Children in the Holocaust and its Aftermath: Historical and Psychological Studies of the Kestenberg Archive

by Sharon Kangisser Cohen (Editor), Eva Fogelman (Editor), Dalia Ofer (Editor)

Overview

The testimonies of individuals who survived the Holocaust as children pose distinct emotional and intellectual challenges for researchers: as now-adult interviewees recall profound childhood experiences of suffering and persecution, they also invoke their own historical awareness and memories of their postwar lives, requiring readers to follow simultaneous, disparate narratives. This interdisciplinary volume brings together historians, psychologists, and other scholars to explore child survivors’ accounts. With a central focus on the Kestenberg Holocaust Child Survivor Archive’s over 1,500 testimonies, it not only enlarges our understanding of the Holocaust empirically but illuminates the methodological, theoretical, and institutional dimensions of this unique form of historical record.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781785334399
Publisher:	Berghahn Books, Incorporated
Publication date:	04/01/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	276
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Sharon Kangisser Cohen is the Director of the Director of the Diane and Eli Zborowski Centre for the Study of the Holocaust and Its Aftermath and the Deportation Project at the The International Institute for Holocaust Research, Yad Vashem. She is, in addition, a lecturer at Haifa University and the Rothberg School for international students at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her most recent book, Testimony and Time: Survivors of the Holocaust Remember, was published in 2015 by Yad Vashem.

Eva Fogelman is the co-director of the International Study of Organized Persecution of Children and the founding co-director of Generations of the Holocaust and Related Traumas. She is the author of the Pulitzer Prize–nominated Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust and writer and co-producer of the award-winning documentary Breaking the Silence: The Generation after the Holocaust.

Dalia Ofer is the Max and Rita Haber Professor Emerita of Holocaust and East European Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her book Escaping the Holocaust: Illegal Immigration to the Land of Israel (Oxford, 1992) received the Ben Zvi award and the National Jewish Book Award. She is the co-editor of Holocaust Survivors: Resettlement, Memories, Identities (Berghahn, 2012) and the editor of Israel in the Eyes of the Survivors (Yad Vashem, 2014). Her most recent work is The Clandestine History of the Kovno Jewish Ghetto Police (Yad Vahsem, 2016).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction
Sharon Kangisser Cohen, Eva Fogelman and Dalia Ofer

PART I: METHODOLOGY

Chapter 1. Age, Circumstance, and Outcome in Child Survivors of the Holocaust: Considerations of the Literature and a Report of a Study Using Narrative Content Analysis
Gila Sandler Saban, K. Mark Sossin, and Anastasia Yasik

PART II: IMMEDIATE POSTWAR PERIOD

Chapter 2. A Child’s View: Children’s Depositions of the Central Jewish Historical Commission (Poland)
Sharon Kangisser Cohen

Chapter 3. Starting Over: Reconstituted Families after the Holocaust
Beth B. Cohen

Chapter 4. “Both Valuable and Difficult”: A Meeting Point between Historical and Psychological Interviews
Rita Horváth and Katalin Zana

PART III: POST WAR MEMORY, COPING MECHANISMS, AND ADJUSTMENT

Chapter 5. Performative Memory-Making and the Future of the Kestenberg Archive
Stephenie Young

Chapter 6. Shadows of Memory and Intergenerational Legacies in Child Survivors’ Testimonies from the Kestenberg Archive
Dana Mihăilescu

Chapter 7. Symbolic Revenge in Holocaust Child Survivors
Nancy Isserman

Chapter 8. Resilience in Child Survivors: History and Application of Coding of the International Study of Organized Persecution of Children
Helene Bass-Wichelhaus

PART IV: NON-JEWISH VICTIMS OF WAR AND NAZISM

Chapter 9. “They Were Jews, but They Were Very Kind People”: Polish Language Testimonies in the Kestenberg Child Survivor Archive
Katarzyna Person

Chapter 10. War Children in Nazi Germany and World War II
Ilka Quindeau, Katrin Einert, and Nadine Teuber

Chapter 11. Insights into the German Interviews of the Kestenberg Archive: Children of Perpetrators and How They Dealt with Their Parents’ Actions
Christina Isabel Brüning

PART V: PERSONAL REFLECTIONS

Chapter 12. Always Moving Forward
Andrew Griffel

Index

Editorial Reviews

"This volume is not only timely and welcome, but it will help define a field of inquiry. For scholars and students looking to explore the considerable resources of Holocaust testimonies, this is a valuable resource." · Françoise Ouzan, Tel Aviv University

EBOOK COMMENTARY

"An index of persons, places and institutions round off a solidly edited volume that gives many ideas of how the Kestenberg Archive can be used for research about the consequences of the national-socialist murder of Jews." - Zeitschrift für Genozidforschung

"Identifying and evaluating sources is fundamental in the history of child- hood, especially since children so rarely leave their own records. This book is about one such source, remarkable in its conception and with some serious potential for understanding a very challenging subject--the experience of the surviving children of the Holocaust." - The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth

"This volume is not only timely and welcome, but it will help define a field of inquiry. For scholars and students looking to explore the considerable resources of Holocaust testimonies, this is a valuable resource." - Françoise Ouzan, Tel Aviv University

From the Publisher