The Effects of the Holocaust on Children

Review of Sharon Kangisser Cohen, Eva Fogelman, and Dalia Ofer, Eds., Children in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath: Historical and Psychological Studies of the Kestenberg Archive (New York: Berghahn Books, 2017), ISBN 978-1-7853-3438-2, 276 pages, $120 (hardcover), $19.22 (Kindle).

During the 2017 annual meeting of the World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust in Jerusalem, I heard Yehudah Bauer deliver a most memorable talk to about 300 people. Listening with rapt attention to this extraordinary 92-year-old professor of Jewish History and Holocaust studies at Hebrew University was the rapidly fading but ever-defiant remnant of European Jewry. This group of aging child survivors was bolstered by some members of the second and third generations who attended also. Though he could not stand for his presentation, Professor Bauer spoke without notes for about 45 minutes in as clear and lucid a way as when I heard him speak 30 years before. He emphasized that the Holocaust was unique among the world’s genocides because it was the only one of its kind that was purely driven by ideology. It was not about acquiring land or political power per se, but about cleansing the world of the vermin known as the Jew. Of the almost six million Jewish lives destroyed by the Nazi quest for world domination, about 1.5 million were children, almost 90% of the population of Jewish children. Of the approximately 150,000 children who survived, about 1,500 of them were interviewed by Judith Kestenberg and her associates.

Most of these interviews took place in the 1980’s, eliciting extraordinary material from survivors living all around the world. By definition, they were 13 or younger at the time when Nazi persecution was experienced in their countries. They were semi-structured interviews following a protocol devised by Kestenberg, whose training as a child psychoanalyst and a movement expert led her to focus on the effects of trauma on memory, developmental milestones, and object relationships. Due to the very young age of some of the hidden children whose cognitive immaturity left them

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with predominantly pre-verbal memory, her understanding of somato-psychic signals enabled her to interpret their body language and help them verbalize what they didn’t know they knew.

A truly gifted clinician and teacher, Kestenberg taught these techniques to perspective interviewers who tried to emulate her, using all five of their senses. I was fortunate enough, early in my career, to be one of her apprentices, and I was given a list of over 100 child survivors in the greater Philadelphia area who had signed up for this unparalleled project. These interviews were audio recorded with informed consent and then transcribed. If needed, they were then translated into English.

The study of the effects of massive psychic trauma due to genocidal persecution on the developing child became the main purpose of these interviews; any therapeutic benefit for the interviewee was seen as a bonus. Several years before her death in 1999, Kestenberg and I co-authored a book presenting preliminary findings gleaned from these interviews (Kestenberg and Brenner, The Last Witness: The Child Survivor of the Holocaust, 1996), with the hope that over time, more definitive publications would emerge. The book that is under review here is the most recent and comprehensive. I am very pleased to have the honor to report on it for Clio’s Psyche.

This volume is an edited book with multiple contributors and was written “as a direct result of the initiative taken by Dr. Eva Fogelman to donate the oral history interviews…to the Oral History Division of the Abraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem” (ix). After the dedication to Leah Fogelman and Professor Bauer, the book begins with an introduction written by the three editors, all preeminent researchers who deserve great recognition for their enormous contributions to Holocaust scholarship. Very briefly, Eva Fogelman, as co-director of the International Study of Organized Persecution of Children, the official term for the interview project under the auspices of Child Development Research, is arguably the heiress to the Kestenberg legacy. Sharon Kangisser Cohen, who oversaw the digitizing, cataloging, and preservation of the interviews, is Director of the Central Archives at Yad Vashem. Dalia Ofer is the Max and Rita Haber Professor of Holocaust Studies at Hebrew University.

The 12 chapters are divided into five sections: methodology; immediate Postwar period; Postwar memory, coping mecha-

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nisms, and adjustment; non-Jewish victims of war and Nazism; and personal reflections. As a whole, they create a fascinating and extremely valuable picture of how the single interview can be both qualitatively and quantitatively analyzed to provide a valid source of historical data on the Holocaust. For example, the chapter in the methodology section describes an analysis of the content of the narratives and concludes that the two major factors influencing postwar adjustment of child survivors are parental competence and maternal functioning. Such evidence supports the importance of Kestenberg having emphasized to us interviewers that pre-war adjustment and post-liberation experiences are at least as important as the persecution trauma itself. These crucial times in the survivors’ lives are also addressed in greater detail throughout the book.

In another section, there are three chapters on non-Jewish war victims. One compares the testimonies of Polish non-Jewish to Jewish survivors and is evocatively entitled, “They were Jews, but they were very kind people.” The second deals with children growing up in Nazi Germany, whereas the third one focuses on the special burden on the children of perpetrators.

This very well written and carefully edited book showcases the unique value of such interviews in furthering our understanding of the effects of the Holocaust on Jewish children and beyond. Such an enormous contribution from this type of research is succinctly expressed by Bauer, who states:

Because the documentation is largely one-sided, that is German, survivors’ testimony is crucial to understanding the events of the period. They become extremely useful and reliable when cross-checked with and borne out by many other testimonies. They are then, at least as reliable as a written document of the time” (Rethinking the Holocaust, 25, 2001).

This goal is accomplished here in a most enduring way. Judith Kestenberg would have been very proud. Of that I have no doubt.

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