So, shalom from Israel and thank you for joining us on another one of Yad Vashem’s online lectures. Over the past month, I have met many of you on our online lectures, and I see some faces that I recognize, so thank you for joining us once again. To those who I have not yet had the pleasure to meet, my name is Jeremy Weiss and I'm a director at Yad Vashem’s International Relations Division. Today, we bring to you a lecture by Dr. Sharon Kangisser-Cohen titled, “What Now? Children Survivors in the Aftermath of the Holocaust” Many in view the day of liberation as a moment of happiness. This is not the case with the survivors, especially for the children who survived the Holocaust. Following the liberation, they confronted a new reality and the reality was one that they had no where to go to. Everything was taken from them. Their families, their homes, their communities, their friends. They had lost their childhood and, in some cases, even lost their names. They were devastated, both physically and emotionally. Dr. Sharon Kangisser-Cohen is the Director of the Diana and Eli Zborowski Center for the Study of the Aftermath of the Shoah at the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem. In this lecture, she will be highlighting the challenges that the Jewish children had to confront, trying to survive the Nazi occupation, and their experience after the effects of their attempts to rebuild the new lives after the war. Sharon, please. Sharon, you need to unmute yourself. There you go.
—Thank you. OK, so good afternoon, good evening, whatever time zone you're in and thank you for joining us this evening. I hope that within the next 50 minutes or so, we will try and think about some issues that relate to the idea concerning the rehabilitation, or the rehabilitation with a question mark, of child survivors of the Shoah after the war. I will start by saying that the research concerning post-war rehabilitation is in its infancy. And over the past 10 years, I would say that it's become more of a research topic amongst scholars, which is— which is wonderful and it’s welcome. And also talks to the fact that there is so much about the Shoah and the period of the Shoah itself and its aftermath that still needs to be discovered, researched, thought about and written about. So, postwar life of Jewish child survivors is in its infancy, as I can say, and has been very much developed as part of the Eli and Diana Zborowski Center at Yad Vashem, where we have had some publications on this matter and scholars from around the world participating in discussions and research. The question of what happened to children during the war is also a relatively new topic of research. And this was notprimarily done after Debórah Dwork and Clark University managed to create a very, very impressive work and on children and their experiences during the war, and which really pushed the whole idea of let's think about this group of victims, the children, the Jewish child, as a separate group within the Jewish larger collective because of their age, and because of their circumstance, and because of their own obviously particular emotional and psychological stage of development as well as Nazi policy, they suffered a particular fate. They suffered a particular fate, and therefore their experiences needed to be examined independently or separately. And what's important, what the Debórah Dwork points out is that essentially one of the issues of writing about or discovering or thinking about what happened to Jewish children during the war, for the most part, we know the majority of Jewish children were murdered by the Nazis, is that there is very little contemporaneous evidence, meaning that they left very little trace. They left very little trace, because they weren't necessarily —at the age of four, five, six, seven or eight— writing down poetry; they weren't leaving letters; most of them were murdered and didn't give testimony; didn't articulate what happened to them during the period itself; and the story of what happened to Jewish children during the war is essentially a story that's told by adults of children — about what they remember happening to the children. And therefore, the child is not the subject, in terms of giving his or her voice, but rather is one that is told by the adult world that survived the Shoah. What we do know that they were obviously, as you know, I'm sure, diaries that were left by younger adults, teenagers that give a glimpse into that particular experience. But essentially the idea also in terms of the Nazi documentation — they weren't recording, necessarily, what is happening to Jewish children up until the deportation to the death camps when it became also a policy of mass murder of Jewish children, which they essentially were the first, you could say, the first victims, along with the elderly, as they were the most vulnerable and weren’t seen as fit for labor. So, even the Nazi documentation—
—Sharon, if you could, we lost your PowerPoint. So, I don't know if you did this purposely, but if not, if you can re-share your screen so we can see your PowerPoint. Thank you. Sorry for disturbing you. So I'm getting so he's talking about the absence of the child experience from contemporaneous Jewish and non-Jewish documentation, and then later on after the war. But we do have some wonderful collections from the early, early post-war period, in which child survivors were generally defined by research as being 16 and under at the age of liberation, who were giving testimonies, early testimonies as to what they experienced. Now, I cannot in this brief time that we have together — you'll have to come to Yad Vashem for more lectures and workshops and the like— I can only give a few examples of experience. And I want to link those examples of experience to later on, but to talk about post-war rehabilitation and adaption. So what are the issues that are facing children at the time? And then what then becomes the challenges that they go through? So, essentially—one second I'm trying to scroll—I’m taking a few slides of extracts from a very important collection that was done by the Jewish Historical Society straight after the war and is essentially housed at Yad Vashem in its original, as well as the Jewish Historical Institute and the oral history archive at Hebrew University of Jerusalem has translated testamonies. So, this is just a fragment from a child by the name of C.. We don't know any more particulars about the person who gave this testimony. And she tells the interviewer the following: “Night, a weak light of kerosene lamps lights up the dusk that reigns over the room. Suddenly I felt someone's touch. I opened my eyes. Over me stood mother, dear, unforgotten mother. I understood that the action expected since the week had come. The mediator of experience for children generally, and particularly during the war itself, is obviously the adult world and particularly parents, if at the certain points in time the parent was still around, or surviving, or hadn't been deported to navigate a reality for for a child. And what we see in the small little excerpt, and I'm sure that you can see other things, but the idea is that you have a domestic situation; you have a mother doing a normal thing, waking up the child, however, for an abnormal event — an event that is not about waking up to reality, of getting up and continue with the day, but an action which usually means a selection and a deportation. And what is interesting is that the child, him or herself, understands that action means something else. They've been waiting for it and it had come, and now the function of the parent is to mediate that experience. Karolina Matecka, at the age of four also talks to this point. “The Germans entered, and I asked daddy why he did not take me to preschool. He told me that the war was on. I did not know what that meant and he did not explain it at all. I did not know I was Jewish. I did not know what that meant. I did not go outside often and I did not know why. I rarely played with children. I had one friend and I cried a lot after she died.”
Again, parents are mediating a reality, and in this instance, the child is not told about what war means, the fact that she is Jewish and is essentially operating under the same sort of traumatic situation, of just been confronted with war, not knowing necessarily how to understand that, particularly at the age of four, five or six, probably four when it happens, but later on, further on. But the parent is not is now mediating, and in some instances, when we try to understand what children understood about the war and what was happening, it was obviously about parents. And we see in many testimonies that parents weren't necessarily explaining or sharing what was actually happening in the world around them. And one could think about why that would be. But children are navigating through themselves. And then, after essentially a time where people under Nazi policy are being hunted, killed and deported children don't necessarily need that navigation because they're seeing it or they're witnessing it for themselves, and then we have to think about: how do they interpret what they are seeing and what they are witnessing? And so Rozalia Barnet tells us the following, it's not a story — it gives us the following testimony. “One day I chased a cow to a pasture and there I saw my brother. He found out that from Ciechanowska where I was and found me. He told me then that he was with the partisans. I asked him for my mother and he cried then and told me how our parents had perished. The Germans took them to the Jewish cemetery and told them to dig a hole. Who could jump over a ditch, could save his life. The hole was very deep and wide. Mother jumped and fell in. After her jumped father and the Germans shot them both. My brother stood behind the fence and saw it all. We both cried and I told my brother that I will go and register as a Jew and they should kill me too, because I don't want to be alone in this world. My brother consoled me that maybe we will survive and he will take care of me. I ran to the house to bring him sour milk and biscuits. Suddenly I hear shots. I return and already my brother was dying. A Ukrainian noticed him and shot at him. I washed his wounds and he lived for five minutes more.” What is happening for children during the Shoah is essentially— we could think about two major themes amongst many, but two major things that I want to talk about. Number one is what Janoff-Bulman who, a psychologist in her research called, “shattered assumptions,” that essentially the world in which children were born, the world in which they were raised, the world in which they understood was essentially those assumptions about how life and the world works was shattered by the Shoah, because despite getting up in the morning or being woken up by your mother, it meant the beginning of a new day, now, being woken up by your mother was talking about the beginning of an action. So the idea of: how do we create after the war, a sense for children that can basically undo those shattered assumptions. Now, the world they know has completely changed, is completely and radically different. Instead of a trajectory to life, the trajectory is to death. That's the fate of European Jewry. So, what do we do afterwards when those assumptions return to a post-war world? And the second issue, which is so important is that essentially we know that children generally— and we talk about normative psychological theories of child development— is that the world is mediated through adults and by adults. Children learn to socialize. Children learn to mediate their reactions and their emotions. And the adult world becomes a function of mentoring children as to how to be in the world. And essentially without those adults — with the adults who are now receiving more and more through their murder. The question is how emotionally can a child socially mediate their lives? And for the most part, in terms of the Shoah, can they, in fact, at all survive? Because a child of four or five, six, seven will not be able to manage to survive the Shoah without an adult within their realm. So, it's either a parent, two parents, a brother, siblings, extended family, a rescuer, or partisans or whoever that might be. A child cannot survive on their own. And so the adult world is about physical survival, but it also becomes about emotional survival, how to mediate emotionally that period. So these themes of reconnecting to an adult world and the idea of reformulating assumptions about the world — it becomes some of the main tropes of post-war rehabilitation of child survivors. Dworka Frymet: “We were poor before the war, but now after father's death, we had nothing at all to eat. When we moved to the ghetto, we had our furniture, but in this room where we had to live, there was no room and the furniture was in the courtyard. I and my siblings were glad that we were moving. There was great enjoyment for us to take the furniture and different things out of the apartment. My mommy cried a great deal then and she said that we were going to our death. She buried the best we had, the Passover dishes, because she thought that maybe one one of us children will survive and we'll take these things perhaps. Mommy was sick constantly from worry. My older brothers had to carry her to the ghetto (because she could not walk) to our new apartment. Other Jews could get the staples, but we had no money. Mommy and the children were swollen from hunger.” What children who managed to survive the war then also have to deal with are those images of the parents, who had become, for the most part, increasingly weak or sick, unable to necessarily sustain themselves and the families that they had. For the fact that essentially starvation was rampant, it was a policy. And what we have are those images of children having to look and remember their parents as people who, unfortunately, were no longer able to keep them alive and to keep themselves alive, and children becoming adults or taking on roles in order to sustain the family. I'm going to move on from the slide for the moment. I want to introduce you to the story of one particular survivor who is still alive and with us today, someone by the name of Yehuda Bacon, whose work we've dealt with a lot at the Zborowski Center. Yehuda Bacon was born in Czechoslovakia in Moravska Ostrava. He is deported to Theresienstadt with his family, and later on deported again to Auschwitz-Birkenau with his family. One of his sisters had managed to leave Czechoslovakia before the beginning of the war, and he arrives essentially to Birkenau and is placed in the Czech family camp at Birkenau itself. At some point during the deportation of Hungarian Jews in 1944, Yehuda Bacon is working with a few other boys in the camp, they are basically schlepping stuff all around the camp, all different types of materials, including building materials, wood, feces, bodies, and Yehuda Bacon asks the Sonderkommando at some point, and I'm just making it very simple, but it’s a very long, complicated testimony, if he could basically see the inside of the gas chamber and the crematoria at Birkenau. And according to Bacon, the member of the Sonderkommando that he had met and become acquainted with, Kalman Furman, asked him, “you're a child, why would would you want to go into the crematorium and the gas chamber?” And he says that “if I survive, I need to tell the world what I have seen.” And he doesn't say that in his testimony, but in a sense, he sees it as his obligation. Yehuda Bacon is an artist, he sees the world vision, he takes it in visually and he basically essentially starts sketching right after the war what he had seen and particularly these pictures, these drawings from 1945, which become the basis of post-war trials, proving essentially that the gas chambers and crematoria existed in the way that we understood them to exist. So we have a picture on the right of crematorium building and the picture on the left of the inside of the gas chamber, itself. And I'm bringing this slide because I want to talk to the point is that we have children who are entering this space of— this world of the death camp, and for the most part, the majority of them are murdered. So any small voice that we have from that place, or those places, any survivors from death is rare. There's nothing more to say, but it's rare. But what is interesting is that what happens is that survivors, adults and even young children start to believe you have this important notion that they need to bear witness, that they might not survive, but if in the off chance that they do that, they have an obligation to tell the story of what happened at these sites. And that becomes another very important post-war trope for children, and I'll get to it later on. But we see children are confronting not just the beginnings, which are awful, whether it's anti-Jewish legislations to ghettoisation, to deportation, to labor camps, they are children who are witnessing death camps and even the crematoria of Birkenau. So after the war, the question is: of the hundred and fifty thousand, which is estimated by the JDC, the Joint, after the war, the hundred and fifty thousand children that were essentially counted as being still alive out of the one and a half million children, that was the pre-war figure. People are trying to think how and in what way can we help? What can we do with this with this miracle, Essentially the hope as well of the Jewish people because they were young and they could rebuild lives and they could restart life. And obviously the most important thing to deal with was the issue of health. The children, and survivors generally, were suffering from a whole host of health issues, from dysentery to all sorts of terrible malnutrition, getting them back— and that was ultimately the first objective: health care services. And there was an important Rachel Herzog that's just been published by Yad Vashem dealing with the health care system and also of doctors who were survivors and later on, doctors who worked in the in the newly state of Israel. So, the issue of medical health Ada Schein, also an important scholar dealing with issues of health. But I want to talk about something different because I think that touched on it in my former slides, which is really the idea of what about the emotional and the psychological world of child survivors? What about how to help children and deal with the trauma of what they'd seen and try to help them figure out a way to rebuild or move forward and rebuild shattered assumptions, regain a trust in humanity, choose to be members of humanity and not choose to leave it. And what's interesting, it's not such a black and white question, because even if a survivor for the most part decides I'm going to live and I'm going to rebuild and I'm going to have all of these positive in a sense that a trajectory of rejoining life, it doesn't mean to say that with throughout those years after liberation that they didn't still contemplate suicide, didn't deal with depression or fight depression and all sorts of behaviors that as a result. So even though we can say we have so many that have rebuilt, we also know that even within the same person, that's not necessarily a constant path. Now, the JDC, which was really probably the most remarkable organization after the war in terms of it being an organization across denominations in the United States in terms of Jewry, and managed to raise funds and really became a lifeline for the survivors. And after the war and thought about how we dealing with health and deal with education and we'll deal with physical conditions. But what about the emotional world of the child survivors? And what they did is essentially commissioned a psychologist, Dr. Paul Friedman, who had come from Europe. He wasn't an American. He was an immigrant, and he was a psychologist who basically became an expert in suicide later on, but he was employed by the Joint to essentially go to Europe in 1946 and visit European countries in which there were child survivors living in different types of institutions, whether it's schools, orphanages or DP camps, and basically write a report: what is happening to children emotionally? Because we need to understand, as the Joint did and as Friedman did, that if we are dealing with this— a group of people who might be physically rehabilitated, but if you aren't emotionally rehabilitated, they can in fact, not necessarily sustain themselves into the future. So Paul Friedman travels to Europe, and he writes a report and he writes a series of articles and observation, which is quoted here that comes from one of his articles and commentary in 1948, he says children, “ they all gave evidence of an incredible physical and psychological resilience. but I soon discovered that these children had serious emotional problems, usually of a neurotic nature that would have been distinctly abnormal not to have had them.” He understands that you cannot emerge from this black hole without having been affected, that there are scars and there are wounds which is normal to have after having experienced such a disaster. And so he's saying we need to figure out how to help. Interestingly enough, we have Lena Kuechler, a survivor herself, who is called in Krakow by the Jewish Committee to establish essentially an orphanage and in Zakopane for Jewish children who had now been orphaned. And she says one of the issues is —and she and she gives in her testimony -- it’s a testimony from Yad Vashem that is based on an earlier interview— that says, “There were absolutely no suitable people,” I’m talking about she's called to create an orphanage, but she's saying, “there were no suitable people. There was no one. I picked out a certain group of women who had returned from the Lager Auschwitz. These women had lost everybody. They lost their husbands. They had lost their children. I said to them a few words. I told them that if they do not have their own children to take to their hearts, these children who do not have parents, we should become true mothers to these children. This will be the aim of all of our lives.” Who is there to look after the children? Most of the children are orphaned, are orphan from both parents, often from one. Whether or not their families had managed who had lived overseas to relocate them, or as we know, in terms of children who had been in the hands of rescuers, some of them are brought back and some of them were never reclaimed for all sorts of reasons. But Lena Kuechler says, ‘fine, we need to look after these orphans, we need to look after these children, but who's going to do it?’
And who’s going to do it? These traumatized women themselves, who have lost their own children. These are the people that we have. And so what does that mean, looking after children who have survived when you, in fact, lost your own? Paul Friedman goes around and he creates this report and — the source is in the JDC archives, the Geneva Collection, and we've got a copy at at Yad Vashem of the report. And he goes on in these gives, case by case details of what he sees as happening to children, what he sees is going on, and he gives countless examples. So, for example, in France he's noting that one of the issues that are dealing with soiling, incontinence. “There were some cases of uncontrolled diurinal soiling. For example: a three year old boy was placed in a home because his mother, a returnee from a concentration camp, was sent to a tuberculosis sanitarium. The child who cried all the time, repeating all along that he wanted to go back to his mother, began soiling himself. Each time he sold himself, he was being punished by being sent to bed for the rest of the day.”
Paul Friedman's conclusions, essentially, from his six month journey in Europe was the carers of these children really weren't equipped, even if they had been through the war themselves, and maybe even more so, but he doesn't say that such words, to deal
with and to help these young children. They were the only ones available. In France he was talking about members of the Resistance who took over the children and they just didn't have the tools, they didn't have the skills. And what was most difficult is that it was not just about responding to behavior. There was a very gross disconnect between what children were presenting in terms of the behaviors and their stories and their past. And he's saying, if you understand what they went through, then you can help them, or then you can treat them, but you can't rely on a parental or a model or a psychological model where you're essentially responding to the behaviors and trying to change the behaviors without thinking about what these children have actually been through. So, Paul Friedman, “So far, the various problems, the children seem to be have been utterly neglected. At no time has there been any attempt at individual understanding .Although at times devoted and intuitive, the supervisors failed to see that the methods were wrong.” Now, we know that there are survivors who left testimonies that are amongst us that claim that they if it wasn't for the people around them after the war, that they wouldn't have been able to survive the post-war period. So on the one, we have Paul Freedman saying we have a lack of skilled care in terms of dealing with children of trauma, and yet we have to understand at the time in the 40s, how much was there that was written about how to help children with trauma? And what Freud was developing as a result of the war, but we don't have a corpus of child psychology that's had to do with the children of trauma. So we have to keep a perspective. But we do know that there are many individuals who are in Europe and later in the States or in later in the State of Israel that do have — maybe not necessarily always skills, but know how to help. And I return to Yehuda Bacon because Yehuda Bacon is essentially a young boy who is orphaned at the end of the war. He loses his mother, he loses father, he loses his sister, and he comes back to Czechoslovakia and he comes back to Prague and he knocks on the door of a synagogue in Prague, and it's opened by a man who says, “I’ve just come back myself from the concentration camp. I can't I can't help you, but I know who can. A man by the name of Peter Peshmishel, who has used castles around around Prague in which he is bringing in children who are victims of war, children who are Jewish and children who are not Jewish. Children who are Slovakian children and children who were German children who had been displaced. And he gathers them around and basically, Yehuda Bacon says, and in his painting, which is one of the exhibits in the museum itself, is that this is what restored him, this is what reversed his shattered assumptions, this gave him the reason to live— was through the work and the love and the guidance of Peter Peshmishel. And he titles his painting, ‘To the Man Who Restored My Belief in Humanity.’ It wasn't something the children could do alone. It needed to be mediated by mentors or educators or people around them who were able to relate to what children had been through and listen and hear their stories. And then, on the basis of that, help them think about ways for them to move forward. But what Bacon is saying throughout his work, it's not just what he taught him in terms of skills or continue to encourage his drawing, It was that his behavior as a person, in terms of a human being, in the way he treated the children around him, became a figure, which restored his faith in humanity. Yehuda Bacon is saying the example I have is Birkenau, of people, of adults, of abusing people. Those are the images— and he said that even in Birkenau, I would find an SS who sometimes was kind. There is kindness in everybody, even an SS person in Birkenau. However, it's the model with the mentoring of ‘mentches’ of people who are good and kind that ultimately say to me that, yes, the world does have goodness. And therefore, on that basis, despite the challenge and difficult, I will commit to being part of the world. And it might not necessarily be a big figure like Peter Peshmishel, who is recognized as a Righteous Among the Nations. yet Paul Friedman talks about the fact that there was another “child of 4, whose parents had been deported, was placed in a home for deaf mutes during the German occupation. She stopped talking after six months. Following the liberation she was given to a foster mother, a pianist and by profession, who gave the child piano and singing lessons. The child's speech and hearing was soon restored.” The sad irony is that it depended who who looked after you, who picked you up after the war, which home you went to, who looked after you, what kind of person were they, were they an example of humanity, had they had an intuition of how to help? And that, for the most part, which is so sad in terms of child survivors, the ones who survived, was really a matter of luck as to who were the people they were actually going to look after you and therefore give you probably the best chance you had of emotionally but also physically surviving and rebuilding a life. And one thing that's also crucially important is that for child survivors, that they needed to be without the child survivors for the most part, that essentially not necessarily child survivors, but children generally, but particularly child survivors, were able to not necessarily communicate what had happened, but they all knew what they had gone through. And so Perla Freitag, who was the sole member of her family. She ends her testimony in the following way: “I entered the children's residence at 25 Narutowich Street. I like this place very much; I'm with many children. We work together and study together. Here I do not feel so lonely, I'm no more depressed.” Rehabilitation is forming bonds of belonging and chains and communities of belonging. The war disrupts family life. It tears people apart. And essentially survival for the most part is a singular sole activity. You are surviving on your own. Children are surviving, obviously, with with adults, but most of them survived the war and they, for the most part, have lost so many and sometimes only sole members. The way the children are able to be rehabilitated is by reconnecting. So whether it’s with a mentor who they can connect with and who are compassionately showing them the path, or through children's groups or children's institutions, they need to feel a sense of belonging and community and no longer alone. As we know, psychosocially children need to be in community, but so much so after the war when they can no longer survive as individuals and as orphans. Now, the interesting thing here is that —why bring this— is because Paul Friedman is in conversation with Louis Pasternack, who's another psychologist from Vienna, saying children need to be rehabilitated with other children. And Friedman is saying: no, children need to be rehabilitated in a family structure. And there's a very big debate within the psychological — not big, big debate, but it's a debate as to what is the best way to go about these children's homes, youth Aliyah (immigration to Israel), kibbutzim or do children need to be in families in a nuclear normative environment? And what is the best way? And we can see that there is this debate, and one could say that it's very hard to evaluate what is the best option. The question is, what is the quality of care? Because in either situation, you could be faced with a very difficult reality or a wonderful reality. As I said, it really was the luck of the draw. And so I want to end this presentation at this point and open up for questions and just leave by saying that we're talking about, as I said, reconnection and rebuilding and rebuilding and or re-thinking about a world in which the assumptions that were as a child was born into were shattered, and how do we help the children after the war to still believe that it is worthwhile to be part of the human project? And that is really in the hands of carers and it's really in the hands of education and of educators. And it's really one of the, I would say, few legacies that we have of the Shoah, because if we think about children in trauma, which unfortunately is still part of our world, we have to think about how to help children with trauma. And the Shoah and its after effect does give some sort of learning model to help us understand that a child cannot rehabilitate him or herself alone, and that the level of care and the nature of care and more importantly, connecting to their individual story is vital for them to be able to start the road to— not a full recovery, but a recovery in which life can still be embraced and enjoyed. So thank you.
— Thank you very much, Sharon. Before I go through questions, I would just like to reflect on something you said. Obviously the ability to treat these children immediately after the war upon liberation was limited, so it took time, sometimes weeks, months and maybe even longer. Paul Friedman, you said, only came in 1946, so that's significant time after liberation. My question to you would be, has there been done any research, and if so, what were the results, of trauma coming up not immediately after, but five, 10, 15, 20 years after the liberation?
—Ok, so that's a good question. First of all, it's a question that's an advert, because in September, we are hosting an international workshop on the psychological rehabilitation of survivors, generally, not specifically just children, but generally after the war, because it's an area that really was brushed on but not not investigated enough. So, at Yad Vashem, we've got a seminar from scholars from around the world who will be looking at different psychological and emotional therapies, treatments that might have been available. However, we know that the the research that's been done has really been done with adults survivors and not with child survivors and for kids, because for the most part, after the war, except for these depositions that I'm showing you and some testimonies— for the most part, children did not speak about their experiences after the war. They did not give formal testimony. They weren't, for the most part, asked formally about what they'd experienced. There were different projects that were small. But child survivors generally were a group of people who, for the most part of their lives, up until the age of around 60, and unless there were survivors, for example, Yehuda Bacon, who becomes a witness in the Eichmann trial because of his drawings, were people who were not asked necessarily and also felt that they didn't want to tell their stories because they wanted to become like everybody else and they wanted to be immigrants, and a whole lot of reasons why there was a silence around child survivors and the only thing we can have now is with later testimonies, which we do have a lot of, because as they age, they began to speak and as the older generation of survivors had passed on, the next generation began to speak. And we know from our experience that the survivors that we've been hearing speak to us one on one for the last 15 years actually were children during the war. So that whole speaking about what happened is really much, much later. And so we have to do research on that. But keeping in mind that there will be research that's based on someone's memories or that are 50, 60 years old, them reflecting on that period, I mean, even 1946, these children are reflecting, even though it's quite— they're still reflecting on what happened to them, but now they're reflecting that a much larger gap, and we need to take that into consideration. —So today, when we encounter survivors who are now in their 80s, possibly a little bit older in the 90s, do we still see traumas, specifically at an elderly age are related directly to the children? One of the questions that came up was addressing that. And are these people getting any specific help which are related to that — it’s a question that came from the audience?
—Sure. Children are— it's interesting because on the one hand, children were given an opportunity to rebuild their lives, they were liberated and they had a whole their whole lives ahead of them. However, what I mentioned before is that the foundations of their lives were shattered. You know, for an adult survivor, they had 20 years, 30 years of living in a normal world. When people behave normally. A lot of the time, young children were born into— just on the cusp of chaos, or just beginning to be. And the foundations of what is normal are really not there. And the question was much harder for them to then think about life after if you don't have the foundation. Just the small example: parenting, if people children lost their parents at a very young age, they didn't have a parenting model when they had their own children. So there were delays in the experience, or gaps in their experience and then life became difficult when they reach those milestones. Now we know the work of Judith Kestenberg, which began in the 80s, which is a phenomenal work, which she basically recognized a group of child survivors She started to interview them in a remarkable collection called ‘The Kestenberg Collection Psychological Questioning’ to see the effects of trauma. And what she developed was a whole theory of a therapy of essentially helping them fill the gaps. For example, one of the things that they used to do is they would gather together in groups, and that's why it's so important, the idea of collecting, sharing your experiences. They would help child survival support groups in which they would play childhood games or they would have a pajama party, or they would have a pillow fight to try to reclaim those parts of experience that they had been not allowed to have, so to speak. So she was trying to restore that. Now, her whole work then led to a whole child survivor, therapeutic model and practitioners— one of them, the most —Judith Kestenberg is no longer alive, but one of her students— one of her co-workers was Eva Fogelman, who lives in the United States, in New York— and the therapy became widely available. Every stage of life or every milestone could trigger a traumatic memory and a flashback, which might lead to some sort of difficulty emotionally. We know that survivors who didn't speak for the most part of their lives, at some point they had some sort of traumatic intrusion or some memory, which all of a sudden reminded them that, in fact, they it was still there. It was still with them, despite the fact that they had survived and overcome. And we know that there's been a lot of work that's been done about what would help survivors and their older parts of their lives to deal with these child, these childhood traumas. And one of the main things they talk about is the idea of telling your story, becoming a witness, feeling that your story now has meaning because now you're an educator and you passing onto the next generation, writing your memoirs as a way of giving a frame to the chaos of trauma. So speaking and retelling has been a very, very —and also, we know survivors talking to groups traveling with them to Poland or to Germany — as they become survivors, experts or educators, they are able to feel that the experience has meaning because they are passing it on to the next generation. So there were all these different models of them. But we know that there are some who might be fine and might be well and not necessarily all the time and and find it difficult, especially when they're aging and they find themselves increasingly vulnerable in the aging process. —So we have many, many questions I'd like to adress just two more to those who were unable to address the questions to Sharon, please do send your questions to the email that has been provided on the chat. Our two questions that came up from different angles from the participants One had to do with sexual or child abuse. That obviously is additional abuse or additional trauma to the total overall trauma that already the family of the child went through So that was a question that came up from different areas. And the second question that came up from several of the participants in different manners was the fact that in many cases the parent himself, were separated and then reunited with a child or went through the war with a child, he himself or she herself was in trauma, and while the child was growing without being able to really deal with his own child because of his parents trauma. So these two things came up through the questions —In terms of sexual abuse, there's a lot of work that's been done recently looking at issues of sexual abuse, mainly that didn't necessarily talk about children as much as the young woman. And it all depends. Look, we know that sexual abuse is part of the unfortunate realities of war regardless, and that it was rife during the Shoah, and even after. But in certain— especially, when we’re talking about this idea of the Russian soldiers coming in and raping and pillaging and all of these images, sexual abuse is there and it's always there, and it's unfortunately with us in human history. In terms of children, is that it's whether or not the children were asked about it and whether or not they were willing to to talk about it. And I interviewed a woman, about 15 years ago, who talked about the fact that she was abused by her rescuers sexually while she was hidden in France. And she never told anybody. She didn't even tell her husband. And after decades of marriage, one night she started to have a very difficult dream and got very upset and turned around her husband in bed decades later and told him the story of her sexual abuse. And it's got to do with the fact that society wasn't able to hear those stories. They didn't ask those questions. And people weren't willingly offering that, especially especially children who might not necessarily even know at the time what was happening, or if it was wrong, or if they should speak, or if they could speak. Very, very complicated. Judith Kestenberg’s testimonies do deal more with issues of sexual dysfunction as a result of trauma. I haven’t looked at all 1,500 testimonies, but I'm sure at some point someone is going to bring it up. But it wasn't something children spoke about or could even articulate or felt that they could articulate. So we don't have that much research on. The second issue is, yes, we've got a very important concept called “Generation One and a Half.” Child survivors are survivors themselves; they're also members of the second generation. Now, a member of the second generation with all that means in terms of having parents, if they're lucky, one or two, who themselves are survivors and carry the trauma of what happened to them during the war. And so they are in this really difficult situation of their own past and their own trauma, but also their parents’. Sometimes their parents are functioning and sometimes the parents are not functioning. And there, I would say, is a lot of pain and trauma from that — of returning to or being returned or reunited with parents who who aren't able emotionally to take care of the children anymore. And also in this one instance, it is a testimony by a woman named Sally Wasserman, who lives in Canada currently, who was from Poland, who was placed in the care of a very loving rescuer and whose aunt reclaimed her after the war. And they had an awful relationship after the war in Canada. And her real sense of why was that taken away from a from a carer that I loved and then I was connected to, and to have to an aunt who had so much difficulty dealing with the fact that I was the only survivor, of her whole family from Poland, and the relationship was very difficult. So we have all sorts of stories. But yes, Generation One and a Half — you’re a survivor and also the children of, and you have to deal with both stories. —Thank you very much. I apologize to the many questions that we're unable to address, and I do ask those who have the questions that were not addressed to please send them to us and we will share them with Sharon, who will get back to you as best as possible. It's a very disturbing lecture, a very professional. Thank you very much. As a second generation, I live this and I understand and I understand that I don't understand. It's extremely traumatic. And once again, Never again. Never again. And thank you very much. Thank you to all the audience for participating and let’s stay strong in our beliefs and in our moral abilities to have a better world. Thank you very much.
—Thank you. Shalom.
