Broken Bodies, Lonely Souls

Winner of the Yad Vashem International Book Prize: Giving voice to the 150,000 child survivors of the Holocaust.

One quarter of the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust were children and adolescents. In many Holocaust contexts, pre-adolescent children were murdered immediately upon arrival. Among those deemed fit for work and sent to forced labor, many were subsequently murdered or died as a result of starvation, illness, and inhumane working conditions. Outside of the Soviet Union, only 150,000 minor victims of the Holocaust survived.

The young survivors often lost most or all of their families, and carried lifelong scars in their souls and bodies. They endured starvation, forced labor, beatings, and humiliation—conditions to which even many adults succumbed. Many had been sexually abused, and some had been subjected to pseudoscientific experiments, including forced sterilizations.
In Broken Bodies, Lonely Souls, Johannes-Dieter Steinert gives voice to these underrepresented victims and sheds light on both their experiences during the Holocaust and the individuals and institutions that profited from their suffering. The German edition was awarded the 2020 Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research. Yad Vashem now brings this important work to a wider, English-language audience.

Johannes-Dieter Steinert is a Professor and Senior Research Fellow of Modern European History and Migration Studies at the University of Wolverhampton, UK. An acclaimed historian, his research focuses heavily on German, British, and European history, with a particular specialization in migration and minorities. Professor Steinert has authored and edited a large number of books, including Przemyslowa Concentration Camp: The Camp, the Children, the Trials (co-authored with Kasia Person; 2022) and I Haven't Even Told My Mother: Children as Victims of Sexual and Sexualised Violence in the Second World War and its Aftermath (co-edited with Helga Amesberger and Helga Embacher; 2025). His profound contributions to the field have earned him prestigious accolades, including the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research (2020) and a Senior Fellowship at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (2015).