War And Childhood In The Era Of The Two World Wars

The histories of modern war and childhood were the result of competing urgencies. According to ideals of childhood widely accepted throughout the world by 1900, children should have been protected, even hidden, from conflict and danger. Yet at a time when modern ways of childhood became increasingly possible for economic, social, and political reasons, it became less possible to fully protect them in the face of massive industrialized warfare driven by geopolitical rivalries and expansionist policies. Taking a global perspective, the chapters in this book examine a wide range of experiences and places. In addition to showing how the engagement of children and youth with war differed according to geography, technology, class, age, race, gender, and the nature of the state, they reveal how children acquired agency during the twentieth century's greatest conflicts.

This innovative book reveals children's experiences and how they became victims and actors during the twentieth century's biggest conflicts.

How do children cope when their world is transformed by war? This book draws on memory narratives to construct an historical anthropology of childhood in Second World Britain, focusing on objects and spaces such as gas masks, air raid shelters and bombed-out buildings. In their struggles to cope with the fears and upheavals of wartime, with families divided and familiar landscapes lost or transformed, children reimagined and reshaped these material traces of conflict into toys, treasures and playgrounds. This study of the material worlds of wartime childhood offers a unique viewpoint into an extraordinary period in history with powerful resonances across global conflicts into the present day.

Because all wars in the twenty-first century are potentially global wars, the centenary of the first global war is the occasion for reflection. This volume offers an unprecedented account of the lives, stories, letters, games, schools, institutions (such as the Boy Scouts and YMCA), and toys of children in Europe, North America, and the Global South during the First World War and surrounding years. By engaging with developments in Children's Literature, War Studies, and Education, and mining newly available archival resources (including letters written by children), the contributors to this volume demonstrate how perceptions of childhood changed in the period. Children who had been constructed as Romantic innocents playing safely in secure gardens were transformed into socially responsible children actively committing themselves to the war effort. In order to foreground cross-cultural connections across what had been perceived as 'enemy' lines, perspectives on German, American, British, Australian, and Canadian children's literature and culture are situated so that they work in conversation with each other. The multidisciplinary, multinational range of contributors to this volume make it distinctive and a particularly valuable contribution to emerging studies on the impact of war on the lives of children. and Canadian children's literature and culture are situated so that they work in conversation with each other. The multidisciplinary, multinational range of contributors to this volume make it distinctive and a particularly valuable contribution to emerging studies on the impact of war on the lives of children.

During the Second World War, an unprecedented number of families were torn apart. As the Nazi empire crumbled, millions roamed the continent in search of their loved ones. The Lost Children tells the story of these families, and of the struggle to determine their fate. We see how the reconstruction of families quickly became synonymous with the survival of European civilization itself. Even as Allied officials and humanitarian organizations proclaimed a new era of individualist and internationalist values, Tara Zahra demonstrates that they defined the “best interests” of children in nationalist terms. Sovereign nations and families were seen as the key to the psychological rehabilitation of traumatized individuals and the peace and stability of Europe. Based on original research in German, French, Czech, Polish, and American archives, The Lost Children is a heartbreaking and mesmerizing story. It brings together the histories of eastern and western Europe, and traces the efforts of everyone—from Jewish Holocaust survivors to German refugees, from Communist officials to American social workers—to rebuild the lives of displaced children. It reveals that many seemingly timeless ideals of the family were actually conceived in the concentration camps, orphanages, and refugee camps of the Second World War, and shows how the process of reconstruction shaped Cold War ideologies and ideas about childhood and national identity. This riveting tale of families destroyed by war reverberates in the lost children of today’s wars and in the compelling issues of international adoption, human rights and humanitarianism, and refugee policies.

In the years following World War II the health and well-being of the nation was of primary concern to the British government. The essays in this collection examine the relationship between health and stress in post-war Britain through a series of carefully connected case studies.

"War Children shows what life was like during the Second World War for the children who lived through it. What was it like going to school in Nazi Germany, or helping to put fires out during the Blitz? How did it feel to be evacuated, or to arrive in Britain as a refugee and then be told you were an 'enemy alien'? Can you imagine running for your life as a doodlebug hurtled towards you, or drifting in a lifeboat for eight days, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean? In this book, eyewitnesses interviewed by the Imperial War Museum tell you just how it felt to be there?..." [Back cover] At head of title: In association with the Imperial War Museum. -First published in the UK as Under fire by Scholastic UK, 2004.

Author Elon Perry uniquely combines the narrative of a challenging childhood amidst wartime struggles with the gripping tale of military service in a commando unit. The book differs from other books on the subject because the plot revolves around two themes: a difficult and impoverished childhood during times of war, and military service in a commando unit, carried out with the aim of exacting revenge on the enemy and featuring vivid and detailed descriptions of battles. In the book, real stories and events are infused, including daring operations from the battlefield. Some of these accounts have never before been published, and only today, 40 years after the events, has the Israeli censorship allowed them to be shared. This story can be an inspiration to people who find themselves in desperate situations. They can learn how against all odds and in any given situation one can survive difficulties, as long as one has the will, perseverance, and belief that anything is possible.