CHILDREN

1 Anneliese Krause (born in January 1938) not only lost her father (beheaded in Berlin-Plötzensee on December 22, 1939) but she was also torn away from her mother. In January 1940, without prior notice, she was picked up from home and taken to a Nazi education school.

2 Berthold Mewes’ (born in 1930) mother was taken to Ravensbrück camp. His father was forced to hand his son over to the officials. Berthold, who met his parents again in 1945 when he was 15 years old, remembers: “The Nazis entrusted me to the care of a childless couple who lived on a small farm. In the morning, I went to school, and in the afternoon, I worked on the farm. Until 1943, I was allowed to write to my parents only once every six months. Then, all correspondence was forbidden.”

3 In 1939, Elisabeth, Paul-Gerhard, and Hans-Werner, the Kusserow family’s three youngest children, were picked up from school and from their home by officials who placed them in reform schools. The school report states: “Conduct: Very good. . . . To this day Paul-Gerhard refuses to give the German salute, and he has not participated in the hoisting of the flag.”

Elisabeth, Paul-Gerhard, and Hans-Werner Kusserow as children, playing harmonicas.

4 After Germany annexed Alsace-Lorraine, Louis Arzt (born in 1930), from Mülhausen, refused to give the Hitler salute. On July 7, 1943, he was taken away from his parents and confined in a Nazi reform school in Weingarten.—(In the group photograph, Louis Arzt is on the bottom right.)

Collage: 1. A young Louis Arzt. 2. Louis with a group of boys at the reform school in Weingarten, Germany.

5 The National Socialists took Eugène Jung (born in 1933 in Gomelange, France), his parents, and his five siblings to Upper Silesia. They had refused to give the Hitler salute and to hang swastika flags in the windows of their home.

6 This picture of Simone Arnold was taken shortly before her mother had to take the 11-year-old girl to a reform school near Constance. (The father had already been sent to a concentration camp.) The girl’s shoes were taken away immediately—the children walked barefoot from Easter until fall. The older children had to do hard work in the house and in the garden. Simone recalls: “We never played. We had no personal belongings, and speaking was forbidden. If a pupil was caught, he was severely beaten on his fingers with a stick.”