Survivors by Rebecca Clifford, review: the children forever haunted by the Holocaust

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, many child survivors of the Holocaust were told they were the “lucky ones”: lucky to be alive, lucky to be young enough and resilient enough “to be able to shed the weight of unbearable memories”, and lucky to be the “objects of reconstruction efforts, rather than the subjects”. They were encouraged to put the past behind them and “focus on the future”. This was easier said than done.

As these young survivors – born between 1935 and 1944 – grew up, writes Rebecca Clifford, they began to ask parents, guardians and care workers about their early lives. Why? Because most of them found it impossible to make sense of their lives when they didn’t know where they came from. With pre-war memories that were indistinct or even non-existent, and without a living adult able or willing to fill in the key details of the childhoods, they “faced a decades-long struggle to assemble the tale of their origins – a simple but essential act of autobiography, fundamental to identity”. An attempt to answer the question: who am I?

Clifford, a professor of history at Swansea University, has chosen to focus on young child survivors who left mainland Europe after the war for two reasons: their experience has hitherto been neglected by Holocaust studies; and the double dislocation of war and emigration made for a “particularly compelling, collective, transnational story”. She also favours individuals whose stories she is able to reconstruct both through archival sources and later oral testimony. In this way she is able to chart the way the survivors sometimes changed the details of their stories to suit the preconceptions of those who were listening. They not only felt pressure to tell a story, but the right kind of story.

Polish-born Janek, for example, told an interviewer for the Survivors of the Shoah project in 1994 that after liberation, he recognised a guard from Flossenburg concentration camp and shot him dead. “I mean,” added Janek, “it didn’t mean anything to shoot somebody after the war. We used to do that.” In future interviews, however, Janek makes no mention of this act of revenge. Having imbibed his first interviewer’s surprise that a 10-year-old might do such a thing, he recrafted his story “to conform to what his listeners expected to hear”.

A survivor of Theresienstadt, Mina confided to the staff of her care home in England that she had witnessed the death of her mother, killed by a bullet to the head. She was responding to the urgings of the care home’s matron that talking about her wartime past was therapeutic. This seemed to be the case, as Mina’s behaviour markedly improved after this revelation. Yet six years later Mina’s mother turned up at the care home alive, much to the matron’s consternation. Mina genuinely thought her mother was dead.

Her assertion of how she had died was probably the result of fragmented memories of someone else’s execution.

Some of the most unexpectedly heartbreaking stories in the book involve children who were forcibly (and unwillingly) removed from their gentile carers. French-born Paulette and her sister, for example, were sheltered during the war in the countryside by a woman called Henriette Gateault. “We had food and warmth,” recalled Paulette, “and I felt loved and cared for. She asked me to call her Maman Gateault.”

But in 1945, the two girls were taken without warning by two men from a Jewish organisation called the OSE. Paulette “hated those men for so many years”. She didn’t want to go with them; she didn’t want to be Jewish. She didn’t have a chance to say goodbye properly.

Agencies like the OSE were understandably keen to reclaim as many Jewish children as possible. “In so doing,” writes Clifford, “their driving goal was to repopulate the ranks of regional and national Jewish communities: they acted so that the children would not ‘be lost to us’.” But their efforts were not always in the best interests of the children who might be moved from loving families to institutional Jewish care homes that were “religiously observant”, encouraged the children to learn or relearn Yiddish or Hebrew, and fostered a Zionist outlook that “sought to prepare the children for eventual immigration to Palestine”.

A few lucky survivors were reunited with one or more parents. But this was not necessarily a happy ending. Clifford estimates as many as “three quarters of survivor children who ended up in care homes after the war had at least one living parent”.

There were many reasons for this: the parent saw the arrangement as temporary, that the child would be better looked after, and that they were not physically or psychologically able to cope. The outcome, however, was rarely positive.

Erwin from Slovakia was only separated from his mother after the war. He later followed her to Palestine, arriving in August 1949 at the age of 12. But instead of being welcomed into her new home – she had remarried and had four stepchildren – Erwin was put into a care home and later a kibbutz.

“I wanted to be with my mother,” he admitted. “Every child wants to be with his mother.” They were never reunited. Erwin died in the kibbutz in 2017, his prize possession a drawer containing “the little handful of official documents that told the story of his early life”.

In this major contribution to the history of the Holocaust, Clifford has written a highly original, deeply moving and perceptive study of the way child survivors struggled to come to terms with their personal tragedies.

“I think, in the end,” said one, “that I and my past are like two trains. It’s gone that way, and I’ve gone this way.”

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