Children in the Great War
New research on the place, role and suffering of children in the Great War. The authors of the research are Dr. Vidoje Golubović and Dimitrije Vujadinović. The project will be completed at the end of the summer, and the publication will be printed during September by IK Prometei from Novi Sad. As the world’s first total war, its brutality left dramatic and lasting consequences on children, youth and their later lives. It was a mass normal reaction to the abnormal events that found them in puberty, the most turbulent emotional and value period of life. Psychiatric and psychological studies have shown that war leaves short-term and long-term traumas in children and young people. In the Great War, for the first time in the history of wars, the warring states massively used and manipulated the feelings of young people for the purpose of war propaganda. The place and role of children and teenagers in the Great War took place on four fronts – home (family), war, domestic and occupation. Over time, their honest voice has been lost in the omnipresent political cacophony of pathlessness, which has been deprived of memory. More than 100 years have passed since the end of the Great War, but this painful and at the same time moral topic has never been the content of our educational system. Immediately after the end of the First World War, a German boy wrote in his school work: “I don’t see how it can be called a Holy War? What can be Holy about the slaughter of innocent women and children, the destruction of peaceful homes, the death and maiming of thousands of our breadwinners?”
There are no winners in war, young people know that best!