Life after death
LAURENCE REES recommends a moving and often surprising examination of the difficulties faced by children rebuilding their lives after surviving the Holocaust
Rebecca Clifford has written a wonderful and important book. It’s wonderful because she is a gifted historian who writes with immense clarity – and important because it corrects so many false perceptions about what it was like to survive the Holocaust as a Jewish child.
She reveals, for example, that it simply isn’t necessarily the case that the most horrendous period of these children’s lives was the years during the Second World War. In fact, for many children – protected and hidden by non-Jews – this was often a time when they felt secure. Even more counterintuitive is the fact that, as Clifford says, in some instances it was possible that “daily life in a Nazi camp could be relatively stable for a small child”.
In many cases, the biggest trauma for these children was their immediate postwar experience. The reappearance of a parent who had survived the Holocaust seldom brought instant happiness. Children had inevitably become fond of their wartime carers. Clifford gives one striking example of a girl who had been protected from the Nazis by a Polish Catholic family, and “become an anti-Semite”, who was upset that her mother was Jewish. The parents themselves were frequently traumatised by their own wartime experiences and were therefore struggling to re-establish their lives. Some were jealous of the attachments their children had made to those who had looked after them.
The consequence of all this emotional upset was that large numbers of the children were subsequently placed in care homes by their own parents. Others, who had been living in care homes after the war, “wished in hindsight they could have stayed” once they had been handed back to their parents. It is no surprise that Clifford, as she writes,
In many cases, the biggest trauma for children who survived the Holocaust was not the war years, but their immediate postwar experience
“initially found this shocking”.
The majority of children also endured enormous physical dislocation after the end of the war, with most leaving Europe. Such children now had to settle not just in a new country but on a new continent, and therefore adjust not only to living in a new home but also to an entirely different culture and language.
Clifford is too nuanced a historian to believe in simplistic happy endings. At every stage in the book she points out the problems and challenges these children faced, and examines how some did – understandably – suffer lasting psychological damage.
The incredible thing is that so many didn’t, and proved resilient enough to press on and live relatively normal lives. In that sense, this book is a powerful example of the ability of human beings to survive at all costs.
Ultimately, then, Clifford’s work asks profound questions about the human condition, perhaps most intriguingly, ‘how can we make sense of our lives when we do not know where we come from?’. Since many of these children were too young to fully remember or understand what happened to them during the war, they were denied the ‘privilege’ of making sense of childhood memories.
This is a book that lingers long in the mind, and I wish it the wide readership that it deserves.