Preliminary Programme

Remembering the military childhood (on materials of oral history)
Every year an opportunity to fill up information on events of the Great Patriotic War from sources of personal origin, and not just from official documents, becomes a little executable as contemporaries of war go away, those who were at war in tanks-cut, those who worked in the back, those who endured the wartime hardships in evacuation, those whose childhood and youth fell on this terrible time.
In the center of attention of our research group (the international group of scientists from Kazakhstan and Russia) there were children of the Great Patriotic War. This generation of the people who were born in the USSR in 1930-1939. Today, they have turned 89-79 years old.
It is extremely important to keep and learn about war from their lips, from lips of the children who were not writing memoirs and recollections, people who being children, every day maintained own daily fight with fear, pain, hunger, cold, stress for the family and relatives. Children appeared in a situation when it was necessary to survive in the conditions of fights, in the conditions of evacuation when they became refugees and often the issue of survival was resolved by them as adults (relatives or acquaintances) were not near.
A significant role in obtaining this knowledge and memoirs has the method of oral history, applying which "the historian has a unique opportunity to operate a new source creation process according to requirements of research, to concretize and specify received information".
At the moment 28 "children of war" in Russia and Kazakhstan are interviewed by us. During the conversation, respondents not always followed those questions which were asked by interviewers, and told about war, again enduring events of those of days, that the emotions accompanying memoirs of story-tellers are more valuable. Our respondents are children and teenagers who in war appeared among those who were in the center of fighting in Stalingrad, those who were evacuated from the warring city for Volga, and those who were far from the front, but felt from it not less strong shocks.
The specific of a historical source of this type is that it contains information different from that which contains in official documents and regulations. Memoirs of children are emotionally charged grief or joy, they, undoubtedly, supplement our knowledge of war, enriching them. (Show less)

The Second World War took a terrible toll on German children. Families were torn apart; homes were destroyed; any semblance of normalcy disappeared. Even after the war ended German children continued to face dislocation. The Potsdam Conference permitted the ‘orderly and humane’ expulsion of Germans from Eastern European countries. As a result, millions of German children were expelled -- sometimes with their families. When they arrived on German soil they were distributed somewhat randomly to the British, American and Soviet occupation zones. Some were placed in the homes of mostly unwilling farmers; others lived with their families in camps as Lagerkinder. Still others, whose families had died or could not be located, were placed in children’s homes. Once the West German economy began to stabilize in 1948, expellee children were expected to integrate into West German society. They were rapidly incorporated into schools, where they were instructed to put their memories of war and expulsion aside and build new lives. However, few of these children integrated seamlessly into their new communities. In general they were poorer and felt their poverty acutely. Many spoke unfamiliar dialects and were treated as interlopers by their new classmates. Memories of war and expulsion, which haunted them, were silenced both publicly and privately. As a result, even as they benefited from the West German economic miracle, they felt excluded. Any hesitance to assume the societally expected roles was viewed as “a refusal to integrate.” Using interviews I conducted with Germans who were expelled from Eastern Europe to West Germany as children, this paper will explore how children understood and processed this outsider status. How did they experience the systematic effort to normalize their childhoods by erasing their memories? (Show less)