Jewish Child Soldiers in the Bloodlands of Europe by David M. Rosen
at first glance, David M. Rosen's book moves in a very narrow thematic area and pursues a thesis that is only conditionally connectable, even irritating, for childhood historians, "that being a child soldier should not necessarily be equated with being abused" (111). On second glance, his dense study, based on dozens of interviews and an impressive corpus of literature, though having an anthropological orientation, provides numerous nuanced insights into the life and survival of children in situations of constant threat, unleashed violence, and unbounded war. In doing so, Rosen deepens the thesis initiated by Tara Zahra in her groundbreaking book The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe's Families after World War II (2011) that World War II and the uprooting and social reconfigurations it caused led to a profound transformation of discourses about childhood. Accordingly, Rosen does not simply enumerate the horrors of violence and the pervasive dangers to defenseless Jewish children but, on the contrary, explores the manifestations of "the human capacity for resilience and adaptation" (108). His children are not surrendered victims, but subjects and actors whose fate can only be explained and appreciated by abandoning normative, moralizing notions of an "ideal" childhood that stands in the greatest possible contrast to the experience of child soldiers in World War II.
Rosen has divided the book into seven chapters, corresponding to seven different stages in the biographies of his exemplary Jewish child soldiers. The first and last chapters also serve to briefly situate the book in the research context, to explain the sources, and to provide a summarizing conclusion. In between, he allows the children themselves to speak for the most part and uses the method of "thick description" that has proven itself in anthropological research. Rosen found his sources in over one hundred interviews from the Yad Vashem archive and the Voices of the Holocaust project, in which adults spoke about their childhood. The author is aware of the problematic nature of these sources, but he deals with the material in a very comprehensible way, holds back with his [End Page 155] own interpretations and attributions, and always draws on several statements to overview the specific topical fields.
As mentioned, these fields are organized in the form of a temporal thread along the prototypical stages in the biography of the Jewish child soldiers. At the beginning, there is almost always an escape event, be it in the face of the German Wehrmacht advancing in Eastern Europe or the threat of deportation and murder in a concentration camp. At no point, however, does Rosen create the illusion that the experiences he describes can be applied to a larger number of children. For every child whose survival under the most adverse conditions he recounts, there are hundreds and thousands of murdered children. Patterns can be discerned, but at every point it is clear what an incredibly large role luck, providence, and chance played in enabling the adults to bear witness to their experience at all. Rosen focuses entirely on the regions of Eastern Europe that were invaded by Germany beginning in 1939—that is, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, the Baltic States, and western Russia. For this purpose, he loosely adopts the term "bloodlands," which is quite controversial in historical circles and was coined by US historian Timothy Snyder (Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, 2012). However, Rosen does not attempt to contribute to this debate but uses the term to refer to an area marked by massive violence against the civilian population, the brutal and systematic destruction of villages and towns, and especially the deportation and murder of the Jewish population by the Wehrmacht, the Ordnungspolizei, and the SS.
After the children's escape, they survived in the wilderness, in forests and swamps, where they then met formations of armies or partisans and fought against the invaders apart from the regular national Polish and Soviet armies, but often in cooperation with them. Here, too, chance often played a decisive role: Were the children taken in or turned away? Were they trained and deployed or left behind? Rosen uses dozens of examples to describe the various constellations, the options and strategies. He underlines the double dangers for the Jewish children, since there were enough volunteer associations that were hardly less anti-Semitic than the Germans. He depicts girls' and young women's fear of sexual violence but also their readiness for action, for armed struggle. Without a transfiguring perspective, Rosen shows adolescents who seek their place in an incredibly brutal, dystopian world, who assert themselves, who fight, who are hurt, who are always close to death.
No illusions should be made about the further life of the child soldiers after the Wehrmacht was pushed back bit by bit and Germany was finally defeated. The years of trauma remained—most of their families had been murdered or [End Page 156] had fled, and often there were further relocations and renewed uprooting. The child soldiers were supposed to become "normal children" again or functioning young adults. Rosen follows up some biographies by way of example, without claiming to tell universally valid stories. However, despite being condensed into some 120 pages, the organized and interrelated narratives he assembles offer childhood historians many important suggestions for investigations of childhood in what Eric Hobsbawm termed the "Age of Extremes," beyond normative or moralizing measurement. The reading is not always easy, often disturbing, but very worthwhile, especially because of the impressive body of sources, their careful analysis, and the rich indexes of research literature.
