Such good children: child agency during the holocaust

Oppressive environments during the holocaust influenced the ways children created identities and communal behaviors in ghettoes and concentration camps. The identities children formed in these environments represent a mixture of rebellion against and adherence to Nazi social practices. Art, diaries, and poems reveal children adopting and appropriating religious philosophies and death and life imagery as a means of rejecting the identities imposed upon them by the Nazi regime and by their own communities. Children's play behaviors came to be amalgamations of Nazi and communal power hierarchies. Games and fantasies often replicated real-life Nazi brutality and every day suffering in camps and ghettoes, with children in the roles of aggressors or socially powerful adults. Such behavior represents children's interests in attaining control in places where they felt they had none. Children also sought to recreate familiar structures in their environments to help them meet certain biological and constructed needs. They formed surrogate families among themselves and their supervisors within welfare institutions and barracks in order to attain physical and emotional support.