Working class children’s toys in times of war and famine. Play, work and the agency of children in Piraeus neighborhoods during the German occupation of Greece

Abstract

In recent decades, within the context of a growing literature on the effects and experience of trauma and conflict on the one hand, and the boom in childhood studies on the other, a number of scholarly works has focused on children’s experience of war in Western and non-Western societies, in an attempt to understand how children shape their daily worlds and are shaped by them in conditions of extreme rupture and violence. This article explores working-class children’s toy and play culture during the period of 1940-1944 in a Greek urban milieu as part of a survival strategy in the face of the experienced destruction. During the German Occupation of Greece and the ensuing famine that plagued the major Greek urban centers, children of the poor not only had to join their family’s efforts to survive by searching for food, working in formal jobs, or simply performing chores, but also struggled to find the materials for constructing their toys in times when materials for toy making were as scarce as food. Based on interviews and toy-making sessions with the elderly in two Day Care Centers (KAPH) of a working-class neighbourhood in Piraeus, Greece, the study focuses on the ingenuity and inventiveness of working-class children in Piraeus neighbourhoods during World War II. Children’s toy play and toy making are examined as a dynamic and complex process uniting work and play, leisure and labor, promoting children’s active participation in the adult world, and constituting part of the strategies for claiming life in times of war and distress.