Holocaust
Studies: A Journal of Culture and History
Abstracts of articles in Issue 11.2
- Children’s Voices and Viewpoints
in Holocaust Literature by Sue Vice
- In this essay I will discuss some examples of
Holocaust writing by, or about, Jewish children during the Holocaust
years. These two categories
consist respectively of contemporary material written by children,
including diaries and testimony; memoirs by adult survivors looking back
at their
childhood selves; and fiction. In the latter, literary and narrative
techniques used to convey children’s experience are very varied and are often
designed to present what is distinctive about a child’s viewpoint.
Both kinds of text, contemporary and retrospective, may include such elements
as misunderstanding, gaps in memory and varieties of irony, but, I will
argue, do not – and indeed cannot – include any representation
or sample of a child ’s
own language or voice.
- Drawing the Holocaust in 1945 by Nicholas Stargardt
- In the early summer of 1945, the Swiss Red Cross
invited 300 child survivors of the camps to recuperate in Switzerland
for a few months.
Many of the children came from Buchenwald. Among them were two
Jewish boys of 16: Kalman Landau was Polish, Thomas Geve, German. Both
had survived
Auschwitz, Buchenwald and the evacuation marches to Groß-Rosen
in the snows of January 1945, and – at different times – both
drew pictures to illustrate their experiences. A cycle of Landau’s
12 pictures would be published in the Swiss magazine Du in March 1946;
Geve’s had to wait another 50 years, mainly for family reasons,
before Yad Vashem and the Gedenkstätte Buchenwald brought them into
public view. This essay explores the ways in which these teenage
boys expressed their experience of the Holocaust in art during the first
months
after their liberation.
- Stolen Childhood: Austrian Romany Ceija Stojka and her Past by
Susan Tebbutt
- In her moving autobiographical accounts Wir leben im Verborgenen
(1988) and Reisende auf dieser Welt (1992) and in the poetry volume Meine
Wahl zu schreiben (2003), which includes images of some of her paintings,
Austrian Lovara Romany Holocaust survivor Ceija Stojka creates a unique
account of the pain and trauma of her childhood under the Nazis. Whilst
presenting dystopian images of the suffering of her family she never becomes
bitter, and offers substantial insights into the world of the Romanies.
In so doing she reclaims in part her stolen childhood and highlights the
importance of all children, whatever their racial origins.
- Between Adult Narrator and Narrated Child:
Autobiographical Writing by Former Members of the Kindertransporte by Andrea
Hammel
- This essay uses several autobiographical texts by former members
of the Kindertransporte to discuss the tension between institutional
history and personal life stories in relation to a number of issues
present in these texts. Authenticity, group identity, the cultural construct
of the ‘child’ concept and the fragmented self are examined
within the framework of Holocaust memoir writing and cultural and autobiographical
theory. The essay argues for a multidimensional analysis of such autobiographical
texts to reach a wider audience within and outside Holocaust studies.
- Between Persecution and Complicity: The
Life Story of a Former ‘Jewish
Mischling’ by Cathy S. Gelbin
- The particular treatment of persons of ‘mixed’ Jewish
and non-Jewish ancestry during the Holocaust remains an under-explored
topic in scholarly research on the Holocaust. Drawing on the relatively
new field of biography studies in Germany, this essay looks at the life
history of a former ‘Jewish Mischling’ in Germany to exemplify
the ways in which circumstances such as age, gender and religious affiliation
affected the diverse treatment of individuals belonging to this persecuted
group. Ralf G’s personal narrative is contextualised within the
Nazi debate on the definition and treatment of ‘mixed-race Jews’ to
show how these discourses and political practices impacted on the
individual self-construction of persons from intermarried backgrounds
at the time
of persecution and into the post-war period.
- ‘I wish I could be allowed to choose who I am’:
Jurek Becker, Victim Identity and Identity Crisis in Post-War Germany
by Catherine Piggott
- This essay examines
two texts by Jurek Becker (1937–97), who spent his
early years in Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen, later
claiming to have no memory of this. Becker’s essay ‘My
Jewishness’ reads as a vehement denial of his Jewish
identity, which in a post-war German context is synonymous
with victim. Becker seeks to disassociate himself from his
past and subvert this unwanted social identity. Nevertheless,
Becker is still intrigued by his past and mourns the death
of his family in ‘My Favourite Family Story’,
where the Jewish narrator laments the loss of great family
traditions, which he has often heard about but never experienced.
This essay suggests that together these two texts show that,
for Becker, children of the Holocaust carried the identity
of outsiders in post-war Germany. Defined and stigmatised
by contemporary society as a victim and ‘other’,
Becker could not access this past that continued to construct
his social identity. His family and its traditions are reduced
to characters in a story for Becker; he is caught in the
tension between past and present, at home in neither.
- Inheriting the Holocaust: Transfer of
Trauma in Doron Rabinovici’s
Suche nach M. by Denise Dick
- Psychologists have observed that unresolved
Holocaust traumas can be passed from survivors to their children.
This
phenomenon, termed trans-generational transfer of trauma, is
also evident in some literary works of second-generation authors.
This essay provides a brief introduction to the theory of trans-generational
transfer of trauma and shows how it can provide another way of
reading the literature of second-generation authors, such as
Doron Rabinovici’s first novel, Suche nach M. (1999).