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Acts of Survival 
Children’s Writings During the Holocaust  

 
Sorcha Deheer 
University of Alberta 

 
Abstract 
An analysis of children’s writings during the Holocaust in former Yugoslavia reveals that 
children are active participants in the formation of the social world and retain a sense of 
agency in spaces that afford them little. Through their diaries, letters, and memoirs, young 
people produced works of radical nonconformity that aided in their individual and social 
survival. This paper aims to understand how children and youth aid in the survival of their 
social environment amid periods of severe systemic oppression by problematizing children 
as an ideological concept. Conventional perceptions of childhood consign children to 
passive roles as victims and symbols. As scholarship on the Holocaust and genocide 
progresses, children’s contributions shouldn't be overlooked. 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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Article 
 
Introduction  
 

The late Júlia Szilágyi (2020), a Hungarian holocaust survivor from North 
Transylvania and renowned professor, wrote in her memoir that “Whoever wants to 
eradicate a culture, in another or in himself, must erase the memories. Not the textbooks. 
Not the legends that have become a treasure trove. No. The most personal, the memories of 
children....”1 Szilágyi poignantly illustrated children's importance in transmitting and 
sustaining culture. When children are viewed as passive actors whose contributions to 
culture are limited to their capacity to mature, it is easy to diminish their contributions.2 By 
challenging this narrative, it is possible to understand how children aid in the survival of 
their social environment (sometimes referred to as social worlds), even if they do not live to 
adulthood. The construction of the social world is an endlessly fluid process made up of 
individual behaviours. These actions impact the accepted social representations—the 
values, beliefs, practices, and ideas shared among a group of people that form the basis for 
their collective identity. Social worlds are intersectional, so a person may be simultaneously 
present in more than one. For the purposes of this paper, the social world refers both to the 
individual communities of people that share a physical space with children in camps, 
ghettos, and neighbourhoods as well as the wider European Jewish community, which is 
connected through shared beliefs, practices, and histories. In essence, the social 
environment encompasses the interpersonal and cultural milieu that shapes their attitudes, 
beliefs, values, and behaviour.  

Conventional perceptions of childhood position them as passive participants who 
exist within history but do not shape it. By problematizing children as an ideological 
concept, this paper aims to understand how children and youth retain a sense of agency 
and aid in the survival of their social environment amid periods of severe systemic 
oppression. Through their diaries, letters, and memoirs, young people produced works of 
radical nonconformity that aided in their individual and social survival. The authors 
demonstrate that they are active, knowing subjects who are capable of critically evaluating 
and impacting their social world. Alexandra Zapruder discusses the legacy of Anne Frank’s 
diary. It is seen not just as a testimony of the events that occurred during the war but as 
“rescuing her generation; and by its seemingly dominant theme of hope for humanity, 
rescuing all of us in the process.”3 By recording and sharing their authentic experiences, 
children challenged Nazi propaganda, providing proof of the events that occurred and 
instilling hope and resilience in their communities.  

Any close examination of children and youth as historical subjects necessitates a 
thorough understanding of how they are viewed—socially and culturally—in the time and 
space they occupy. As with any other social actor, their actions and worldviews are 

3 Alexandra Zapruder, “Introduction,” in Salvaged Pages, ed. Alexandra Zapruder (Yale University Press, 2002), 7. 

2 Children are regarded as important to the transmission of culture in the sense that they will grow up to carry on the 
traditions, but not as a child in and of themselves.  

1 Júlia Szilágyi, Álmatlan könyv (Kolozsvár: Korunk, 2014), 32, quoted in Louise O. Vasvári, “Culinary Nostalgia 
and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Addenda to Kinga Király's Az újrakezdés receptjei (2019) / Recipes for a New 
Beginning (2020),” Hungarian Cultural Studies 14, no.1 (2021): 196.  

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determined, in part, by social climate. Understanding how society viewed and treated 
children is easier, however, than uncovering the lived experiences of the children 
themselves. Holocaust studies has grown into a significant discipline, but children and 
youth continue to occupy a small space. Some barriers are demographic. The aging 
population of survivors dwindles and the availability of source material in archives and 
personal collections is inconsistent. Although numerous sources are available in other 
languages, English is the primary language of publishing for this subject. For academics 
who are not writing in English, this restricts the resources that are available to them as well 
as their publishing options. Some are based on research, including the ones covered in 
further depth below. Scholarship on children and youth employs a wide variety of age 
ranges, making the research inconsistent. When sources survive, they can be subjected to 
omission and doctoring, as was the case with Anne Frank’s diary. When research is 
conducted, children are often constrained by age-related ideologies. As I will discuss, this 
leads to an incomplete and potentially misleading analysis of children’s experiences. 
Similarly, sources directly from children themselves can be limited, so scholars rely on the 
memories and reflections of adults. While this can be valuable in its own right, it is not a 
replacement. Finally, the interruption to education as a result of German policies, trauma, 
and displacement serves as a barrier to effective communication.  

Challenges Faced by Children’s Historians 
 

Patricia Herberer Rice challenges historians to “represent these experiences in a 
meaningful and authentic way.”4 Reproducing the world as it was seen by children in the 
past is difficult because the nature of childhood itself is fluid and a social construction 
defined by adult expectations.5 There are legal, cultural, religious and biological definitions 
of childhood and all of them would situate historical actors in a different way. Even if we 
were to choose a single definition, there are additional factors to consider. If a time and 
place have surviving legal definitions of childhood, how do we situate that in a culture that 
may or may not consider this definition in their everyday lives? Does a 16-year-old girl 
remain a child because she is under the age of majority and not done growing, or an adult 
because she has surpassed puberty and is married with children?  

To put this into perspective, we can look at the various ways that youth were treated 
during World War II. The Hitlerjugend, also known as the Hitler Youth, consisted of boys 
ages 14-18 years old. As members, they were prepared for war but did not participate 
directly in it until 1943.6 The organization defined what it means to be a youth legally, but 
in practice, the line blurred. A defensive militia known as Volkssturm was set up in the last 
few months of the war and consisted of boys as young as 16. In this case, the need for 
soldiers trumped the legal definition of childhood. The dilemma facing historians is 

6 “Hitler Youth,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, accessed May 1, 2025, 
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/hitler-youth-2#fn_ref-1.  

5 Mischa Honeck and James Marten, “Introduction,” in War and Childhood in the Era of the Two World Wars, ed. 
Mischa Honeck and James Marten (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 4-6.  

4 Patricia Herberer Rice, “In Their Own Words” Children in the World of the Holocaust,” in War and Childhood in 
the Era of the Two World Wars, ed. Mischa Honeck and James Marten (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 
2019), 231.  

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whether to use legal or social definitions to determine when their subjects are considered 
adults.  

Hidden children pose a similar challenge to the definition of childhood. Assuming 
persons in their late teens and early twenties were sent abroad by their parents at the 
beginning of the war it can be assumed that they were considered children, to some extent, 
by their parents and communities. Again, the social perspective is more important than the 
legal one. Mischa Honeck and James Marten focus on the industrialization of actual and 
ideological childhood, a process that frequently placed children at the forefront of war and 
violence. They place fewer limitations on who they consider children for research purposes, 
including adolescents and older. The same is true for Jefferey Blutinger, who classifies 
anyone under the age of twenty-five as being a child. Most historians will go up to a 
maximum age of twenty-five, although it can be as low as sixteen.7 In line with Blutinger, 
this paper situates children and youth (used interchangeably) as any persons under the age 
of 25 because this is the approximate age when social conventions around childhood 
appear to stop.  

After defining what a child is, based on social conventions, it is critical to assess how 
scholarship positions them as a historical subject. Conventional discourse constrains 
children and youth by situating them as passive actors, both within their own lives and 
their larger social networks. As historical subjects, they occupy a submissive role, 
experiencing the world around them but not actively participating as sovereign agents. 
When looking at the literature surrounding the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth), children and 
youth are depicted as tools of the state, with little regard for the role they are playing in the 
war. We have often questioned how children are utilized to further political ends, but less so 
how those children understood and responded to the regime's puppeteering. Further 
challenges occur when we explore children as perpetrators. Jessica K. Taft argues for a 
critical approach to child and youth studies that treats young people as “knowing subjects 
who can offer their own theoretical insights into the social world.”8 The challenge then is to 
reconcile our perception of children as innocent with their capacity to critically assess their 
social position. Children and youth as submissive historical subjects is a discursively 
constructed narrative with potential implications on age-related ideologies. If children are 
viewed as inherently passive, we risk overlooking a significant part of history.  

The sources left behind by children of the past embody childhood as it is understood 
by those who are living through it, rather than a narrative that has been reconstructed 
through the lens of maturity. This does not mean that there is no place for post-war 
memoirs, interviews, or similar. The reflections of adults on their childhoods provide 
greater depth to the study of memory. It is important to consider how the experiences of a 
child are interpreted and valued years later. There is a wealth of sources examining 
children’s experiences from the perspective of their older selves. Many Holocaust survivors 
documented and archived their experiences soon after the war, while others waited until 

8 Jessica K. Taft, “Is It Okay to Critique Youth Activists? Notes on the Power and Danger of Complexity,” in 
Children and Youth as Subjects, Objects, Agents: Innovative Approaches Across Time and Space, ed. Deborah 
Levinson, Mary Jo Maynes, and Frances Vavrus (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 194.  

7 Jeffery Blutinger, "Children and the Holocaust," in Plight and Fate of Children during and Following Genocide, 
ed. Samuel Totten (Routledge, 2014), 85-86. 

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old age. Both cases reflect the belief that memory is valuable and worthy of preservation. In 
a uniquely reflective article, historian Elena Jackson Albarrán challenges her perceptions of 
scholarship and childhood. Jackson submits her childhood diary for historical scrutiny by 
herself and a class of undergraduate students. Through this process, two interesting things 
emerge. The assumptions made by the undergraduate students were at times wildly 
incorrect, especially when only given a fraction of the diary to work from. Secondly, Jackson 
was faced with questions about her diary that she did not have answers for or had not 
considered, even as an adult. Jackson writes that the experience “prompted me to take a 
second, more objectively distanced, look at a childhood I thought I understood” in response 
to observations that her parents worked more than average.9 The experiment points to the 
challenge that historians and subjects face when remembering the past. The affective 
practices of the child and the adult are different as they situate themselves uniquely within 
the social environment.  

When written sources from children do exist, they may be subject to partial 
omission or doctoring, as in the case of Anne Frank’s diary. This leaves scholars to rely on 
the interpretations and manipulations of powerful adults.10 Omission is also seen in a 
different but equally important way in cases of hidden children. Throughout the war, 
children were being transported across borders in an attempt to save them from the 
horrors occurring at home. Children, especially those rehomed through private means, 
were not always returned to their biological families after the war. In many cases, these 
children did not know they were hidden children until much later in life. Blutinger points to 
this phenomenon as a key reason for a lack of documentation from child survivors.11 In 
both instances of omission, the history and agency of the children are removed from 
themselves and the historical record.  

The last issue faced by historians is simply the lack of evidence to begin with. Many 
individuals would have been too young to write, and many experienced interruptions to 
their education. In 1933, the national government instituted a quota on the number of 
non-Aryan students admitted to German schools, and the tenth supplementary decree to 
the Reich Citizenship Law in 1935 disbanded Jewish educational institutions and Jewish 
teacher-training centers. While there were regional differences in legislation, by 1938, 
Jewish students were banned from all public schools throughout Germany and Austria.12 
Many students continued to attend segregated schools, however their education was likely 
interrupted by the trauma of current events. Others faced interruption when their families 
fled their country of origin. Felicitas and Thomas Gumpel’s letter is an example of this 
interruption. The siblings were among hundreds of Jewish children who fled Germany for 
unoccupied France. Along with their mother, Gertrud Gumpel, the siblings were caught 
during roundups in Vichy and transported to the Drancy transit camp near Paris. Felicitas 

12 Karl A. Scleunes, ed., Legislating the Holocaust: The Bernhard Loesener Memoirs and Supporting Documents, 
trans. Carol Scherer (Routledge, 2018).  

11 Blutinger, "Children and the Holocaust," 93. 

10 Mona Gleason and Tamara Myers, eds., Bringing Children and Youth into Canadian History: The difference kids 
make (Ontario: Oxford University Press, 2017), 2.       

9 Elena Jackson Albarrán, ““So How’s Your Childhood Going?” A Historian of Childhood Confronts Her Own 
Archive,” in Children and Youth as Subjects, Objects, Agents: Innovative Approaches Across Time and Space, ed. 
Deborah Levinson, Mary Jo Maynes, and Frances Vavrus (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 21. 

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and Thomas wrote to their grandmother after their mother and older brother were 
deported to Auschwitz. The imperfect German reflects the limited education they received 
before the war.13  

Excerpt 1: A letter written by Felicitas Gumpel and Thomas Gumpel from the 
Drancy transit camp to their grandmother, 1942. Translated from German by 
Patricia Herberer Rice. 

July 14, 1942 

Dear Grandma,  

Now don’t be shocked about the newest thing that I have to tell you: this morning Mama 
and Kurt were taken away with others to work. But they are staying in France, they are 
still in Tours in order that they will be examined [by a doctor]. Those that are sick will 
come back here. We children all remained here and are in good hands; they are taking 
good care of us. We have good things to eat, better than normal anyway: cookies, bread 
with butter, etc. We even sleep at night with a family that Mama had befriended before; 
they are very kind to us. At nine-thirty we must all assemble again in our barracks, and 
then we will get to hear news; I hope good news. Just don’t excite yourself too much; this 
is all only for the time being. Share this letter with the entire family, because I cannot 
write to everyone. It is very sad in the camp because only the old men and women are 
here. They each have a suitcase a piece and 200 francs and a comforter, a thick one from 
us. This evening we haven’t heard any more [news]. I must close for today. Many, many 
greetings and kisses,  

 Your Fee 

 Dear Grandma,  

 With this news I think I have cried as never before, but this I show it is, so [many] 
fathers done from their children, mothers done from their children. I write these lines 
with tears in my eyes. Many greetings and kisses,  

 Your Tommy14 

Felicitas and Thomas were able to communicate with distant relatives, but many children 
had not learned the skills necessary to do so after being separated from their parents. Even 
with these skills, many children did not survive long enough to author letters and diaries. In 
many ways, children were at a disadvantage due to their age, limited education, and poor 
health. However, in some cases, like that of Felicitas and Thomas, their ages—thirteen and 
eleven, respectively—allowed them to communicate at least once with their family. Prior to 

14 Letter for Felicitas and Thomas Gumpel, July 14, 1942, in Reiner Lehberger and Ursula Randt, eds., “Aus Kindern 
Werden Briefe”: Dokumente zum Schicksal Judischer Kinder und Jugendlicher in der NS-Zeit (Hamburg: Freie und 
Hansestadt Hamburd Behorde fur Schule, Jegend und Berfufsbildung, 1999), 52-53 (translated from the German), 
quoted in Patricia Herberer, Children during the Holocaust (Lanham: AltaMira Press in association with the United 
States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2011), 97.  

13 Patricia Herberer, Children during the Holocaust (Lanham: AltaMira Press in association with the United States 
Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2011), 96-97.  

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1942, policy in France largely forbade juveniles from being deported to concentration 
camps. This policy spared the lives of the siblings until September 23, 1942, when the two 
were transported to Auschwitz.15  

Despite their circumstances, their letter conveys hope and resilience. They aim to 
reassure their loved ones and share their experiences with a wider community. The writing 
is nuanced and emotional. The goal of the Nazi regime was not to instill hope in Jewish 
children but rather the opposite. Whether intentional or not, Felicitas’ letter serves as an 
example of radical nonconformity. Felicitas saw the events happening around her as 
something of importance that needed to be shared. She did not write exclusively about her 
family but about all the mothers and fathers who were separated from their children. Their 
record of the events that took place subverts the Nazi’s attempt to control and erase Jewish 
history.  

Children’s writings from the Sajmište concentration camp and Vilna ghetto  
 

On the bank of the Sana River stands an exhibition centre built in the 1930s known 
as Sajmište. In 1941, the site was converted by the German army into a concentration camp 
for Serbian Jewish women and children. The conditions in the camp were especially 
heinous, with buildings that were broken and leaking in the middle of winter. Food rations 
were so poor that the SS medical officer, Dr. Jung, attempted to intervene. His plea was 
denied by the administration, and many died well before the gas vans arrived in 1942.16 
Sajmište was a relatively small camp with very few survivors, making it particularly 
remarkable that sources were produced and survived. Unlike Drancy, prisoners in Sajmište 
were not permitted to communicate with the outside world. The stories of Đura Rajs and 
Hilda Dajč provide a glimpse into the lives of children during severe systemic oppression.  

The Diary of Đura Rajs was written by an eleven-year-old boy during his internment 
in the Sajmište concentration camp. Đura was among the approximately 7,500 Jewish 
women and children from the Banat region of modern-day Serbia to be forcibly transported 
to Belgrade in 1941. Along with descriptions of his experiences, Đura filled the pages with 
drawings of the things and places he saw. Taken together, it is possible to inquire into the 
everyday life of a child in the Sajmište camp, but also what children value and the 
experiences that they find worthy of recording at a time when resources are scarce. Written 
on grid-lined paper, Đura has dated and titled the work, given it a dedication, and signed it.  

The diary’s author pays great attention to detail. The image shows black smoke 
billowing from the engines of double-masted ships; the pen drawings give substance 
through the use of wavy lines and cross-hatching. Đura’s work likely served as a way to 
externalize the trauma and rapid changes faced by him and his family. While many children 
were forced to or chose to take on forced labour jobs in camps and ghettos, Đura and other 
children “were able to play to our heart's content all day long.”17 Play does not feature in the 

17 Đura Rajs, Diary of Đura Rajs, August 11, 1941, US Holocaust Memorial Museum, last accessed April 7, 2023, 
https://perspectives.ushmm.org/item/diary-of-dura-rajs.  

16 Menachem Shelach, “Sajmište — An Extermination Camp in Serbia,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 2, no. 2 
(1987): 243-260, https://doi.org/10.1093/hgs/2.2.243.  

15 Herberer, Children During the Holocaust, 97.  

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short diary; rather, Đura takes the time to assure the reader that his accounts are real, lived 
experiences. He is intent on recording the harsh realities of life in the camp, both for 
himself and the adults. The work is dedicated to the Lager, a word that the author makes a 
note of translating. Meaning camp in German, Đura makes it clear that he is aware of the 
situation he is in. The introduction, written in Sajmište, sets a scene wrought with disease 
and sadness. His otherwise pragmatic retelling is interrupted briefly, expressing remorse 
that, at the age of eleven, he cannot produce a work of fiction.  

Rather than playing with his peers, Đura spends time drawing meticulous maps and 
diagrams. He details the living conditions and harsh realities of those around him in an 
attempt to show the reader how he “sees and imagines” the camp.18 Đura’s attention to 
detail mirrors the literary writings of children across Nazi-occupied Europe. In the Vilna 
and Łódź ghettos, young people poured hours into learning, documenting, and creating. 
Vilna-born Yitskhok Rudashevskin was 14 years old when he was transported to the Vilna 
ghetto along with his parents and maternal grandmother. Yitskhok kept a diary that 
documented his experiences over the two years he was interned. The Vilna ghetto boasted 
two youth organizations that served as spaces where fragments of childhood could be 
preserved. Along with his peers, Yitskhok compiled a history of the ghetto.19 In response to 
a folklore project, Yitskhok wrote: “In the ghetto dozens of sayings, ghetto curses, and 
ghetto blessings are created before our eyes…[T]he ghetto folklore…. must be collected 
and cherished as a treasure for the future.”20 He relayed a sense of responsibility for future 
generations and an understanding that resistance is located in the survival of culture. At 
ages when interest in make-believe is quickly fading, children such as Đura and Yitskhok 
transcend the restraints placed upon them through biographical pursuits. Much like 
children’s play mimics the social environment, the diaries of camp and ghetto children 
reproduce the experiences of those around them. A sense of purpose and agency is 
sustained through these endeavours, contributing to their emotional survival. Yitskhok 
writes in his diary that “…if we did not go to school, to the club, did not read books. We 
would die of dejection inside the ghetto walls.”21 The individual survival of youth in the 
ghetto relied not only on food and shelter but the creation and transmission of culture, to 
which these children were essential. The two boys are not passively experiencing history 
but creating it. In addition to their individual survival, the sources subvert attempts to 
modify and erase history.  

 

 

21 Yitskhok Rudashevskin, diary entry, October 17, 1942, in Salvaged Pages, ed. Alexandra Zapruder (Yale 
University Press, 2002), 208. 

20 Yitskhok Rudashevskin, diary entry, October 17, 1942, in Salvaged Pages, ed. Alexandra Zapruder (Yale 
University Press, 2002), 192. 

19 Herberer Rice, “In Their Own Words,” 231-232. 

18 Đura Rajs, Diary of Đura Rajs, August 11, 1941, US Holocaust Memorial Museum, last accessed April 7, 2023, 
https://perspectives.ushmm.org/item/diary-of-dura-rajs.  

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Excerpt 3: Excerpt from a diary written by Đura Rajs during his time in the 
Sajmište concentration camp (1941). Translation from Serbo-Croatian by the 
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 

 

Introduction 

I have dedicated this book to the "Lager." Readers will be surprised and will wonder what 
a "Lager" is, and what kind of word that is. It's a German word, which, translated into 
Serbo-Croatian, means camp. All Jews of Petrovgrad were resettled into that camp. 
Earlier the camp was an army barracks, which had been totally neglected and thus full of 
lice and bedbugs. Before the Jews were moved into the barracks, it was a breeding place 
for infectious diseases. The courtyard was full of various military things which the 
retreating Yugoslav army left in great disorder. In the rooms, soldiers unloaded their 
things from suitcases, trunks, etc. Bedbugs promenaded among those things just like 
people taking an evening stroll in town. In a word, there was a big mess in this building, 
and the only inhabitants were lice and bedbugs. We, the children, still lived relatively well 
because we were together, and we were able to play to our hearts' content all day long. 
But the adults could not boast anything like that. They worked and sweated very hard, 
and when they returned, the commissar would harass them. And so it went. This book 
cannot be written in the form of a novel, because it wouldn't have any content, and 
therefore I am writing in the form of short stories. The stories in this book are not 
fabrications but rather the plain truth which I lived through. Readers will see how a 
young boy of 11 feels and imagines the Lager. Because I am writing this book when I am 
only 11 years old. 

 

So, let's begin…22 

Hilda Dajč was born in 1922 in Belgrade, where she studied architecture before the 
invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941. Hilda chose to volunteer as a nurse after her studies were 
interrupted, a venture that she would continue throughout her internment in the Sajmište 
concentration camp. Hilda's father, Emil Dajč, took on the role of vice president of the 
representative body of the Jewish community in Belgrade. Emil’s position granted him and 
his family leniency under antisemitic legislation, notably during orders for deportation. 
Despite this protection and her family's misgivings, in December of 1941, Hilda volunteered 
to join a group of Jews destined for Sajmište to “put [herself] wholly at the service of 
others.”23 Her experiences in Sajmište were recorded in a series of smuggled letters written 
to her friend, Mirjana.  

The need to retain a sense of agency and control over her destiny is evident in 
Hilda’s letters. Her experience challenges the myth that young people passively absorb 

23 Hilda Dajč to Nada Novak, December 7, 1941, in “Semlin Judenlager: In Serbian Public Memory,” The Letters of 
Hilda Dajč, last accessed April 9, 2023, http://www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/semlin/en/letters.php.  

22 Đura Rajs, Diary of Đura Rajs, August 11, 1941, US Holocaust Memorial Museum, last accessed April 7, 2023, 
https://perspectives.ushmm.org/item/diary-of-dura-rajs.  

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history. Hilda’s letters were smuggled out by medical staff travelling between Sajmište and 
Belgrade. These pieces of paper stitched together the reality faced by inmates, but they 
provide something more. Throughout her four short letters, Hilda chronicles her changing 
mental and emotional state. Even in her most sombre letter, Hilda reveals that her writing 
gives her hope and strength. Her survival in the camp hinges on her connection through 
writing and her work as a nurse. Both were radical acts of agency that subverted the goals 
of the Nazi regime. She influenced her social world by creating a record of the events she 
witnessed, humanizing a tragedy despite attempts by the regime to control the dominant 
narrative. Her immediate social environment is impacted through her work; caring for her 
community in a place meant to break it apart. The date and manner of Hilda’s death are not 
recorded, but it is assumed that she perished along with 6,000 other Jewish inmates in 
mobile gas vans in March of 1942.24  

Excerpt 4: Excerpt of a letter from Hilda Dajč to Mirjana Petrović on December 9, 
1941. 

My Dear Mirjana,  

…Dear Mirjana, there are now 2,000 women and children here, including nearly a 
hundred babies for whom we can't boil any milk as there's no fuel and you can imagine 
what the temperature is towards the top of the pavilion with the Kosheva wind blowing 
as hard as it does. I'm reading Heine and that does me good, even though the latrine is 
half a kilometre away and fifteen of us go at the same time, and even though by four 
o'clock we've only been given a bit of cabbage which has obviously been boiled in water, 
and even though I have only a little straw to lie on, and there are children everywhere 
and the light is on all night, and even though they shout 'idiotische Saubande' [stupid 
bunch of pigs] and so on all the time, and even though they keep on having roll calls and 
anyone missing these is 'severely punished'. There are walls everywhere. Today I started 
to work in the surgery, which consists of a table with a few bottles and some gauze, 
behind which there is just one doctor, one pharmacist and me. There's a lot to do, believe 
me - with women fainting and goodness knows what else. But in most cases, they put up 
with it all more than heroically…25 

 

Excerpts of a letter written by Hilda Dajč to Mirjana Petrović in February 1942. 

My dear,  

I could never have imagined that our meeting, even though I was expecting it, would 
arouse in me such a flurry of emotion and create even more unrest in my already 
frenzied soul which simply won't calm down… That reality is unsurpassable, our 
immense misery; every phrase describing the strength of the soul is dispersed by tears of 
hunger and cold; all hope of leaving here soon disappears before the monotonous 

25 “The Letter of Hilda Dajč,” Semlin Judenlager: In Serbian Public Memory, accessed April 9, 2023, 
http://www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/semlin/en/letters.php. 

24 “The Letter of Hilda Dajč,” Semlin Judenlager: In Serbian Public Memory, accessed April 9, 2023, 
http://www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/semlin/en/letters.php.  

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perspective of passive existence which, whatever you compare it with, bears no 
resemblance to life… 

… we're all becoming cynical and count everyone else's mouthfuls - everyone is 
desperate - but in spite of this, no one kills anyone because we're all just a bunch of 
animals that I despise. I hate every single one of us because we've all fallen as low as we 
can go….  

…It's the people that get on my nerves. Not the hunger that makes you weep, not the 
cold that freezes the water in your glass and the blood in your veins, nor the stench of the 
latrines, nor the Kosheva wind - nothing is so repulsive as the crowd of people who 
deserve to be pitied, but who you are unable to help and can do nothing else than put 
yourself above them and despise them…. 

... Mirjana, my dear, we are imprisoned slaves, in fact even lower than that - we're not so 
much wretched as a despised and starving horde, and when from this position one sees a 
little of life - meaning you - then one senses so many of life's juices that flow through it. 
Only - yes that eternal only - to wrench oneself away from that life afterwards is so 
painful and bitter that not even the sea of tears that one sheds can express it. I cry and 
they all start laughing: How can you, who conducts yourself like a man, allow yourself to 
cry like a sentimental teenager?! 

But what can I do when in the depths of my heart everything is so horrible. That's the 
refrain I repeat to myself all night. I know there's no hope of our getting out soon, and 
outside are you and Nada, all that binds me to Belgrade which, by some 
incomprehensible contradiction, I deeply hate and deeply love at one and the same time. 
You don't know, just as I didn't know, what it's like to be here. I hope you will never find 
out. Way back when I was a child, I was afraid they would bury me alive. And now this is 
some sort of vision of death. Will there be some sort of resurrection? I've never thought 
so much about the two of you as I do now. I continually talk with you and yearn to see 
you, because to me you are that 'paradise lost'.26 

 

Through their production and transmission of culture, as well as the optimism and 
resilience they instilled in people around them, children like Đura, Yitskhok, and Hilda had 
an impact on the environment in which they lived. Through acts of nonconformity, 
“yesterday's agent becomes through her actions a part of tomorrow's structure.”27 
Children’s writings aid in a more democratic understanding of the past, building an 
imagined social world by documenting its history. Without this history, there is little 
identity from which to build a culture or community. Genocide seeks to break the ties 
between the present and the imagined social world by destroying embodiments of social 
representations, the people, the land, the art, and the texts. Yitskhok’s collection of ghetto 

27 Daniel Little, “The Social World,” Understanding Society (blog), April 26, 2014. 
https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-social-world.html.  

26 “The Letter of Hilda Dajč,” Semlin Judenlager: In Serbian Public Memory, accessed April 9, 2023, 
http://www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/semlin/en/letters.php. 

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https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-social-world.html


 
 

folklore shows that culture and language continued to evolve and sustain even in spaces 
where it was meant to wither. The tragedy of the Holocaust is brought to relief through the 
lives of children. Their experiences contrast more effectively against oppression because of 
their perceived innocence. Đura’s drawings are not viewed as simple childhood doodles but 
evoke an emotional reaction to the situations in which a young person was subjected. 
Although each of these situations has been examined separately, taken as a whole, they also 
have special significance. The variety of sources detailing the loss of Jewish life is proof of 
the extent of the genocide.  

Conclusion 
 

Children, youth, and adolescents remain on the fringes of Holocaust writing. The 
discipline has archival and internalized constraints that have downplayed children’s 
contributions to the ongoing social survival of their communities. Children turned to 
writing and archiving as a feasible alternative to imaginative play when it became 
impossible for them to cope with their devastating realities. These records, which at first 
served as a means of personal survival, affected the imagined social world, subverting the 
mechanisms that aimed to control them. In their short letter, Felicitas and Thomas Gumpel 
reflected on the conditions that they and their peers were facing. They had lost their 
parents, but so had many other children. The effects of genocide are magnified in their 
letter through their emotions. The impact of a child explaining that their family was ripped 
away from them is greater than if it were described from an outside perspective. The 
evidence of their experiences and the hope they attempted to instill in their family had an 
impact on social survival. 

Đura and Yitskhok retained a sense of agency through their biographical 
endeavours. While nonconformity is not difficult under a system that makes most aspects 
of life illegal, both boys made active and deliberate choices to record the genocide that was 
occurring. Đura described the sorrow he felt at not being able to write fiction, an effort that 
shows a loss of childhood innocence and feelings of responsibility for the survival of the 
culture. Yitskhok similarly undertook significant endeavours in recording culture as it 
existed around him. This act of individual agency contributed to his everyday, individual 
survival. Reporting and writing were important outlets that allowed him to cope with life in 
the ghetto, but it was also an act of rebellion. He strived to ensure that the lives of the 
people around him were not erased. Hilda’s experience was uncommon in that she chose to 
go to Sajmište as a nurse. In a world where people’s lives and choices were rapidly being 
stripped away, Hilda strived to make a difference in whatever way she could. This allowed 
her to retain a sense of agency and control while attempting to support her community. Her 
letters are the best description of a camp with very few survivors.  

Children, youth, and adolescents remain on the fringes of Holocaust writing, but 
when we situate them as active participants, it becomes clear that they make a significant 
impact on the world around them. The discipline has archival and internalized constraints 
that have downplayed children’s contributions to the ongoing social survival of their 
communities. Ideological perceptions of children as passive do not allow for a holistic and 
nuanced understanding of their impact. Children turned to writing and archiving as a 

76 



 
 

feasible alternative to imaginative play when it became impossible for them to cope with 
their devastating realities. They sought to record the culture and experiences of those 
around them despite their suffering, which have become invaluable sources for historians 
and scholars. These records, which at first served as a means of personal survival, affected 
the imagined social world, subverting the mechanisms that aimed to control them.  

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

77 



 
 

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