Analysis Of The Holocaust In Children’s Literature

Holocaust is more than a tragedy for the Jewish people during the Second World War, it is a non-healing scar that always exists in the soul of modern people. Under the background of the "unspeakable", children’s literature writers created many excellent children’s literary works on the theme of the Holocaust. These works allows children to be able to think about issues such as race, morality and so on in the context of the Holocaust, and to examine the nature of the Holocaust in the field of children’s literature. Israeli writer Uri Orlev is one of outstanding writer. Orlev’s works show the whole face of Holocaust writing in the context of children’s literature in a more comprehensive way. He provides a very good example for children’s literature and the Holocaust Literature.Orlev represents the Holocaust by paratexts, children’s perspective and framed slicence, and constructs a literary space that will not produce ambiguity and distortion for the Holocaust. He emphasizes the primacy of historical authenticity in such works through the paratexts. From the perspective of children, the moralization and adult experiences of the world are suspended. Framed slicences ensure that the children readers understand and reflect the Holocaust in a safe position.As a survivor, Orlev try to restore the grand history of the Holocaust to the children’s daily life based on real events. He shows the life of Jewish children during the Holocaust and the desire of the children during the Holocaust to return to daily life through plenty of details of lives, culture and psychology.In characterization, Orlev did not take the nation or race as a standard of value and avoid the real part of human nature. He tried to describe the complexity and richness of human nature to explore the ethical responsibility of the people in the extreme environment such as the Holocaust.Orlev is not limited to the basic home-away-home pattern of much children’s literature. He pay attention to the identity crisis of Jewish children during the Holocaust and the plight of the return to normalcy. In the Holocaust, the Jewish children have to deny their Jewish identity in order to get the chance to survive. The ambiguity of this kind of identity makes them fall into the crisis of identity, and directly affects whether they can return to the normalcy. Orlev truly shows the difficulties and confusion of the Jewish children in hiding Nazi persecution and returning to their homeland. In his opinion The whole Jewish people can really return to their ideal home only in a tolerant view of the relationship between themselves and their fellow citizens, as well as with the rest of the nation.