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Childhood Agency in Julian Kulski’s WWII Diary
January 28, 2020 @ 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm
Location
3310 Turlington Hall
Lunchtime Symposium
WWII: Beyond the Battlefields – CES Series Marking the 75th Anniversary of the End of WWII
Corinne Matthews, Ph.D. Candidate, English
“I’m determined to show them that the younger boys can fight as men.”
The World War II diary of Julian Kulski is one of few English-language primary accounts of the WWII German occupation of Warsaw. First published in 1979 and re-issued in 2014, this account follows Julian’s experiences over the course of the war as he “is recruited into the clandestine Polish Underground Army by his Scoutmaster, undertakes a secret mission into the Warsaw Ghetto, is captured by the Gestapo, sentenced to Auschwitz, rescued, fights in a Polish Commando unit in the Warsaw Uprising, and ends [up] as a 16-year-old German POW.” This talk explores how Julian demonstrates childhood agency as he fully participates in and even leads acts of resistance to the German occupation. Ultimately, Kulski’s record demonstrates the efficacy of children working both alone and in conjunction with adults to resist tyranny.
