Description: The story of how Soviet children experienced the horrors of the Great Patriotic War, both as victims and as heroes who helped make victory possible.
Brief description: Julie K. deGraffenried is assistant professor in the Department of History at Baylor University.
Review Quotes:
"An engaging and heartrending account of Soviet children at war that reminds us of the conflict's horror and brutality. deGraffenried brings to life the small people whose heroism and endurance simply beggars belief. This book will make an important contribution to both childhood studies and the emerging social history of the Soviet war effort."--
Olga Kucherenko, author of Little Soldiers: How Soviet Children Went to War, 1941-1945
"Charting the effects of World War II on Soviet children, Sacrificing Childhood establishes the war as a rupture in both individual lives and Soviet conceptions of childhood. Amply documenting children's contributions to the war effort--and the representation of children's "heroic" self-sacrifice in the Soviet media--deGraffenried never loses sight of the suffering and hardship that defined the children's war."--Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, author of Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917-1932
"Relying on an impressive array of visual, written, and oral records, deGraffenried chronicles how in the Soviet Union during World War II a paradigm of "sacrificing childhood" supplanted the "happy childhood" of the 1930s. In wartime, Soviet children suffered incredibly, and yet, as the state portrayed it and many children understood it, they largely responded not as victims but as active heroes who helped make victory possible. This book adds a moving narrative and brings new perspectives and insights to existing work on Soviet children during the war by Olga Kucherenko and Catriona Kelly."--
Larry E. Holmes, author of Kirov School No. 9: Power, Privilege, and Excellence in the Provinces, 1933-1945
"Julie K. deGraffenried's Sacrificing Childhood is a thoroughly researched, vivid account of how Soviet children experienced the trials and horrors of the 'Great Patriotic War' (1941-1945). Tracing life under occupation and the contributions made by juvenile labor to the war effort, the book also examines the heroic legends, collective values, and commemorative representations that helped child witnesses, and successive generations, make sense of their experience. The book makes an important contribution to an under-researched area of Russian history."--Catriona Kelly, author of Children's World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890-1991