Dan Snow's History Hit - Child Survivors of the Holocaust

Episode Date: September 23, 2021

The Holocaust was perhaps the most infamous and traumatic event of the Twentieth century and it seared itself into the consciousness of the world but some survivors find themselves in the strange position of having no memory of the events which they lived through. As the years pass, our connection with the Holocaust fades with the passing of each survivor. Indeed many of the surviving witnesses to the Holocaust were children many of whom were too young to remember or understand what went on. This has often been a painful, bewildering experience and for many of these child survivors, it has led to a lifelong quest to seek understanding of and connection with the communities and family members they lost. Dr Rebecca Clifford, herself related to a childhood survivor, joins Dan to explain the research she has been conducting into the lives of childhood Holocaust survivors. She and Dan explore some of their stories, the huge impact the trauma has had on their lives, whether it's possible to find closure, Rebecca's own personal journey through this subject and how to make sense of our lives when we do not know where we come from.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We're talking about the Holocaust today, we're talking about a particular group of people who lived through the Holocaust, and bizarrely, many of them don't really remember it. That's because they were children. They were infants, babies sometimes. And what does that mean, to live through a genocide, to live through the Holocaust, and so to be a survivor, but to have no recollection of it? Do you search that history? Do you hunt it out? Do you try and work out what happened to you? Or do you let it lie? search that history? Do you hunt it out? Do you try and work out what happened to you?

Or do you let it lie? Well, Rebecca Clifford is an Associate Professor of Modern European History at Swansea University, and she's author of a couple of books on the Holocaust, including Survivors, Children's Lives After the Holocaust. It was shortlisted for the History Prize in 2021, and I just couldn't resist inviting her on the podcast to talk about this if you want to listen to other podcasts on the holocaust we've got plenty of them we've got the story of the remarkable man who volunteered to go to auschwitz to provide intelligence in auschwitz we've got the story of the father and son team again that son volunteered to go to auschwitz to try and keep his father's name, which he succeeded in doing. You've got Mary Fulbrook

with her gigantic survey of the Holocaust. Truly one of the most interesting conversations I've ever had in this podcast. They're all available at HistoryHit.tv. You go to HistoryHit.tv, HistoryHit.tv, for a very small subscription, although it's 30 days free if you sign up today,

for a very small subscription after that, you get all of those podcasts from the back catalogue without the ads. And then you get access to a gigantic library of history documentaries. Hundreds and hundreds of history documentaries from all different periods, Stone Age to Nuclear Age. Go and check it out, everybody. I met some of you at the Tank Museum, Tank Fest, over the weekend. And lots of people subscribing there.

And lots of people telling me what they thought of the service. And you were all very pleased, apparently, with the range of history offered. So we got all that. And of course, it's growing all the time. We had at least two new shows a week. So please go and check it out. But in the meantime, everyone, here's the very brilliant Professor Rebecca Clifford. Rebecca, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. It's my pleasure to be here. Thanks so much for having me. Are people now talking to and studying the experiences of those that were children during the Holocaust? Is that something of necessity? Because we're losing that connection with people that were adults who went through that genocide? No. Great question, though. It's not really. Although you could put a very good argument on it and say, yes, this is indeed, in terms of interviewing Holocaust survivors,

it's now child survivors and adolescent survivors who are the only ones left, and this is our last chance to talk to them. And if we want to do interviews, which obviously I do, and that's the sort of lifeblood of my work as a historian, this is the last chance. But that's not really what motivated me to do it. I'll be perfectly honest. I've been an oral historian, which means I do a lot of my work through interviews. I've done that all through my academic career. So for coming up on 20 years now.

And I was just really interested in how people tell their stories that was actually the prompt for me I was working on a very very different project and we did so many interviews in that project I started to think about sort of the pattern of a story if that makes sense like especially where people start you know if I sat down with you Dan and said okay let's do an oral history interview and tell me about your life or tell me the story of your life, you'd probably start with your parents and your childhood and the place you were born. And noticing that pattern, I started to think, well, what if you don't know where you were born? What if you've never been there? And what if you don't know your parents? You know,

what if you don't know about your childhood? How do you tell the story of who you are? And so that's actually what brought me around to being really interested in this group of very young child Holocaust survivors, because so many of them had to kind of go through their lives, not knowing the answers to those very basic questions about their childhood. They might not have known anything about their parents. They might still not. They might have never seen the place where they were born, might have no memories of those early years, even though obviously they experienced them. So for me, that was actually the driver. What do you notice about how they describe themselves? Well, I guess what doing the interviews for this book and also listening,

I did some of them myself and others, I use historic collections of interviews and what I really notice, and it's not unique to child Holocaust survivors. There'll be many people listening to the podcast, I think, who recognize these issues from their own childhood and their own memories, is that it's really, really hard in a nutshell to explain who you are when you can't fill in those early parts of the patchwork of your life. And if you can't fill that in for so, so many people, it becomes a lifelong quest. It's really very difficult. We have a human imperative, I think, to explain who we are. So if you don't know, if you don't know the answers to those questions about your early life, you're very likely to search for them and keep searching. Now, the nature of the search is different for different people.

For some people, it's very much an external search for facts. For others, it's much more of an internal kind of soul searching. But I see them as two sides of the same coin, you will try to find out the answers to those questions. You will be driven. And as I write about in the book, in a way, you will be forced to become a historian of yourself. Okay, so quite apart from the trauma they've suffered during the Holocaust, is this lack of history, a lack of self-knowledge, is that also a trauma? Is it possible to generalise in your experience, your research about the toll that takes?

I wouldn't want to make any sweeping judgments about the group. As you'll know, there's 100 children, obviously now in their 70s and 80s, who are in the book. And they're as diverse as any group of 100 people could be in so many ways. However, yes, of course, it takes a toll. It's not necessarily a traumatic toll, although it is for some people, certainly. But it is something that eats away at you. And I guess one of the things that I was left with after doing the research was this thought of, my God, it's an enormous privilege to know where you come from. That had never dawned on me before, but it certainly dawned on me working on the book that we just take it for

granted. You probably do, and I do too, that I can tell you all about my parents, and I can tell you about the house I grew up in, and I've got lots of childhood memories that make sense because my parents helped me to understand them and my extended family. And to not be able to do that is very challenging and creates a kind of a lifelong, sounds a little silly to call it a quest, but it is something that eats away at you over the decades of your life and drives you to search in a way. Some people do experience that as extremely traumatic. Others are actually very curious and kind of have a wonderful burning curiosity. Others still are very angry about it. There's different emotional responses. I once said to a colleague, a very good

friend who came from a very different background, I said something about ancestors and she snapped at me that only posh people have ancestors. And I realized how lucky that was, something I'd taken for granted. I kind of knew where I'd come from. I knew that I came from a long line of square-jawed Scottish farmers who emigrated to Canada around 100 years ago. I guess I realized in that second, it was a great privilege knowing who you are. I think you've actually just summed it up better than I have. I suppose there's another thing, in all honesty, I should admit as well, which is I'm not a neutral observer of this topic. My mother is a child survivor of the Holocaust, and really that's one of the things she sort of said to me through my whole life is, you know, I could never fathom why everybody else had grandparents, and they knew about their

grandparents, and I didn't know anything. And every time I asked, you know, I just sort of go, oh, don't ask about your grandparents. So even though my mother was very curious, and this is true for a lot of the people in the book as well, they were asking as children, they wanted to know, they were trying to kind of probe those questions. But because the adults who were in their world were so traumatized, they often just ran up against a wall. So yes, it's a privilege to know your grandparents, your great-grandparents, to have a sense of being in a chain, like a link in a long chain. I certainly understand that better now. Let's come to the Holocaust itself. There is actually a huge variety of experiences of the people that you talk to, the interviewees. on the whole, were they willing, did they wish to

revisit their wartime experiences? Well, that's an interesting question because only 100 children in the book, obviously not children anymore, were all born between 1935 and 1944. So that is to say none of them was older than 10 at the time of the liberation in 1945. And what that means, so one of the things I do explore in the book is the nature of children's memories and what you're left with in terms of memory fragments when you don't have that social world that helps us fill in the gaps because children remember in fragmentary ways. So normally it would be our parents and our families help us kind of make a narrative out of these busted up fragments, basically. And so these children didn't have that. So they were all very, very young. So they all were

in continental Europe during the war. They lived in hiding. Some of them were in ghettos, some were in internment and concentration camps. I mean, some survived extreme experiences. But that doesn't mean that they remember them. So they were there. Their physical bodies were there and their minds were there, obviously, as well. But because they were so little, they haven't been able to retain those memories as a narrative format or make sense of them necessarily. So although when I interviewed them, we did talk about their memories of what they experienced during the war, it was never my point of emphasis in the interview. I always just wanted to know about their life after the war. And that's really

what the book is about. It's about children's lives after the Holocaust. And so we didn't always dig in too deeply to what happened during the war, partly because I did a lot of work with existing interviews, especially from really big collections, like this collection set up by Steven Spielberg called the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Archive. These are video interviews that have been done over the last 20, 30 years. You can see that for many child survivors, it's very upsetting to be asked, you know, tell me more about being in duration stat, because they don't remember. So they feel almost challenged. You know, it can upset the balance of the relationship in an interview because they

can't tell you much. They don't have many memories. I've got one woman that I write about in the book. You encounter her story on the very first page. She's got these memories. She remembers being in a room and it's filled with children and some adults and the children, some of them are crying, but the predominant feeling she has is of wood. She remembers there was wood. Everything was wooden, kind of rough wood, the kind you get a splinter from. And as she grew up, she kept asking her parents, what is this wood?

You know, what's this wooden room? And they kept saying, oh, it's nothing. And everybody has memories like that. And so she's always being sort of rebuffed by these people who she thought were her parents. And when she's in her late teens, she's having a row with the man she thought was her father. And she screams at him, I wish you weren't my father. And he finally says the truth. He says, I'm not. And this just both upends everything that she thought was true, everything she believed. And at the same time, she ends up feeling like, huh, okay,

well, that explains it then. She had all these memories she couldn't make sense of. Her parents never told her the truth. It turns out that her parents were actually her aunt and uncle, and the memory was of being in a concentration camp in Theresienstadt. But because they wouldn't explain it to her, she couldn't make any sense out of it either. That's very, very typical of the memories of very young child survivors. In the whole group of 100, there were only a tiny fraction who actually had really very traumatic concentration camp memories. Many children remember life in internment as simply feeling normal because they had no experience of anything else. And children are really good at making any situation feel normal.

So many describe it just seemed like normal life, even though obviously it was very much not normal life. So these experiences are traumatic, but in a different way than the trauma experienced by an adult or an older child as well in adolescence. It's partly just actually accepting that these are memories of a concentration camp, trying to make sense of that, trying to insert it into your life. That's the challenge for very young survivors. You're listening to Dan Snow's history we're talking about child survivors of the holocaust more after this what did Tudor men like their women to look like they should have broad shoulders fleshy arms fleshy legs and broad hips what did 17th century Londoners think of coffee a syrup of soot and the essence of old shoes. And what did executioners wear?

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a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Okay, so this is me asking my stupid question here, but do you think they had it worse not remembering compared to their older relatives and comrades? I think the worst situation, if I think about all the different people in the book, was the

situation where a child had some memories, like the one I've been describing, and never had anybody explain what they were, and was constantly kind of thinking, what am I remembering? What does this mean? That is the worst case scenario, I think, because then there's a question mark there at the middle of your life, if that makes sense. And there's so many people in the book for whom that's really the beating heart of their story is trying to make sense. And the problem is that in that period of the war and the early years after the war, there was a really deep belief that somehow child survivors were lucky in that they were so young, they'd just forget it. And just forgetting it was the right option. So we should not talk about it with child survivors, or we should talk about it only to

forget it. And the best thing for young children was just to put it behind them and move on because they could do that, it was assumed, and older survivors couldn't. And I think that assumption was wrong and actually very damaging for children. And in many ways, the very best thing, which didn't happen very often, happened occasionally, was to have a chance to talk about what had happened and to make it part of the life story because it is part of the life story and to integrate it into the sense of self, if that makes sense. To be told just to forget it and you're lucky and you survived and moved on, that was hugely, hugely damaging. So I think the

best thing was actually when children had a chance to ask questions and get honest answers. And that was pretty rare. So you say make sense of it. That doesn't mean recalling the violence inflicted upon them. Are you saying make sense of it as in they're trying to connect with their relatives, their pre-war lives? Yes. I think that's probably a big part of it. So where did I come from? Who were my parents? You know, everybody would rather know something about their parents than nothing, I think. Actually, very painful for me and awful is that I, in some cases, know more about the

parents of some of these child survivors than they ever did, because some of them passed away before the archives that had some really wonderful, rich information in them open. So for example, I've been really privileged and lucky to use the incredible digital archive of the International Tracing Service, which has so much information. And I've searched for the parents of some of the children in the book who passed away years ago and found just reams and reams of information. I think of one boy who's in the book in particular. He's not a boy, obviously. He died in the late 1990s. So he was never able to see this information. When I went and searched for him in the archive, I found his parents. I found more about them than you could have imagined. It turns out they were

incredibly brave. They were not just persecuted because they were Jewish, but also because they were communists. And even though they were arrested multiple times, they kept on meeting, they kept on going to communist meetings and kept on doing all sorts of subversive activity. And so, of course, what I found was their criminal records, which just shows people of such intense bravery. I found it shocking. And I just thought, he never knew this, but I know this. It didn't feel right. It still doesn't feel right. I wish I could tell him. Your parents were amazing. They were so brave. So I think that's probably the main driver for many child survivors is just to know, not the names of lost parents, but who they were as people.

That's very hard to know from documents, but occasionally you get lucky and you can see something of who they were. Did they get lucky or is it you? Is it the professional historian that's been able to get lucky? Both. I've had the benefit of being able to access some archives which have only been digitized very recently and so it would have been really hard for me or anybody else to access some of that information like the archive I've been telling you about. I would have had to go to Bad Arolsen in Germany and do that kind of by hand search and it would have been very complex. Some of the people in the book did do that on their own. These archives started

to open up in the 1990s and especially in Eastern Europe, more and more have opened since then. And many of the people who I was sort of closest to in the book, who I kept in touch with a lot and who I've had lots of conversations with, I would say most of them found out something about their parents. Not all of them lost their parents, of course. Not everybody in the book was orphaned. In fact, not even half were orphaned. Most were returned to at least one surviving parent. But for those who lost not just their parents, but their whole extended family, most have managed to find out quite a lot, I would say, but maybe not what they wanted, which is to know something of who their parents were as people and not simply names on a birth or death certificate or a marriage

certificate. However, for all that, I would say certainly in the last 10 years, pretty much all of them have found out something. There is one exception in the book. I talk about her in one of the later chapters. She was never able to find out anything because she doesn't know her own name. And if you don't know your own name, you can't search for your parents. I think that's a fairly uncommon but not rare trajectory for a child survivor. She survived in hiding.

She was given a false identity. And at the end of the war, nobody knew her real identity anymore. So it's entirely possible her parents survived but couldn't be found because she couldn't be connected to them anymore. For those of them that have made discoveries, found out things, has that helped them find peace? Well, that's interesting. I'm thinking of one of them in particular, who I really adore him, actually,

and we've stayed in touch and we talk quite frequently. And the answer is no. But he always assumes, every time he's about to find out a new piece of information, he assumes, finally, I'll get some peace, I'll get some peace. And he doesn't. And I think there's an honesty in that actually, that there's a kind of a burning desire to find out the information. But the road doesn't have an end. You find out something and you just realise you want to know more, you want to know more. I'm thinking of this particular child survivor. What he desperately,

desperately wants is not to know his mother's name. He knows that. Not to know where she died. He knows that. He just wants to know what she looked like. It's the 20th century. You think, well, school photos and this and that. Surely there's a photo of this woman somewhere. And he is obviously searched. I've searched. Other friends of ours in archives and libraries around the world have searched. Nobody's found anything. And I think every time you find a piece, it's not necessarily satisfying or cathartic. It makes you want to know more. How did their experiences shape their approach to parenting, to memory, when it came to their turn? There is a chapter in the later part of the book about that, because many child survivors found it

really, really hard when their own children were born. Not a surprise, really. In fact, there's one wonderful woman in the book, again, somebody I'm very close to, Paulette, and there's a bit where she describes the shock of being faced with the vulnerability of having little children. And she in particular says, you know, she wasn't too bothered when her son was born. And she was okay at first when her daughter was born. But then when her daughter reached the age that she had been when she last saw her own mother, she went through this period of about a year when she couldn't pick up her daughter, couldn't cuddle her, gave her all kinds of presents, but didn't want to physically touch her. She was just going through an awful moment of reckoning. Every time she looked at her daughter, she thought, oh my gosh, this is how little I was when my mother had to leave me.

And so she had a real crisis in her relationship with her own daughter at that point. And then it got better. But I think to this day, she feels very guilty about it. So I think many child survivors actually found it very, very difficult to be parents themselves. And certainly maybe recognize that now because they've in general found it much easier to talk to their grandchildren about what they went through than to their own children. Which maybe shouldn't surprise us because we want to protect our children from our own pain. I think it's a very natural response. from our own pain. I think it's a very natural response. How has this journey that you've been on, how has this experience changed your response to your mother, to your family story? It's changed everything. I see that side of my family with a lot more compassion, I think. I understand their reactions to things differently and not just that of my mother. My mother was an

infant survivor so she was born in a complete chaos and wreckage and destruction in Budapest in 1944. I understand my grandmother who passed away a few years ago now really differently too, understand the decisions that she made differently and I think the whole, it's just left me with an overwhelming sense of compassion for their choices and their lives and the difficulties that they've had. And especially my grandmother in being warm or open or welcoming in many ways, she became a very closed person

and it's been incredibly enriching. And it's also been very revealing for me as a historian, because we like to think of ourselves as objective historians, and we don't want to get too close to the bone. But this project is very close to the bone for me. And I'm so glad I went there. I spent a long time thinking, is it okay for me to do something that's so personal? Now, my family history doesn't come into the book at all. I didn't want my story to intrude in any way on the stories of the children in the book. I wanted it to be about them. But it's left me with the sense that I would really love one day to write a book about us,

I would really love one day to write a book about us, my family, and me. It's not a mistake that I became a historian, I think. And I enjoyed having the chance to think about that. It's very introspective in some ways. And it's opened up vistas for my feature work that, I mean, I think in some way, I always want to work on this now. I'm not done with it. I found writing Survivor is one of the most, yeah, I know this will sound strange because it looks like a very depressing topic. It was never depressing for me. I found it one of the great pleasures of my life, thinking about it, researching it and writing it. And I don't feel finished with it. There were so many stories that didn't make it into the book. They want their own books. I can keep going with it. So I think that's what I intend to do.

Well, please come on and tell us all about it when you do that. What is the book called? The book is called Survivors, Children's Lives After the Holocaust. Thank you so much, Rebecca. Good luck with it. Oh, you're very welcome. Anytime. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country,

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