Some Wrote Books

After the Roundup by Joseph Weisman

Holocaust Survivor Testimonies and interviews

Forever Alert – German Child Survivors in Action Before 1945 and Beyond by Philipp Sonntag

Witnesses of the Holocaust

From The Last Witness: The Child Survivor of the Holocaust by Judith S. Kestenberg, M.D., and Ira Brenner, M.D.

“By then, this person’s memory of that part of life – ravaged by time and doubtful in the first place (the child was “too young to remember”) – will have faded into the barbaric ancient history section of the twentieth century. By then, revisionist historians will have done their best to “prove” that the Final Solution of the Jewish problem never existed, or that if it did, the death toll was “only” in the thousands, not the millions. By then, the world will have seen numerous genocidal attempts by the stronger against the less powerful; and the word Holocaust, which already is thought by some to have become overused and even commercialized,may have taken on totally new connotations.

Consequently, it is not difficult to envision the problems of psychohistorical research in that far-off time, which will include the accuracy and reliability of eyewitness reports and the limited degree to which they can be corroborated. The effects of time on one’s recollections add merely another level of doubt in sorting out the validity of memories of long ago, especially if children are involved. My first contact with child survivors came via my husband Milton, an attorney who spent many hours helping children remember what had happened to them so that they might qualify for compensation. When we joined the Group for the Psychoanalytic Study of the Second Generation, he stood by me and participated, and when I began to interview child survivors, he did too,with an open ear and heart.

My attention was then drawn again to survivors who were children during the war, by several parents who attended the Center for Parents and Children, where we did research and practiced primary prevention. We could observe the effects of child survivors’ hiding on the development of their own young children, and we were amazed to see how very early these parents transmitted to the children their own fears of being abandoned and never returned to their parents. One survivor had to escape from his homeland when only four years old. He had to learn a new language and for a longtime could not communicate with other children. This led to an attitude that was later reproduced in his own son, a four-year-old who, because encouraged to speak his parents’ European language, could not learn enough English to talk to other children. It was the son’s assigned task, it seemed, to resurrect the dead, which he did symbolically by holding back his feces and not dropping them into the toilet, where they might drown.

Some twenty-five years ago, faced with my first patient who was a child of survivors, I became concerned with the generationally transmitted effects of persecution, but I still knew very little regarding the adult fate of children who were themselves persecuted. I read several stories of how children rescued themselves, but I still knew very little about these young children except for my knowledge about the Theresienstadt children brought to Anna Freud’s Hampstead nursery and clinic after liberation. But nothing I read had the same effect on me as the analysis of a man who was born during the Holocaust and spent his first two and a half years in ghettos and two more in a concentration camp. The effect on his cognitive and moral development was overwhelming. I knew then that I must learn much more about the adult fate of young children who suffered under the Nazis,both those who survived with their parents and those who were left to make it on their own.”

The Last Witness: The Child Survivor of the Holocaust