Children in the Holocaust: Death Rates


Figure 1.--Jewish children were the most vulnerable of all the various groups targetted bu the NAZIs. The younger the child , the more vulnerable they were. The dividing line between death and possible life was often whether they looked old enough to work. Boys were more vulnerable than girls. And they died in the greatest proportion. ppearance was also a factor, affecting the ability to hide. Here we see two unidentified boys in a NAZI getto in Poland, probanly during 1940. The boy on the left would have had no chance of survival. The boy on the right might have had some chance.

Jewish children were the most vulnerable of all the various groups targetted bu the NAZIs. The younger the child , the more vulnerable they were. The dividing line between death and possible life was often whether they looked old enough to work. Boys were more vulnerable than girls. And they died in the greatest proportion. The NAZIs are estimated to have murdered over a million Jewish children. The children were not just a consequence of killing the adults. Killing the children was the haeart and soul of the NAZI effort to destroy the Jewish people. A priority was acyally placed on killing the children as soon as possibke as they were non-workers. And the NAZIs were terrifyingly effective. There are of course no precise statistics. It is estimated that about 90 percent of the Jewish children in the occupied were killed by the NAZIs. This is much higher than the 60-70 percent of adults that perished. [Tec] Part of the reason was that children died in such large numbers was that they were more vulnerable and less able to fend for themselves. They were more vulnerable to disease and malnutrition in the ghettoes. The NAZIs rounded up the children for killing operations before their parents. And when wholescale transports to the death camps began, the children and their mothers were singled out for death as soon as the gas chambers were available. The NAZIs prived stunningly successful in killing children. In 1939 there were some 1.7 million European Jewish children under the age of 16. By 1945 only an estimated 0.2 million of those children had survived. [Greenfield] For younger children the only way of surviving is that someone took them in and hid them.

Sources

Greenfeld, Howard. After the Holocaust.

Tec, Nechama. "Children and the Holocaust: Keynote address," Children and the Holocaust Symposium, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, April 3, 2003.








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Created: 2:37 AM 6/19/2009
Last updated: 12:04 AM 1/30/2015