And Life Is Changed Forever: Holocaust Childhoods Remembered

Looking at the Holocaust through the eyes of children who lived through it, this collection offers an inspiring assortment of perspectives on survival.

This distinctive volume contains twenty first-person narrative essays from Holocaust survivors who were children at the time of the atrocity. As children aged two to sixteen, these authors had different experiences than their adult counterparts and also had different outlooks in understanding the events that they survived.

While most Holocaust memoirs focus on one individual or one country, And Life Is Changed Forever offers a varied collection of compelling reflections. The survivors come from Germany, Poland, Austria, Romania, Hungary, Italy, Greece, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Latvia, and Czechoslovakia. All of the contributors escaped death, but they did so in myriad ways. Some children posed as Gentiles or were hidden by sympathizers, some went to concentration camps and survived slave labor, some escaped on the Kindertransports, and some were sent to endure hardships in a "safe" location such as Siberia or unoccupied France. While each essay is intensely personal, all speak to the universal horrors and the triumphs of all children who have survived persecution. And Life Is Changed Forever also focuses on what these children became-teachers, engineers, physicians, entrepreneurs, librarians, parents, and grandparents-and explores the impact of the Holocaust on their later lives.