In the context of the murder of about six million European Jews, the lives of Jewish children in concentration camps were essentially reduced to their survival, unintended by the regime and under inhumane conditions, for a certain period of time. This article summarizes the reasons for the increasing attention which has been paid to the memories of Jewish child survivors over the past decade. We will investigate, among other things, the reasons for the registration of Jewish children in the concentration camps in the context of the genocide perpetrated against the Jews, which camps contained groups of Jewish children, and the nature of their lives and living conditions in the camps.

Since 2011, every year in October, hundreds of Berlin citizens have gathered at Grunewald rail station in Berlin to remember the deportation of Berlin’s Jews to concentration camps, which commenced at the station in October 1941. This essay examines the history of Holocaust commemoration at this location from the 1950s onward and the impact on these activities of the effects of the Cold War in Berlin. The article focuses particularly on the Holocaust survivor Adolf Burg and on a small group of people formerly persecuted by the Nazi regime and the associations they formed. During the first four decades after the war, these people and associations upheld the memory of those deported via Grunewald and subsequently murdered, until in the 1980s new figures and groups began to take an interest in this historical site.

The article will regard and discuss the individual Case Files of the Allied Child Search Branch (CSB) kept in the archives of the International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen as early testimonies of child survivors of the Holocaust. After describing the origins and functions of the CSB, we will explain the form and structure of the case files and the interviews conducted with children and young people. Further, the article will investigate the identity of the interviewers, the time at which and the purposes for which the interviews were conducted, and their design. Excerpts from testimonies will illustrate the fact that the interviews provided space for individual children’s voices to be heard in spite of their standardized format. The article is based on files on surviving Jewish children and the interviews they contain.