TCK - Third Culture Kid (someone growing up in a country/culture not their own)
History - if you're interested in Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, or the Holocaust then yes hit me up
Biology - I'm about to finish my A-levels so anything from genetics to biodiversity I know something about
PLEASE ask me if you're writing young children (ages 0-5) and want them to talk naturally - I see so many books where children's speech is grossly inaccurate and it's annoying
Ok so could you teach me how to write like children talking naturally, because that is my downfall when writing stories and I'm not sure what to do about it.
(Yes! My time has come!)
The most important thing about writing children is that they treat language as if it's actually something that makes sense. Like, no child (older than 3) will say "I stupid" or whatever - they see patterns in language and are most likely to be wrong when it comes to exceptions.
A child might say, "I willn't do it" or "it goed round and round" because those words are exceptions to the general rules of language that they understand. Like they know that most verbs are turned to the past tense by adding "ed" (liked, greeted, walked, etc) so they assume that the verb "go" follows the same rule - but it doesn't. These are all mistakes that a kid around age 5 would be growing out of, because we acquire language really fast.
Basically once your kid is in school, they'll be able to have conversations in perfect grammar with the slight odd mistake (depending on the child, they might decide to say things like "goed" because technically it fits the rules better). The only difference between children's speech after age 6 and adult's speech is the content - adults use more complex vocabulary generally, and talk about more abstract concepts.
Kids in late elementary (grades 3-5) will start to debate stuff, like politics or things that they hear about from their parents, just remember that their viewpoints will often be limited to the sources they are exposed to.
Also, if you're super nerdy like me then I suggest looking up Piaget's stages of cognitive development to better understand how children would be having conversations. The stages are divided into the sensorimotor stage (ages 0-2) (where kids experience the world through movement and the 5 senses), the preoperational stage (ages 2-7) (where they start to use symbols and imaginations to engage with the world, start asking questions and expanding on their knowledge (WHY is the key question, a kid aged 4-7 will definitely ask that question a lot), playing and pretending, but still can't understand other people's points of view), the concrete operational stage (ages 7-11), and the formal operational stage (ages 11-16 and onwards) (where we develop logic, mental manipulation of information, and abstract reasoning).
Gosh there's even more. If a child (once they can read, that is) has an interest or a hobby, then rest assured they will know EVERYTHING about that hobby. I once met this boy who loved trains and I swear he knew more about trains and how they work and what they do than anyone else I've ever met.
Though obviously every child develops differently. It's also been recorded where children don't speak at all until they're 5 and then suddenly speak in perfect sentences. But if you want to go for natural children's speech that might be better to avoid.
Wow, that was a lot of information and I only barely scratched the surface. Maybe it'd be easier to start with this and then you can ask questions on all the stuff I was unclear on or stuff I just completely missed out.
You know, since you were obviously looking for an entire essay on this subject (haha). Sorry about that.
I'm writing about what is basically the halocaust, and I need some good info on concentration camps.
Good info on concentration camps… that's a lot of information I could potentially tell you (people have written entire books that only scratch the surface). If this isn't helpful, then maybe narrow kind of info you want down a bit?
Are you writing about a genocide, about ethnic persecution, or something else entirely? Are you interested in hearing things about ghettos (where they secluded Jewish people in special parts of the city at about 100,000 people per square kilometer) or what kind of concentration camps are you writing about?
I guess the most important few things:
- A concentration camp could either be a work camp or a death camp.
- Work camps were places where prisoners would be forced into slave labour for the Nazi government - supporting the war effort, producing consumer goods for the people back in Germany, etc. Labour camps were only for the fit - so pregnant women, children under 12 or so, elderly people, and sick people were generally killed immediately (in the infamous showers, at Auschwitz) or never even deported to the camps. Though there was no active extermination policy, they received so little food and the conditions were so hard that there were high death rates anyway.
- Death camps were literally just for death - you go in, you never go out. Treblinka is the most well-known of these. At Treblinka, they killed 1000 people an hour for 12 hours a day.
- The concentration camps were originally developed as a method because the other methods they were using were "inefficient". (Basically they just sent their soldiers out in killing squads called Einsatzgruppen to round up people and kill them.) It was considered inefficient because it was costly, it was hard to conceal, and it psychologically damaged the executioners.
- Few concentration camps were located in Germany, and if they were it was in remote rural locations. Many ordinary Germans claimed after the war that they hadn't known about the Holocaust - and it is true that it was actively kept from them (code words, lies, and false information). Officially the Jews that were deported to concentration camps were being "resettled" in the East.
- The war was a big factor in the development of concentration camps - after the Nazi regime had taken over Czechoslovakia, Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands and France in 1942 they were basically the masters of Europe and had time to take on issues like the "Jewish Question". It was a matter of what they could get away with. Also, because of the war countries like Britain and America closed down their borders which meant that Jews could no longer be encouraged to emigrate (which happened before the war). (This is a huge point in the historiography of the Holocaust and has lots of info if you're interested)
Generally I'd say that it's one thing to write about a genocide, but it's another to write something that mirrors the Holocaust. It's definitely the genocide of the biggest scale that I know of in world history, and as such is incredibly complex to fully understand and accurately represent. Depending on what you're writing, if it's on a smaller scale maybe it'd be easier to research other historical genocides (like in Rwanda, Armenia, or Iraq) and take elements from those (just a thought).
If this is just about concentration camps, then it might interest you to know that Nazi concentration camps were in no way unique. Soviet gulags, or even British camps in South Africa during the Boer war, had similar elements.
Either way if you need any more info about the Holocaust, or sources from where I got my info, or links to others sources, feel free to hit me up! I'm always happy to help
So I'm writing about a situation where several different kinds of fae are being shoved into concentration camps and killed. I want to write about a group that survives, so I'd like to know more about the work camps, though the ghettoes would also be useful to know about. What you gave was really helpful, but more would be amazing. I guess the day to day in a work camp and a ghetto would be the most useful.
Great! (honestly I would probably read that depending on the rest of the story)
Ghettos:
- Areas of the city that were sectioned off and Jews forced to live inside. Often (for example in Krakow) it was areas where Jews had clustered anyway (bc historical antisemitism) and the Nazis just forced the Christians to move out.
- The Warsaw Ghetto is an interesting case study if you want to research further:
It had 500,000 Jews at over 100,000 people per square kilometer, with 15 people per apartment and 6 people per room. 1% of apartments had running water, which means that there was a lot of diseases and generally unhygienic conditions. The Jews inside the ghetto got less than 300 calories of food rations every day (compared to 634 calories for Poles and 2310 for Germans outside the ghetto). This means that smuggling accounted for 80% of the food consumed - smuggling is a huge deal, actually. Basically, since there were no cars inside the ghetto, they developed these "rickshaws" for transport and most had secret compartments for food. Children were often sent into cracks between walls as well.
- In the ghettos, the Jews tried to keep their culture very much alive - so they gave theaters, concerts, had libraries, illegally educated their children and in Warsaw they had the Oneg Shabbat, a group of historians who kept records and stuff. Other than that, they also worked for the Nazi regime, and were actually a huge source of supplies. There's this one horrible case where the Jewish leader of the Lodz ghetto, Chaim Rumkowski, demanded that people send their children, sick, and elderly to the work camps so that the ghetto overall could have a higher productivity.
- That's actually a really interesting and vastly contentious topic - Jews who assisted the Nazis by running the ghettos, drawing up lists for deportment, and basically keeping order ("Jewish Councils"). For example in Amsterdam the councils were blamed for facilitating the murder of 75% of Holland's Jews. That might be an interesting point in your story - when a bunch of people are stuck together, they need leadership, and in this case the Nazis granted benefits to those who helped them out and led. It might add a layer of moral complexity to your story if you had some Fae choosing to organise and cooperate with the oppressors to save themselves or their family.
Work camps:
- Most famous one of these is Auschwitz-Birkenau. It had 3 camps: Auschwitz I (the first, original camp), Auschwitz II (the extermination camp, where they had 8 gas chambers with 14 ovens and cremated up to 8000 bodies a day), and Auschwitz III (an industrial center near Monowitz). People were basically worked to death there, and this was also the site where the infamous Dr. Mengele did his horrible experiments (maybe also a possibility for you to explore, since Fae are magical and their oppressors might want to medically examine them??? idk just throwing out ideas, ignore me).
- When people arrived at Auschwitz, they were divided into fit/not fit to work. Then their hair was cut, they were registered (had a number tattooed on them) and assigned to a bunk. There'd be several people in each bunk, and since the conditions were so stuff like diarrhea would leak down onto the lower bunks because the people in the higher bunks were too weak to move.
- There was a roll call every day (hours-long, you had to stand through the whole thing or be shot)
- This is different depending on the camp, but we studied this one guy called Freddie who worked at Auschwitz III in Monowitz. What he did every day at first was carrying 25kg cement bags from train to building at top speed. With little food (watery soup, basically) that was no joke and lots of people died. But he had connections with this doctor (people who had learned other trades back in the day would be sent to work in that section) and who got him out of the Cement Kommando into indoor work. Because they would work whatever the weather, so outdoor workers suffered more (especially in winter, around -20 degrees Celsius).
- Sometimes people with outside experience would work on war-related things (like rockets). If they were caught sabotaging, random Jews were hung to set an example.
- There were also collaborators here - Jews who worked at the gas chambers and cleared out dead bodies and brought them to crematoria, or Jews who picked others for work, or just stuff like that. Again, very complex, controversial topic. They were called Kapos.
General notes:
- There were not just Jews in concentration camps. I guess this is more relevant for you since you have several groups of Fae. There were Jews, Roma, Black Germans, Homosexuals, criminals, and political prisoners - but the worst possible thing you could be at a labour camp was a Jew. They were considered the most "racially degenerate". So there were also different power structures between the different groups - that might be interesting to explore. Which of your different groups of Fae are the most hated, or are there no distinctions? How would they get on with each other?
- Men and women were separated out, and each had different experiences:
Pregnant women were immediately killed.
Any woman who became pregnant in the camp was "beaten or mauled by dogs and later thrown in the crematorium alive".
Women stopped having periods within a few weeks - because of severe malnutrition and the addition of bromide into food (in some camps). But while they had periods, they weren't given sanitary products - and anyone found to have blood stains on their tunics were immediately sent to the gas chambers (because aesthetics).
Women generally found the stripping and shaving and showering aspect more traumatising than men, because often it was their first time being naked in front of a man. The SS people (as you might expect) were not too gentle when shaving women.
Women were more subject to rape/sexual assault than men. Rape was relatively rare, since men and women were separated and the guards didn't really consider them human to begin with (plus there was this thing called the "Aryan Blood Honour Law"). But it was definitely a thing.
There were also male rape stories, though they are quite rare - one 15-year-old was raped by another male prisoner and homosexuals were sometimes forced to become concubines to the Kapos (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kapo_(concentration_camp)
Gosh okay that was longer than I expected. I know that's not incredibly specific, and probably not the "day to day" in the camps/ghettos that you wanted, but this stuff is important context for a day to day kind of existence. Plus specifics might not work depending on how you translate it to your Fae setting.
Hope it helped somewhat, anyway. Feel free to ask if you need more info, more specifics, more sources… I'm happy to help!
