Innocent Witnesses: Childhood Memories of World War II

by Marilyn Yalom, Meg Waite Clayton (Foreword by), Ben Yalom (Editor)

Overview

In a book that will touch hearts and minds, acclaimed cultural historian Marilyn Yalom presents firsthand accounts of six witnesses to war, each offering lasting memories of how childhood trauma transforms lives.

The violence of war leaves indelible marks, and memories last a lifetime for those who experienced this trauma as children. Marilyn Yalom experienced World War II from afar, safely protected in her home in Washington, DC. But over the course of her life, she came to be close friends with many less lucky, who grew up under bombardment across Europe—in France, Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, England, Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Holland. With Innocent Witnesses, Yalom collects the stories from these accomplished luminaries and brings us voices of a vanishing generation, the last to remember World War II.

Memory is notoriously fickle: it forgets most of the past, holds on to bits and pieces, and colors the truth according to unconscious wishes. But in the circle of safety Marilyn Yalom created for her friends, childhood memories return in all their startling vividness. This powerful collage of testimonies offers us a greater understanding of what it is to be human, not just then but also today. With this book, her final and most personal work of cultural history, Yalom considers the lasting impact of such young experiences—and asks whether we will now force a new generation of children to spend their lives reconciling with such memories.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781503613652
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	01/12/2021
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	1,101,532
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Marilyn Yalom's books include classics of cultural history such as A History of the Wife, Birth of the Chess Queen, and How the French Invented Love. A former professor of French, she was a senior scholar at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. She lived in Palo Alto, California, with her husband, psychiatrist and author Irvin D. Yalom.

Table of Contents

Foreword Meg Waite Clayton vii

Preface xv

1 A Sheltered Vision

My American Girlhood and French Connection 1

2 Resistance

Inside France's "Free Zone" 22

3 Under German Occupation

The Brutal Winters of Normandy 36

4 Within the War Machine

A Nazi Childhood 52

5 Against Two Enemies

A Finnish Family's Odyssey 86

6 Into Exile

Fleeing Czechoslovakia for England 113

7 Escaping the Nyilas

Hungary's Holocaust 132

8 When Memory Speaks 155

Epilogue Wartime Children as Adults 167

Afterword Ben Yalom 187

Acknowledgments 193

Credits 195

Editorial Reviews

"In Innocent Witnesses, history and memory waltz in step and strain and part. Marilyn Yalom displays her talent for bringing together stories remembered, filtered by the innocence of childhood. She brilliantly draws us into the lives of these ordinary children living in an extraordinary time."—Heather Morris, author of The Tattooist of Auschwitz

"World War II spawned tales of horror as well as heroics. The memories of war captured in Innocent Witnesses are bathed in the guileless luminosity of childhood. They will be among the last from those who lived it. These invariably touching tales offer poignant perspective on the twentieth century's most cataclysmic event."—David M. Kennedy, author of Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945

"Marilyn Yalom's Innocent Witnesses offers a fresh, meaningful perspective on war trauma among children. Yalom's wise and sensitive framing brings the accounts of child survivors into vivid focus. She has not only made another meaningful historical and literary contribution, but assembled a book that is beautiful and haunting to read."—Alexandra Zapruder, author of Salvaged Pages: Young Writers' Diaries of the Holocaust

"In a feat of history-making, Marilyn Yalom convinced her friends, all children during World War II, to tell their stories. In Innocent Witnesses, they recall their childhoods in war with heartbreaking clarity. It is vital that we hear from those who were able to survive such trauma, and go on to live long creative lives."—Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts

"The experiences of these children, so sensitively portrayed, offer more than just insight into the tragic wartime history that determined their lives. Their stories serve as a mirror in which we must confront ourselves and the pain we are capable of inflicting on others. Innocent Witnesses compels us all to think about who we are and, most importantly, who we want to be."—Ronald Leopold, Executive Director, Anne Frank House

"A life-repairing act of literary generosity, collecting and connecting diverse experiences into a narrative that is, in this particular moment in history, as necessary as it is inspiring."—Meg Waite Clayton, author of The Last Train to London

"An ever timely account of the traumas that conflict imposes upon children and how they reverberate through time."—Kirkus Reviews

"This timely and valuable book examines diverse vital stories and the vagaries of childhood memory reported at a substantially later age. This is an important imaginative exploration of our shared past."—Oliver B. Pollack, San Diego Jewish World

"By pulling this rich and varied collection of memoirs together in one volume, Yalom has made a significant contribution to our understanding of the effects of war on children and the experiences of childhood in the Second World War."—Jennifer Craig-Norton, The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth

From the Publisher

"Marilyn Yalom's Innocent Witnesses offers a fresh, meaningful perspective on war trauma among children. Yalom's wise and sensitive framing brings the accounts of child survivors into vivid focus. She has not only made another meaningful historical and literary contribution, but assembled a book that is beautiful and haunting to read."

author of Salvaged Pages: Young Writers' Diaries of the Holocaust - Alexandra Zapruder

"In Innocent Witnesses, history and memory waltz in step and strain and part. Marilyn Yalom displays her talent for bringing together stories remembered, filtered by the innocence of childhood. She brilliantly draws us into the lives of these ordinary children living in an extraordinary time."

author of The Tattooist of Auschwitz - Heather Morris

"A life-repairing act of literary generosity, collecting and connecting diverse experiences into a narrative that is, in this particular moment in history, as necessary as it is inspiring."

author of The Last Train to London - Meg Waite Clayton

"World War II spawned tales of horror as well as heroics. The memories of war captured in Innocent Witnesses are bathed in the guileless luminosity of childhood. They will be among the last from those who lived it. These invariably touching tales offer poignant perspective on the twentieth century's most cataclysmic event."

author of Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 - David M. Kennedy

"In a feat of history-making, Marilyn Yalom convinced her friends, all children during World War II, to tell their stories. In Innocent Witnesses, they recall their childhoods in war with heartbreaking clarity. It is vital that we hear from those who were able to survive such trauma, and go on to live long creative lives."

author of The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts - Maxine Hong Kingston

"This timely and valuable book examines diverse vital stories and the vagaries of childhood memory reported at a substantially later age. This is an important imaginative exploration of our shared past."

San Diego Jewish World - Oliver B. Pollack

"The experiences of these children, so sensitively portrayed, offer more than just insight into the tragic wartime history that determined their lives. Their stories serve as a mirror in which we must confront ourselves and the pain we are capable of inflicting on others. Innocent Witnesses compels us all to think about who we are and, most importantly, who we want to be."

Anne Frank House - Ronald Leopold

2020-10-15
A moving anthology of firsthand accounts of childhood experiences during World War II.

This collection is being published just over a year after Yalom’s passing; the text was edited by the author’s son, Ben. “Each of the stories,” writes the author in the introduction, “presents a micro-history of World War II as filtered through a child’s sensibility, and each draws us into the world of a particular child.” Because the narratives, which span Europe and the U.S., draw on previously published memoirs by each of the seven subjects (including Yalom), this book functions as something of a summary, via literature, of personal WWII memories. Due to the focus on children’s perspectives, the stories are light on political and socio-economic analysis of the historical period they depict, but each contributor provides a vivid, harrowing window into how those years felt to them. It’s clear that Yalom is interested in how feeling is registered in memory. “What we ‘choose’ to remember is more than the incident itself; it is also the accompanying affect,” she writes. Though the accounts fail to adequately address the colonial context out of which WWII arose, the on-the-ground impressions are consistently memorable. Throughout, Yalom’s dedication to feminism is evident, as the book offers sharp descriptions of how women were treated during and after the war, including those who were punished for their relationships with soldiers in the occupying army. Especially informative is Winfried Weiss’ account of growing up in Germany and witnessing how anti-Semitic tropes were disseminated by the media’s propaganda machine across generations. For the victims of the Nazis, a recurring theme is the trauma of being separated from parents and hearing about the deaths of relatives in concentration camps. In her foreword, novelist Meg Waite Clayton delivers a gracious tribute to Yalom and her work.

An ever timely account of the traumas that conflict imposes upon children and how they reverberate through time.

Kirkus Reviews