Captivated by Another Chance: Everyday Practices and Survival Strategies of Jewish Children in the Occupied Mariupol (1941–1943)

Abstract In October 1941, about 9,000 Mariupol Jews experienced the last minutes of their lives in anti-tank ditches in the village Ahrobaza. Within a year all that was repeated though on a smaller scale. However, at that time the main target was primarily the descendants of heterogeneous marriages. The proposed research is focused on Jewish children who managed to survive after shootings in Ahrobaza and avoid further extermination in Mariupol Gestapo torture chambers. I will focus on children’s understanding of life hazards and death as well as on the transformation thereof as a result of traumatic practices of genocide of Mariupol’s Jewish population. Children who were rescued or who escaped the Ahrobaza ditches on their own were forced to hide, lose touch with their homes and families, change their names, lie about their identity and become grown-up much earlier than their coevals before the war. Analysis of oral evidence to all those sufferings makes it possible to identify typical survival strategies of Jewish children in occupied Mariupol, to identify their dependence on types of traumatic experiences and to inscribe it into a broader context of social history of Jewish childhood under the conditions of Nazi occupation.