Winner of the 2020 Ernst Fraenkel Prize from the Wiener Holocaust Library​

Jewish Childhood in Kraków is the first book to tell the history of Kraków in the second World War through the lens of Jewish children’s experiences. Here, children assume center stage as historical actors whose recollections and experiences deserve to be told, analyzed, and treated seriously.

Sliwa scours archives to tell their story, gleaning evidence from the records of the German authorities, Polish neighbors, Jewish community and family, and the children themselves to explore the Holocaust in German-occupied Poland and in Kraków in particular. A microhistory of a place, a people, and daily life, this book plumbs the decisions and behaviors of ordinary people in extraordinary times.

Offering a window onto human relations and ethnic tensions in times of rampant violence, Jewish Childhood in Kraków is an effort both to understand the past and to reflect on the position of young people during humanitarian crises.

"A well-researched book. An important addition to Holocaust literature." - author of Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland

":This well researched book on the history of Jewish Childhood in Kraków will become a standard work on the subject, inviting other scholars to investigate Jewish childhood in other ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe.:" - author of Poland's Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present

"Joanna Sliwa offers a nuanced and compelling picture of what it meant to grow up Jewish under the German occupation of Kraków, one of the oldest Jewish communities in Poland. By giving voice to Jewish children and their fears, heartbreaks, loss, and survival, she allows readers to learn of children’s vulnerability and resilience, agency and helplessness firsthand. These voices will become central to the ways we think about Jewish children’s experiences during the Holocaust." - author of Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust

"A well-researched book. An important addition to Holocaust literature." - author of Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland

":This well researched book on the history of Jewish Childhood in Kraków will become a standard work on the subject, inviting other scholars to investigate Jewish childhood in other ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe.:" - author of Poland's Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present

"Joanna Sliwa offers a nuanced and compelling picture of what it meant to grow up Jewish under the German occupation of Kraków, one of the oldest Jewish communities in Poland. By giving voice to Jewish children and their fears, heartbreaks, loss, and survival, she allows readers to learn of children’s vulnerability and resilience, agency and helplessness firsthand. These voices will become central to the ways we think about Jewish children’s experiences during the Holocaust." - author of Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust

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"Sliwa’s book is an essential contribution to Holocaust scholarship, but even more significantly, she offers us the opportunity to learn about children’s experiences, which often are absent from Holocaust literature. Their concealed presence, which Sliwa spends so much time discussing, is precisely what makes it difficult to tell their stories. But Sliwa’s persistence and ability to dig through a multitude of sources to find even the smallest pieces of information resulted in this remarkable account that will hopefully encourage future scholars to explore the experiences of children in other parts of Poland and Europe."