Livia Bitton-Jackson was thirteen years old when she and her mother arrived on a transport from Auschwitz to Płaszów, a forced labor camp near Krakow. Livia had been a prisoner at Auschwitz for ten days and, before this, had lived briefly with her family in the Nagymagyar ghetto in southwestern Slovakia. Now she was pressed into service in a Kommando that cleared land occupied by a Jewish cemetery for construction. Hauling heavy gravestones from a cemetery under the blows of a tyrannical Kapo was backbreaking labor, and the skeletons she unearthed as she worked haunted her dreams at night. In her seven weeks at Płaszów, she “grew into a concentration camp prisoner. I learned to live with fear and hunger and abuse…. I learned to endure cold, pain, and long hours of physical labor. I learned to live with waning hope….” (175).

One and a half million Jewish children were murdered in the Holocaust. Scholars estimate that 150,000 children and juveniles outside the lands of the former Soviet Union survived the genocide—the vast majority of these because they were able to perform forced labor. Johannes-Dieter Steinert has spent the past decade researching the subject of child labor during World War II. In this book, Steinert uses contemporary documentation, as well as hundreds of oral histories and autobiographical testimonies, to draw a compelling portrait of the lives and experiences of Jewish child forced laborers during the Holocaust. The volume complements an earlier work, Deportation und Zwangsarbeit. Polnische und Sowjetische Kinder in nationalsozialistischen Deutschland und im besetzten Osteuropa 1939–1945 (2013), which focuses on Polish and Soviet children deployed as Ostarbeiter—civilian forced laborers deployed on German soil during the war years.

Steinert proceeds from an assessment reached by many scholars of children during the Holocaust: that even as the tenets of Nazi anti-Jewish policy—discrimination, internment, deportation, and mass murder—were fundamentally the same for youngsters and their parents, children experienced these events in a radically different way than did their adult contemporaries. Using the criteria of age and gender, Steinert analyzes children's memories and experiences of war, persecution, and violence. Exploring various aspects of child labor in the German-occupied territories, in camps of the armaments industries, as well as in ghettos, concentration camps, and killing centers, his work offers significant insight into the lives of Jewish children, for whom fear, hunger, and brutality were part of daily life.

Steinert's volume documents the strenuous work performed by Jewish youngsters during the war years. Jewish children as young as ten shoveled snow and cleaned streets and public areas in the ghettos. German occupation and Wehrmacht officials deployed juveniles, primarily very young men, in water control management and in the construction of roadways and railway networks. Children of both genders engaged in agricultural labor and the digging of trenches and antitank ditches. In concentration and forced labor camps, Jewish youngsters performed backbreaking work under dangerous conditions in quarries, cement works, and armaments manufacture.

Without exception, adult survivors of child forced labor during the Holocaust recounted the terrible conditions they encountered: the lack of food and clean water, the constant beatings, the harsh punishments for the most minor transgressions, and sleeping on bare floors or crowded bunks. Many recalled the appalling lack of hygiene: the absence of toilets; the inability to bathe or change clothes; the pervasive infestations of lice and vermin. Young children labored in dangerous conditions without protective equipment and spent long hours exposed to harsh weather, clothed only in paper-thin garments. Although survivors consistently spoke of suffering from intense hunger and wounds from beatings that refused to heal, many insisted that the most painful wounds were psychological: the humiliation of standing naked before German officials, the anguish of witnessing the execution of fellow prisoners, or the agony of watching a parent beaten. Some forms of labor conferred exceptional trauma to the young psyche, such as being forced to bury or burn the corpses of the dead, laundering the bloodied clothing of slaughtered ghetto residents, or clearing the bodies of murdered Jews from the gas chambers or gas vans. Many child survivors assigned to sorting the possessions of dead prisoners remembered the horror of finding their mother's dress or sibling's spectacles among the belongings.

Steinert reminds readers that for children (and adults), the ability to perform labor did not always guarantee survival, but there were certain circumstances that helped raise the odds for Jewish children. Youngsters had a better chance of survival in a camp or ghetto setting if they were accompanied by a parent or close adult relative, or if they fit into a network of companions who could support one another. Lying about one's age or wearing clothing such as a headscarf or heavy coat that made one look older or stouter were also successful strategies. In the camp environment, one's place of work could quite literally save one's life. Experienced prisoners, even children, understood that working in a Kommando outside the camp—where one marched long distances under the blows of guards and labored in harsh weather—meant almost certain death. Working inside the camp was infinitely preferable, especially if it meant laboring in the kitchen or garden, where edibles were at hand. Even work in the lowly Scheisskommando—the detail that emptied and cleaned the latrines—had its advantages because these workers were able to connect with a large number and variety of prisoners from whom they could “organize” things needed for their survival. The best kind of work for children was in the household of a (preferably benign) Nazi official, where one could work indoors, with access to table scraps and away from the gratuitous beatings meted out by guards and other prisoners.

In bringing readers the memories of Jewish child forced laborers, Steinert weaves together their stories of survival, employing their own voices. The result is a narrative of suffering and loss, but also an account of resilience and of children's capacity to hope and endure.