Children and Play in the Holocaust: Games among the Shadows

Children and Play in the Holocaust: Games among the Shadows by Eisen, George. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780870237089.

Occasionally an accident of research produces a book more engaging than the one the historian originally intended. While sifting through material for his Ph.D. dissertation, which dealt with an entirely different topic, Eisen came across a diary from the Vilna ghetto written by Zelig Kalmanovitch. His tone was sober, but not entirely so. The passage that caught Eisens eye concerned a playground erected around 1942 and the authors inner conflict surrounded the coexistence of games and sports and mass murder in the ghetto.