Children's Literature On The Holocaust Essay

The role of the child’s perspective gives a voice to one that is usually not heard. Most children did not survive the Holocaust. A child’s perspective facilitates the role of seeing how events affected children, how they dealt with the circumstances they found themselves in and also by giving a child’s perspective, children engage more deeply with the text and therefore educated more responsively about the Holocaust. Children can relate to another child’s thoughts and imagine themselves in that situation. This essay will deal with two books John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief and will discuss the role of the child’s perspective in the context of teaching children about the Holocaust. Both books set out to give us a child’s perspective. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas main protagonist is Bruno while The Book Thief is narrated by Death but it tells Liesel’s story as she has seen it.  
In taking a child’s perspective the reader learns how much of the child’s perspective is overshadowed by adult intervention. In these two texts much of the children’s access to knowledge was limited by adults in their life reflective of the treatment of children at that time. In the books facts are presented in such a way as to minimize upset caused to children yet they still tell the story but in a less graphic way. (Jordan, 2004, 200) In The Book Thief Liesel is protected from the full truth. She does not know where her mother has gone or that the Nazi regime also condemned Communists, which her parents were. This fact, she comes to realize herself when confronted while at a Nazi demonstration   ‘As the word ‘communist’ seized her, the remainder of the Nazi recital swept by, either side, lost somewhere in the German feet around her. Waterfall of words. A girl treading water. She thought it again. Kommunisten.’ (Zusak, 2007, 116). However this text also illustrates through the role of the child’s perspective how children lost the right to be...