Reviews

Witnesses of War: Children's Lives under the Nazis

Nicholas Stargardt

London: Jonathan Cape, 2005

336 pp., £20 (hardback)

Preamble

In January this year, snow was falling on a parade of soldiers and civilians carrying wreathes in the St Petersburg cemetery. The cemetery is not like others, full of individual graves, but consists mainly of massively long, unmarked, communal mounds, the graves of the millions who died of hunger in the siege of Leningrad (as St Petersburg was then called) successfully protecting the city from the onslaught of the Nazis. This was the first time the memorial day had been observed in St Petersburg rather than nationally in Moscow.

Our ‘taxi driver’ seemed an ordinary old man, one of the many who stop their private cars when they see people hailing taxis, in order to make some extra roubles. To our horror, no sooner had we got into his car than we were stopped by the police – we were travelling the wrong way up a one way street! However, the old man returned from the police car wreathed in smiles – he had been exempt from losing his driving licence, just given a small fine, because he was one of the miraculous survivors of the siege and this was his special day.

Introduction

This book is about the siege period – the Second World War – still in so many ways, as at the cemetery, influencing people's lives. It is one of most searing accounts I have had to read. However, it is one from which I have learned an enormous amount, convincing me that everyone, particularly those in our profession, needs to read it. It is history during the Nazi regime from a very unusual angle – the experiences of children and young people. It details how once the forces of the irrational, fired by untruthful and vicious propaganda, dominate truth and rationality, no-one is safe, not even babies and young children, supposedly the precious seeds of the hoped for future new Nazi race.

Nicholas Stargardt's book is impressively documented from new sources in several languages: m