An attempt to answer the question: who am I?Ĭlifford, a professor of history at Swansea University, has chosen to focus on young child survivors who left mainland Europe after the war for two reasons: their experience has hitherto been neglected by Holocaust studies and the double dislocation of war and emigration made for a “particularly compelling, collective, transnational story”. With pre-war memories that were indistinct or even non-existent, and without a living adult able or willing to fill in the key details of the childhoods, they “faced a decades-long struggle to assemble the tale of their origins – a simple but essential act of autobiography, fundamental to identity”. Why? Because most of them found it impossible to make sense of their lives when they didn’t know where they came from. This was easier said than done.Īs these young survivors – born between 19 – grew up, writes Rebecca Clifford, they began to ask parents, guardians and care workers about their early lives. They were encouraged to put the past behind them and “focus on the future”. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, many child survivors of the Holocaust were told they were the “lucky ones”: lucky to be alive, lucky to be young enough and resilient enough “to be able to shed the weight of unbearable memories”, and lucky to be the “objects of reconstruction efforts, rather than the subjects”.
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