Abstract This article presents a study of Jewish children registered before the establishment of the ghetto in Brest, a city located in what is now the Republic of Belarus. Archival materials from the Brest Regional Archives reveal the disintegration of Jewish families and the condition of the Jewish population in the autumn of 1941, after many family heads had been executed during the preceding summer. The article examines the epistemological issues involved in studying children through administrative records, the place and role of children within families in a context of household disintegration, and the ways in which they became victims of the Nazi productivist imperative. Its aim is to interrogate the fate of children as an indicator of the shift from a repressive policy to one of outright extermination.
Anicet et al. (Tue,) studied this question.