...and Yet They Learned

This book details clandestine efforts to provide education to beleaguered Jewish children under Nazi occupied areas of Europe and North Africa between 1933-1945. Included are efforts made in Germany during the rise of Nazism, in ghettos, concentration camps, orphanages, convents and monasteries, and even in forests. This book answers questions about the important factors that relate to understanding the improvised, and generally clandestine, education of Jewish children during the Shoah in German-occupied areas. It deals with who, what, where, how, and why Jewish children received education and how the answers might be applied to contemporary educational settings. This study shows that despite severe restrictions and enormous hardship there were adults who took responsibility for providing children with "schooling" that gave them a sense of normality and contributed to their lives in other ways as well. The conditions under which Jewish children lived during that period, the treatment they received from the adults with them, and their activities often determined, to a great extent, their survival and even conditions later in life. This important study should be of interest to scholars and others interested in understanding social conditions in time of war, educators wanting to read the philosophies, priorities and teaching methods of professional, progressive teachers as well as non-professional teachers during the Shoah and learn how children were taught academics, survival skills, and civility even under unstable, frightening, and dangerous conditions. It should also be of interested to a general readership still trying to know about and understand what happened during that tragic period of history.