Reviews for Did the Children Cry?: Hitler's War Against Jewish and Polish Children, 1939-1945

The average rating for Did the Children Cry?: Hitler's War Against Jewish and Polish Children, 1939-1945 based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-03-06 00:00:00 Fred Herrman Disturbing How anyone could kill children is beyond me. The horror depicted in this book is truly epic in scope. Can’t sleep well after reading this book.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-07-29 00:00:00 Susan Smith This is a short and fast read, albeit one that is not for the fainthearted. It is the story of the systematic destruction of the bulk of a generation of Polish Gentile and Polish Jewish children by the Nazis. It is difficult reading insofar as the descriptions of the creative ways that the Nazis discovered to torment and murder innocent children defies comprehension. Ideology or not, it remains difficult for me to understand how one can kill an innocent child. Killing them in such numbers is truly unfathomable: 1,800,00 children (1.2 million Gentile and 600,000 Jewish). I really did not learn much except the scope of the slaughter of children from this book. Lukas repeats some of the narrative that he wrote in The Forgotten Holocaust, almost word for word. So that was a bit disappointing. What was quite surprising to me was that I found mention of my mother, her fiance, and the youngster who made up their little trio of saboteurs/couriers in the Sokol battalion during the Warsaw Uprising. The reference was unmistakeable, as he referred to them by name, but the translation from the original Polish reference was not well articulated. I don't know if he used Google translator or just a bad human translator, because the translation was pretty concrete and with better interpretation could have been a bit more comprehensible. All in all, this is a book that really does not add that much to the repertoire of WW II literature or to the Holocaust literature. Lifton and other Holocaust writers have dealt with this subject already, although admittedly they did conflate the Gentile and Jewish numbers. The fact that Lukas broke them out and discussed the context for the deaths of each set of children is the value of this small book.