Exhibition Talk – Echoes from Auschwitz: Jewish child forced labourers

During the Second World War, 1.5 million Jewish children were murdered in the Holocaust. Only a small minority survived as child forced labourers, in hiding and with partisan groups. Jewish children were forced to work in ghettoes, concentration and labour camps, in industry and agriculture. The Wehrmacht and SS deployed children in construction work on fortifications, roads and airfields.The survivors were shaped by external and internal wounds, scars, disabilities, and traumatic experiences. They lost parents, family members, and friends. Child survivors often also lost any trust in adults. Over months and years, their lives became characterized by the vicinity of death, forced labour, hunger, thirst and humiliation. Many had been sexually abused; some had to endure forced sterilization and medical experiments. In general, only children whom the Germans regarded as useful labourers had a chance to survive the camps.In this talk, Professor Steinert will discuss a research project in which hundreds of testimonies as well as contemporary and post-war documents were examined. He will walk us through some aspects of the children’s living and working experiences and their chances of survival. After some reflections on “Children’s testimonies”, he will then turn his focus towards “Resilience and survival”, and on “Forced labour in the vicinity of death”.

Johannes-Dieter Steinert, Emeritus Professor of Modern European History, University of Wolverhampton. Senior Fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (2015). Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research 2020. Co-organiser of the international conference series: “Beyond Camps and Forced Labour: Current International Research on Survivors of Nazi Persecution” (London) and “Children and War: Past and Present” (Salzburg). Current research: Romani child forced labourers in WWII. Most recent book publications: “I haven’t even told my mother. Children as victims of sexual and sexualized violence in the Second World War and its aftermath, edited together with Helga Amesberger and Helga Embacher (Salzburg: Edition Tandem 2025). Przemysłowa Concentration Camp. The Camp, the Children, the Trials, together with Katarzyna Person (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan 2022).

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