In what ways do you feel the children were at the heart of ghetto life?

In what ways do you feel the children were at the heart of ghetto life? Why do you suppose that was so?

The children were able to get in and out of the walled ghetto and trade for food which was badly needed. They were also hopeful and innocent, so keeping the children happy and staying positive helped the adults to remain positive as well.

I think the children represented a future that held promise. They also gave parents who might otherwise have given up a reason to continue to hope. In the face of the adults' despair that deepened as the war dragged on, the children's innocence and positivity helped the adults to believe the war would soon end and life would return to normal.

The children gave the adults reason to continue on. The children were able to sneak out and get food and learn a bit of what was happening around them. The children are always to hope of the future. In terrible situations as the Warsaw Ghetto, the elders saw that they had to continue for the children. I think that was a major reason for the writings. They found it as a way to protect their history and should any of them survive, it would be the children,

Children are so adaptable - the children in the ghetto adjusted to their new life and went about moving forward. This is an example to adults that understandably let their fear, pain, etc get in the away of living in the moment.

Generally, children are the future and parents do everything they can to protect them. And I think the parents tried, but the reality was that they also relied on children to forage for food and otherwise support the family. Szifra's brother Eli is bribing the guards and risking his life to buy and sell. Szifra eventually prostitutes herself - at the cost of her life to save her brothers. Adam wants to tell her mother - but it seems that even before her mother got , she didn't/wouldn't have stopped her children from their dangerous activities.

Filip provides chicken feet and his mother wants to cook them, but needs onions and so he goes out to get them. She knows this is dangerous - and it causes her stress - but she does want the onions. They also relied on him to redouble his smuggling efforts to get them coal for heat.

"These smugglers, these boys had become the lifeblood of the ghetto economy...we didn't like to talk about it,...but if the children hadn't smuggled in food, we would have perished...But then there was the cost." Filip and others are shot and killed.

The children helped by supplying their families with food and other needed items. They also gave their parents something to focus on besides despair. The children did what they needed to do to survive, whether that be bartering for goods, learning, or just getting through the day, even as they lost parents.

Keeping children in the ghettos and then in concentration camps and killing centers alive was amongst the highest of priorities- they represented hope for future. More than one million children were murdered in the Holocaust.

The children are the hope for the future. They are the very pulse of their parents' lives. They are more resilient than we give them credit for being, and they are strong, with excellent intuition (before they learn not to trust it). The children, being physically smaller, were able to navigate the ghetto and move about, looking and bartering for food & other items, evading the Nazi guards. For characters like Sala, they were the reason she didn't just follow in her husband's footsteps, giving in to grief and despair. They gave her a reason to keep looking ahead. For Szifra, a little less so but she was still a child herself and she wanted to live her full life away from the ghetto in a world where she was again free and safe.

Children are resilient and can often find ways to get through whatever adversities they face without a lot of angst. They also tend to live in the moment. In this ghetto, their natural adventurous and imaginative natures led them to steal and barter for food, which literally contributed to life. Their abilities to find ways to have fun brought hope and amusement to the adults.

I agree with the comments made by other people that the children represented hope and demonstrated resilience and courage. They also gave parents a reason to keep trying even in the midst of their fears for their children and their future. Children have the ability to live in the now,celebrate small things and not have the same expectations adults have and the same anger when those expectations are not met.

Children gave hope for a future to the adults and were able to do things, like "sneak around" and get much needed food for the people in the ghetto. Many children didn't fully understand what was happening so they were able to exist without fear.

I think that just like in most societies, the children gave hope for the future. They did a lot of the bartering for the community since they could fit through the fences. They for the most part, maintained their innocence in not fearing what was happening in the world around them.