One Day the Soldiers Came Read Online Free PDF Page A

showed just how terribly war crimes against children shake people.
    In the 2006 clashes between Israel and Lebanon, one medical organization stated with alarm that a “disproportionately high” number of children were endangered by the conflict, at risk not only to the falling bombs, which killed three hundred children and injured thousands more, but due to serious health problems that would develop even after the fighting ceased. Without a doubt, during wars, children are victims.
    But what of the myriad children who care for their cousins, brothers, sisters, and uncles in impossible conditions? In mytime doing research for this book, through innumerable soccer games and melted crayons and slow walks with young people, I had the privilege to meet children around the world who have survived and continue to survive unspeakable horrors and chronic deprivations. Each one of them has a unique genius for survival, physical and psychological, sometimes with the help of adults, often on their own, and many of them flourish: they manage to eat, to play and laugh, to help others, to find support when they need it, to make challenging decisions when they have to. It would be both presumptuous and meaningless to say that they did not have a “childhood” because they did not grow up in the rather unique safety and stability common to Western notions of child development.
    Neil Postman asserts in his book The Disappearance of Childhood that the modern world is “halfway toward forgetting that children need childhood,” by which he means that the modern world is forgetting that children need to be kept separate from the adult complexities of life in order to be healthy and happy. Though his was largely a critique of media culture, that same notion has been exported to humanitarian crises as well, taking the basic assumption that children occupy a privileged space in society as gospel truth. But this privileged space has never been a given in much of the world, and the notion of childhood has never been a fixed state.
    The United Nations, in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, states, “a child means every human being below the age of eighteen.” As a legal instrument, this is sufficient, but it sheds no light on the various cultural contexts that define the relationships between the world of children and adults around the globe.
    For the Gussi tribe of Kenya, the rite of passage into adulthood occurs at age eight, while the Jewish bar mitzvah occursat age thirteen. In some societies childhood ends for girls with puberty and marriage, or is defined by whether or not a boy is in school or working. In medieval Europe, childhood ended at age seven, when children could master spoken language. The Catholic Church still recognizes age seven as the age at which children can understand concepts of right and wrong, can begin to use reason. As St. Thomas Aquinas wrote: “Age of body does not determine age of soul. Even in childhood man can attain spiritual maturity.”
    Childhood is not a concept set in stone. The idea of childhood, as most of us understand it, has existed for less than two hundred years. In the Middle Ages in Europe, no distinction was made between children and adults. They wore the same sort of clothes and once they could care for themselves, as far as we know, they did. They worked and talked like adults. They did everything adults did. Childhood was given no special place in society, and children were not particularly valued. Their death rates were so high that few got very sentimental about childhood. In a seventeenth century French manuscript quoted by Philippe Ariès, in his Centuries of Childhood , a neighbor consoles a young woman who has just given birth to her fifth child by saying: “Before they are old enough to bother you, you will have lost half of them, perhaps all of them.”
    In the Middle Ages, there was no great effort to protect children from the adult world, as there was no concept that they