Children of The Holocaust

It is a derelict landscape when you combine the 2 most incompatible elements of life - children and war. Yet, children are the first to suffer incalculably when war erupted anywhere in the world: from Afghanistan to Iraq in recent times to Germany and Cambodia in not so recent times. 

I had always been morbidly fascinated by the holocaust and its calamitous effects on children, the embodiment of life and idealism. In September 1939, when World War 2 began, there were more than one and a half million Jewish children living in countries soon to be occupied by Hitler's Nazi armies. By 1945, when the war ended, over a million of these children were simply - and quietly - wiped out from existence. 

I had read Anne Frank - The Diary of a Young Girl at least 3 times since I first laid my eyes on it when I was 12. Early this year, I read more 3rd person narratives of Anne Frank from Carol Ann Lee and Jacqueline van Maarsen, her best friend, to understand how her young life was tragically trampled on and ended - just because she happened to be born in an era when her religion and people was not tolerated. 

It is appalling to read entries from her diary that were so vibrant with energy, hope and life, even at the peak of war...and then to be greeted with an abrupt epilogue that she had been captured 3 days after her very last entry. 

It is even more crushing to read from a 3rd person's account of how her sister and her had endured through the Germans' famous concentration camps, only to die within short spans of one another.

Have a read through these books and then take a close look at our children. Feel thankful for their carefree liberty now and pray that no such calamity would befall them ever.