European Online Project "War Children in Europe" has started
“The stories and perspectives of the children of the war hardly feature in our collective memory. I want to understand how their experiences shaped the next generation and affected my own generation accordingly." This is how Bettina, 23 year old EUSTORY alumna from Germany, explains her interest in the topic of war children. Rafael, a former prizewinner from Spain, adds: “I want to discover the facts that didn't make it into the history textbooks.”
Bettina and Rafael are two of twenty participants of the online project "War Children in Europe" that the Koerber Foundation and EUSTORY are organising together with the Agency for Historical, Civic and Media Education in Germany. Over a period of six months, students from fifteen European countries will reconstruct the yet unknown destinies of war children and will look into consequences of experiences as war children and traumatic experiences in the post-war societies in Europe. The young Europeans will exchange views about similarities and differences of lives of children who were born between 1927 and 1949: How do they remember bomb raids, detention camps, escape, persecution, parentlessness and resistance? What do they recall about being a child of a member of the occupying army or of war criminals in the post-war period?
Because of the fact that young people from crisis regions in the recent past will take part in this project, the topic of war children will be taken above and beyond the context of the Second World War to include current contexts.
“I have an 8-year-old cousin who moved into our house about six months ago with her mother and her grandmother because of the war in Donetsk. She often screams at night because she has bad dreams. I want to learn more about war children to help the girl come to terms with the horrors she remembers,” explains a participant from Ukraine.
Milena comes from Serbia and her interest in the project feeds on her question of which unsolved experiences from the Second World War fuelled the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s: “I wonder if some former war children raised their own children to hate “other” nationalities?”
The results of the project will consist of individual investigations of participants, several webinars, a constant common exchange on the Koerber Foundation's virtual History Campus, as well as of a week long History Camp in Berlin. Results will be published in autumn on the History Campus platform.