The Lost Childhood (Yehuda Nir)

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The Lost Childhood is a memoir written by Holocaust survivor Yehuda Nir. [1] Born in 1930, Nir was only nine years old when his father was killed by German soldiers in a mass execution of Jewish men from his hometown, Lwow, in 1941. The story is based on the cunning survival of Nir, his mother and his older sister Lala during six years of his life throughout World War II. With the aid of false documents, a family's will to survive, and despite his loss of innocence, his family managed to escape the cruelty of Nazi concentration camps and potential execution. He and his family "hid" in the open, pretending to be people they were not (Poles), practicing a faith that they did not believe in (Catholicism), and working tireless jobs (for German employers in occupied Warsaw), struggling to conceal the pain they felt when their people were murdered before their eyes; and fearful of being identified. Amidst all the turmoil was a boy trying to make sense of his world, his body, and his place as a human being on Earth.

Yehuda Nir was a Polish-born American Holocaust survivor, psychiatrist and author of The Lost Childhood. Nir posed as a Roman Catholic and learned Latin to escape Nazi persecution in Poland during World War II. Nir's ordeal led him to a career as a psychiatrist, specializing in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder and severely ill children. He immigrated to the United States in 1959 to complete medical residencies in New York City and Philadelphia. He served as the chief of child psychiatry of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center from 1979 until 1986.

World War II 1939–1945 global war

World War II, also known as the Second World War, was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. The vast majority of the world's countries—including all the great powers—eventually formed two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. A state of total war emerged, directly involving more than 100 million people from over 30 countries. The major participants threw their entire economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, blurring the distinction between civilian and military resources. World War II was the deadliest conflict in human history, marked by 50 to 85 million fatalities, most of whom were civilians in the Soviet Union and China. It included massacres, the genocide of the Holocaust, strategic bombing, premeditated death from starvation and disease, and the only use of nuclear weapons in war.

Nazi concentration camps concentration camp operated by Nazi Germany

Nazi Germany maintained concentration camps throughout the territories it controlled before and during the Second World War. The first Nazi camps were erected in Germany in March 1933 immediately after Hitler became Chancellor and his Nazi Party was given control of the police by Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick and Prussian Acting Interior Minister Hermann Göring. Used to hold and torture political opponents and union organizers, the camps initially held around 45,000 prisoners. In 1933–1939, before the onset of war, most prisoners consisted of German Communists, Socialists, Social Democrats, Roma, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, and persons accused of 'asocial' or socially 'deviant' behavior by the Germans.

Contents

First published in 1989, the book was republished by Scholastic Press in 2002. [2] The Lost Childhood is now utilized as part of the high school curriculum at schools throughout the United States. [2] [3]

Curriculum educational plan

In education, a curriculum is broadly defined as the totality of student experiences that occur in the educational process. The term often refers specifically to a planned sequence of instruction, or to a view of the student's experiences in terms of the educator's or school's instructional goals. In a 2003 study, Reys, Reys, Lapan, Holliday, and Wasman refer to curriculum as a set of learning goals articulated across grades that outline the intended mathematics content and process goals at particular points in time throughout the K–12 school program. Curriculum may incorporate the planned interaction of pupils with instructional content, materials, resources, and processes for evaluating the attainment of educational objectives. Curriculum is split into several categories: the explicit, the implicit, the excluded, and the extracurricular.

About the author

Yehuda Nir was born in 1930 into a well-off Polish Jewish family and died July 19, 2014. In June 1945, he and his family returned to Poland and he went back to school at the age of fifteen, earning his high school diploma at age twenty-one. He went to Vienna, Austria, to study medicine for four years. He graduated from Jerusalem Medical School in 1957. As of 2001, he was an associate professor of psychiatry at Cornell University Medical College. He was married twice, first to Eva (date unknown), and then to Bonnie in 1973. Nir had two sons from his first marriage and a son and one daughter from his second marriage. His children are Daniel Ludwig, born in 1961, and Aaron, born in 1965. Nir was divorced in 1969 and remarried in 1973; his son David was born in 1977 and daughter Sarah in 1983. He also had a private practice in New York City with his second wife, Dr. Bonnie Maslin. Nir worked at a New York college, and was a frequent speaker on his experiences as a Holocaust survivor.

Vienna Capital city and state in Austria

Vienna is the federal capital and largest city of Austria, and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primate city, with a population of about 1.9 million, and its cultural, economic, and political centre. It is the 7th-largest city by population within city limits in the European Union. Until the beginning of the 20th century, it was the largest German-speaking city in the world, and before the splitting of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in World War I, the city had 2 million inhabitants. Today, it has the second largest number of German speakers after Berlin. Vienna is host to many major international organizations, including the United Nations and OPEC. The city is located in the eastern part of Austria and is close to the borders of the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. These regions work together in a European Centrope border region. Along with nearby Bratislava, Vienna forms a metropolitan region with 3 million inhabitants. In 2001, the city centre was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In July 2017 it was moved to the list of World Heritage in Danger.

Austria Federal republic in Central Europe

Austria, officially the Republic of Austria, is a country of nearly 9 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Hungary and Slovakia to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the west. The territory of Austria covers 83,879 km2 (32,386 sq mi). The terrain is highly mountainous, lying within the Alps; only 32% of the country is below 500 m (1,640 ft), and its highest point is 3,798 m (12,461 ft). The majority of the population speaks local Bavarian dialects as their native language, and German in its standard form is the country's official language. Other local official languages are Hungarian, Burgenland Croatian, and Slovene.

New York City Largest city in the United States

The City of New York, usually called either New York City (NYC) or simply New York (NY), is the most populous city in the United States and thus also in the state of New York. With an estimated 2017 population of 8,622,698 distributed over a land area of about 302.6 square miles (784 km2), New York is also the most densely populated major city in the United States. Located at the southern tip of the state of New York, the city is the center of the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the world by urban landmass and one of the world's most populous megacities, with an estimated 20,320,876 people in its 2017 Metropolitan Statistical Area and 23,876,155 residents in its Combined Statistical Area. A global power city, New York City has been described as the cultural, financial, and media capital of the world, and exerts a significant impact upon commerce, entertainment, research, technology, education, politics, tourism, art, fashion, and sports. The city's fast pace has inspired the term New York minute. Home to the headquarters of the United Nations, New York is an important center for international diplomacy.

"The intention of this book is to convey to young people that if you take charge of your life rather than passively observe it like a couch potato, you might help to create a world where forgiveness is possible.” (Page 282, Epilogue)

Notes

  1. ↑ Yehuda Nir, The Lost Childhood (New York: Scholastic, 2002).
  2. 1 2 Berger, Joseph (2014-07-23). "Yehuda Nir, 84, March 31, 1930 - July 19, 2014". The East Hampton Star . Retrieved 2014-08-13.
  3. ↑ Berger, Joseph (2014-07-19). "Yehuda Nir, a Psychiatrist and Holocaust Survivor, Dies at 84". New York Times . Retrieved 2014-08-13.

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References

Nir, Yehuda. The Lost Childhood. New York, NY: Scholastic Press, 2002.


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