ABSTRACT
During the years of persecution and war the children’s life conditions dramatically changed. Abruptly excluded from their familiar environment, their schools and playgrounds, transformed into “strangers,” scapegoats, and enemies, persecuted and condemned to death, they needed to understand and reinterpret their realities and discover ways out. As they strove to comprehend what was happening to them and why, they identified deep-rooted racism, prejudice, the lack of critical thinking, the power of manipulation, and the perverting impact of social inequality and injustice. They rarely use abstract notions to describe these factors, but when they relate their exclusion from their schools and playgrounds, the ways racism and prejudices impregnate their environment, they depict the mechanisms of indoctrination and brainwashing. When they show how toxic ideologies find fertile ground in both the privileged and the marginalized classes, they highlight the role of social inequalities and injustice in the erosion of moral values and social cohesion. Trying to understand what made them a target to be annihilated, they are confronted with key existential questions about identity, faith, belonging to a community, and the meaning of life and death.
