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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.
“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
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.
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