In this large volume, Patricia Heberer tells the history of the Holocaust “through the eyes, and the fates, of its youngest victims” (p. xiv). As the introduction by Nechama Tec suggests, children matter to our understanding of the Holocaust because “the survival rate of Jewish children was consistently lower than that of the general Jewish population” (p. xxvi) and “the systematic murder of Jewish children marked the passing of the threshold toward genocide” (p. xxii). To the Nazis, children were “at once useless” as unproductive mouths to feed “and potentially dangerous” as a Jewish progeny (p. xxi) that would become adults in due course. To Jewish adults, children were precious—beyond the obvious reasons—as a tenuous hope for the future. Yet if they went to great lengths to save their children, they were often compelled to decide how their children were to die. As a particularly vulnerable population, children thus matter to scholars not only for their own sake but also for what their fate tells us about the experience of their parents, families, and communities.

The book's plot follows the “chronological arc of persecution” (p. xvi). At its core stand the experiences of emigration, deportation, war, Einsatzgruppen, ghettos, camps, resistance, hiding, and rescue. A particularly rich and compelling chapter (chapter 8) focuses on the “world of the child” within the machinery of death. The volume further contextualizes these core experiences in the social and legal exclusion of young people before the war as well as the postwar processes of liberation, remembering, and searching for family members and a permanent home. Heberer wisely included the experiences of non-Jewish children—ranging from victims to perpetrators and often falling into a gray zone—in the context of Nazi society, war, and racial hygiene policies. Unfortunately she did not adequately address those young people who were active perpetrators—not just of Nazi ideology but also Nazi violence. To be sure, many of the worst Nazi crimes were perpetrated by adults; but many of the adults in the 1940s had been adolescents in the 1930s, and the violent habits of youth provided a solid foundation for the genocidal practices of adults.

This volume is pleasantly broad in scope but not very deep in analysis. Yet Heberer is not trying to provide exhaustive evidence or a new interpretation. She is trying to provide an overview of her subject through “historical sources in context” (series title). Each subchapter provides general overviews of the historical context, then an analysis of several case studies, followed by illustrative documents in translation. Her concise treatments of each theme could readily be assigned to undergraduates as a way to elaborate and enrich a more standardized Holocaust textbook or curriculum. Insofar as she often quotes directly from the documents to follow, Heberer models how one might read these texts.

Indeed, this volume is most interesting—and not just for undergraduates—in terms of the breadth of sources and the opportunities they provide for insight into the past. Heberer knows: just because children are not “fully formed” historical subjects does not mean that their perspectives on historical events are any less valid. Like all sources, they need to be treated critically by historians. Moreover, children are often difficult to document even under “normal” conditions. The younger they get, the less documentary evidence is produced, valued, and saved—at least not in traditional archives. We historians have more texts about children than reports by them. This relative paucity of evidence was exacerbated by the fact that they often bore the brunt of genocide. Yet Heberer takes pains to demonstrate the very wide range of sources actually available to the researcher interested in reconstructing the experiences of young people in the Holocaust. These include many classical kinds of sources such as reports, memoranda, lists, card files, trial proceedings, correspondence, diaries, memoirs, newspapers, and photographs, which the author has carefully selected for relevance to this often overlooked population. She has enriched this standard repertoire with the art and literature of young people created during the war as well as often fascinating oral testimonies recorded soon after. And even the most jaded historians cannot help but be fascinated when Heberer presents us with such treasures as class essays, school records, crayon or ink drawings, scribbled notes, and album pages. With the sensibility of an archivist, she explains how many of these sources survived, often through miraculous circumstances, even when their authors did not. Moreover, the author clearly took pains to select a representative sample of sources from different genders, ethnicities, nationalities, politics, and religious practices—though she seemed less successful in striking that balance in terms of class. And if many speak from the perspective of adults, a remarkable number of really quite amazing sources provide the perspective of young people themselves. It is also worth mentioning that Heberer almost exclusively prioritizes relatively contemporary accounts.

Sometimes this reviewer wanted more interpretive integration in this diverse mosaic of perspectives. But Heberer does not reduce children to the objects of state or adult authority. “Children often followed where adults led,” she notes in the context of Nazi propaganda, but they also “take matters into their own hands” (p. 264). She properly accords to children independent voices and agency without ignoring or diminishing the terrible and constraining circumstances in which they operated. They exhibited a degree of courage and creativity that surprises even the most cynical. In the shadow of genocide, children begged, peddled, played, worked, smuggled, starved, fought, studied, acted, sang, collaborated, resisted, denounced, published, hid, escaped, converted, lied, prayed, dreamed, and—in tragic numbers—suffered and perished. Heberer's child-centric history of the Holocaust thus does an excellent job of highlighting the horror of the Holocaust as well as the amazing capacity of children to “adjust” to almost any circumstance, even genocide.