This is the story of two children caught in the midst of war.It is 1939 and thirteen-year-old Ilse, half-Jewish, has been sent out of Germany by her Aryan mother to a place of supposed safety. Her journey takes her from the labyrinthine bazaars of Morocco to Paris, a city made hectic at the threat of Nazi invasion. At the same time in Germany, Nicolai, a boy miserably destined for the Nazi Youth movement, finds comfort in the friendship of Ilse’s mother, the nursemaid hired to take care of his young sister. Gripping and poignant, The Children’s War is a stunning novel of wartime lives, of parents and children, of adventure and self-discovery.
Fifteen generations of Hassanakis's family have been Cretan. After WW1, amidst rumours that Cretan Muslims will be sent to Turkey, Hassanakis worries he will have to leave behind his great love, the Greek widow Marigo, and his beloved homeland. He can't believe he will be sent to a country whose language he barely knows and where he knows no-one.
When the Second World War broke out in September 1939, it came as no surprise to the children of Germany: the Nazis had been preparing them for a war ever since they had come to power in 1933. To British children it was an altogether different matter. Children all over Britain were deeply affected by the war: many were separated from their parents by evacuation or bereavement; all had to 'make do and mend' with clothes and toys; and some even died while contributing to the war effort at home. In this moving and often amusing account, Mike Brown describes what life was like on the Home Front during the war from a child's point of view. His fully illustrated narrative includes details of evacuation, rationing, coping with gas masks and air raids, entertainment and the important - and often dangerous - roles of the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides. This photographic history pays tribute to the generation of girls and boys who grew up under the shadow of the Second World War.
Like thousands of other children in London this eight year old boy with his younger brother, were evacuated to the country on the orders of the British Government. Two days before the outbreak of World War II, on September 1st, 1939, they left for the duration of the war, separated from their parents and families until the war ended in 1945, apart from rare visits for a few days during this period. The author recalls many of his memories and boyhood experiences – some horrifying, some sad, all indelible. Memories to remain with him like tens of thousands of other youngsters who went through this traumatic time in World War II.
Children at War is the first comprehensive book to examine the growing and global use of children as soldiers. P.W. Singer, an internationally recognized expert in twenty-first-century warfare, explores how a new strategy of war, utilized by armies and warlords alike, has targeted children, seeking to turn them into soldiers and terrorists. Singer writes about how the first American serviceman killed by hostile fire in Afghanistan—a Green Beret—was shot by a fourteen-year-old Afghan boy; how suspected militants detained by U.S. forces in Iraq included more than one hundred children under the age of seventeen; and how hundreds who were taken hostage in Thailand were held captive by the rebel "God's Army," led by twelve-year-old twins. Interweaving the voices of child soldiers throughout the book, Singer looks at the ways these children are recruited, abducted, trained, and finally sent off to fight in war-torn hot spots, from Colombia and the Sudan to Kashmir and Sierra Leone. He writes about children who have been indoctrinated to fight U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan; of Iraqui boys between the ages of ten and fifteen who had been trained in military arms and tactics to become Saddam Hussein's Ashbal Saddam (Lion Cubs); of young refugees from Pakistani madrassahs who were recruited to help bring the Taliban to power in the Afghan civil war. The author, National Security Fellow at the Brookings Institution and director of the Brookings Project on U.S. Policy Towards the Islamic World, explores how this phenomenon has come about, and how social disruptions and failures of development in modern Third World nations have led to greater global conflict and an instability that has spawned a new pool of recruits. He writes about how technology has made today's weapons smaller and lighter and therefore easier for children to carry and handle; how one billion people in the world live in developing countries where civil war is part of everyday life; and how some children—without food, clothing, or family—have volunteered as soldiers as their only way to survive. Finally, Singer makes clear how the U.S. government and the international community must face this new reality of modern warfare, how those who benefit from the recruitment of children as soldiers must be held accountable, how Western militaries must be prepared to face children in battle, and how rehabilitation programs can undo this horrific phenomenon and turn child soldiers back into children.
The amount of international research on 'Children and War' carried out by academics, governments and non-governmental organizations has continually increased in recent years. At the same time there has been growing public interest in how children experience military conflicts and how their lives have been affected by war and its aftermath. In light of the many brutal post-colonialist civil wars or 'new wars', especially in Africa and Asia, child soldiers have in particular gained increased attention. Simultaneously, since the 1990s, the history of the Holocaust and World War II has also increasingly been written from the perspective of children; those who speak out now and publish their memoirs experienced the Holocaust as children. A similar generational change has also taken place in the societies of the perpetrators: Germans and Austrians who experienced the war as children took over the role of war witnesses from the soldiers of the German Wehrmacht. Moreover, intensified focus on children's experiences and their strategies for dealing with what they went through is evident in Eastern Europe as well. In Children and War: Past and Present Volume II scholars from different academic disciplines, practitioners in the field, and representatives of government and non-governmental institutions present a further selection of studies in this sensitive subject from different angles and in various methodological ways. A number of studies investigate the difficult areas of recovery and reintegration both of child soldiers specifically, and children affected by armed conflict. Further sections examine Victims and Witnesses, Public Discourse and Education and World War II and the Second Generation.
"Excellent, well-documented, thoughtful, and comprehensive, Forgetting Children Born of War challenges the prevailing discourse on human rights and humanitarian intervention."-ALISON BRYSK, University of California, Irvine.
When the Second World War broke out in September 1939, it came as no surprise to the children of Germany: the Nazis had been preparing them for a war ever since they had come to power in 1933. To British children it was an altogether different matter. Children all over Britain were deeply affected by the war: many were separated from their parents by evacuation or bereavement; all had to 'make do and mend' with clothes and toys; and some even died while contributing to the war effort at home. In this moving and often amusing account, Mike Brown describes what life was like on the Home Front during the war from a child's point of view. His fully illustrated narrative includes details of evacuation, rationing, coping with gas masks and air raids, entertainment and the important - and often dangerous - roles of the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides. This photographic history pays tribute to the generation of girls and boys who grew up under the shadow of the Second World War.
