The North Caucasus and German exploitation policies in World War II: everyday life experience of children under the occupation

Abstract

This chapter discusses the results of a research project that aimed to collect, process, and systematise oral histories of individual children’s experiences of the Second World War in the North Caucasus, South of Russia. North Caucasus is a very unique region in the geography of the occupied territories during the war. Our storytellers confirm the shortage of food, but at the same time they admit that the warm climate, fertile land, and crop yields became the main reasons for their survival. We try to reconstruct the everyday life in the occupied southern cities and villages that feature in the oral stories of the children of war. Children became psychologically older, often taking on responsibility for their relatives and themselves and sometimes they had to learn to survive without their parents’ care. We come to the conclusion that children always remain children even under the extreme circumstances of wartime reality