–Łódź–Warszawa 1947). The author of the selection contained in this volume also wrote on the subject (see Bibliography, also for more recent works on the topic).
