Stolen childhood. War memories of children and young people from 1945-1946

Abstract

The article analyses a collection of school essays of world-wide uniqueness, written by Polish children and young people in the years 1945–1946. This collection consists of two independent collections. The first is the 99 wartime memories of pupils from Greater Poland schools, created between May and September 1945. The second contains over 1,200 war memories written by pupils from schools in the Kielce region (south-eastern part of Poland) in the second half of 1946. A common feature of wartime memories is that the young authors combine elements of private written forms with elements of text intended to function in the public space (public literary forms). They smoothly switch between confessional style, full of dramatic details related to the war, and the style typical of a school essay, the aim of which was to test language skills and proficiency in creating a story based on real events. The themes in both collections were imposed on pupils by a programme of writing campaign for writing war memories. Thanks to the conditions provided by the educational system of the time, pupils usually honestly and directly described the traumatic war experiences which they had participated in. In the article, wartime memories in the form of a school essay are treated as a record of a microhistory, containing many details related to local wartime events, such as round-ups, public executions, secret education, and Nazi violence against adults and children.