Jewish Children’s Emotional Communities amid a Genocide

• In Event: Between Experience and Memory: East European Jewish Childhood in Ego-Documents

Abstract

This paper will explore the daily lives of Jewish children in Nazi-occupied Poland by focusing on their emotional bonds as they found expression in their own writing. Examining children’s expressions of affect with family members, and friends, as well as non-Jewish caretakers, it will analyze continuities and ruptures in the way they were expressed. By reading a variety of ego documents: diaries, letters and testimonies, it seeks to examine the ways children wrote about and performed their relationships. It brings together a growing number of studies on the history of emotions and the daily life amid occupation, persecution and mass murder.

Author

• Natalia Aleksiun, U of Florida