Children and war

de Helga Embacher

The amount of international research on 'Children and War' carried out by academics, governments and non-governmental organizations have 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.