Book Talk – Through the Eyes of Jewish Child Survivors from Poland

Through the Eyes of Jewish Child Survivors from Poland offers an intimate social history of Jewish childhood during and after the Holocaust. Centered on children from German-occupied Poland but informed by experiences across Nazi-occupied Europe, the book highlights the child’s own perspective to illuminate rescue, survival, and relationships with adults under the Nazi occupation.

In the first part of the book, Joanna Beata Michlic examines children’s wartime experiences, showing how agency, gender, class, and religious or social background shaped their chances of survival. The second part traces the complex efforts of these young survivors to reclaim both childhood and Jewish identity, revealing the gap between their hopes and the actual opportunities of the immediate postwar period.

Drawing on children’s diaries, letters, testimonies, and memoirs, Michlic illuminates how children experienced and remembered trauma: the destruction of their families, the loss of their prewar worlds, and the struggle to adapt to a new reality, challenging myths that sentimentalize the children’s endurance and portray the Holocaust as neatly concluded. This powerful study shows why the history of Holocaust child survivors remains a vital resource for understanding vulnerability, agency, and the enduring impact of war and genocide.

Professor Zoë Waxman will join Michlic in conversation on her new book.

Joanna Beata Michlic is an internationally recognized social and cultural historian of the Holocaust and its aftermath whose work focuses on Jewish children and families, memory, antisemitism, and nationalism in East Central Europe, particularly Poland. She is the founder and first director of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute Project on Families, Children, and the Holocaust at Brandeis University.

She is the author of the award-winning Poland’s Threatening Other and co-editor of several influential volumes. A recipient of major international fellowships, including the Gerda Henkel Foundation Fellowship, she serves as one of the Editors-in-Chief of Genealogy and on the editorial team of the Journal of Holocaust Research. Her work bridges scholarship, teaching, and public engagement on Holocaust memory and contemporary antisemitism.

Zoë Waxman is Professor of Holocaust History at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Writing the Holocaust: memory, testimony, representation (2006), Anne Frank (2015), and Women in the Holocaust: A Feminist History (2017), as well as numerous articles relating to the Holocaust and genocide.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

The Wiener Holocaust Library, 29 Russell Square, London, United Kingdom

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