Children in the Holocaust and its Aftermath: Historical and Psychological Studies of the Kestenberg Archive eds. by Sharon Kangisser Cohen, Eva Fogelman, and Dalia Offer

Abstract

Reviewed by: Children in the Holocaust and its Aftermath: Historical and Psychological Studies of the Kestenberg Archive eds. by Sharon Kangisser Cohen, Eva Fogelman, and Dalia Offer Paula S. Fass Children in the Holocaust and its Aftermath: Historical and Psychological Studies of the Kestenberg Archive. Edited by Sharon Kangisser Cohen, Eva Fogelman, and Dalia Offer. New York: Berghahn Books, 2017. viii + 266 pp. Cloth $120. Identifying and evaluating sources is fundamental in the history of childhood, 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. Specifically, it evaluates and seeks to use the oral interviews in the Kestenberg collection housed at Yad Vashem in Israel. While the volume is instructive in providing searching analyses of how difficult such sources can be for historians to use, it is also a cautionary example of the pitfalls of books largely dedicated to research methodologies applied to recalcitrant subject matter. The Kestenberg archive is an oral history collection of psychological interviews in which survivors recounted their experiences as young children during the Holocaust. Like other survivor testimonies, they are therefore also a form of witness to those horrific events. Judith Kestenberg was a psychoanalyst, and Milton Kestenberg was an attorney who pursued reparations claims on behalf of Holocaust survivors. In their project, begun in 1982 as the International Study of Organized Persecution of Children (ISOPC), the Kestenbergs located a significant number of child survivors of the Nazi regime's policies aimed at exterminating European Jewry. The survival of these children was the extraordinary and entirely unpredictable result of various maneuvers by Jewish parents to protect their children from an almost certain fate by placing them with Catholic neighbors or in convents and monasteries. Among the survivors were also children who had been hidden underground or with partisans in the forests and those who survived with their parents in cellars and other hideaways on remote farms. The children varied in age. All of them, regardless of their specific circumstances, were subjected to conditions that the Kestenbergs understood to be trauma inducing. "The project engaged mental health professionals from all over the world who began interviewing child survivors," (170) and one of its purposes was to understand how children responded to these traumas and the consequences for adult adjustment and mental health. As mental health [End Page 281] professionals, the interviewers were also deeply committed to effective diagnosis and interventions based on an evaluation of which kinds of conditions led to particular outcomes. The project was thus marked by the distinct goals of its interviewers, and while it was devoted to Jewish experience, it also interviewed some non-Jewish children, Poles, and Germans, whose wartime circumstances could be understood as traumatic. Each of the eleven investigators whose essays are gathered in this volume attempt to use these materials to make assessments—sometimes psychological, sometimes historical—of these conditions as well as to reflect on the limitations built into the interviews, and this combination of aims often makes the volume confusing. The reader is confronted with a large variety of psychological terms and several attempts to draw generalizable conclusions from interview data drawn from the scattered and unusual circumstances of particular child survivors. Some note the difficulties of using testimony about remembered and now long distant experiences, often of very young children. Several of the authors recognize how difficult it is to use this data in pursuit of generalizable quantitative or qualitative conclusions. Only a few of the essays provide a vivid introduction to the children themselves. One of the essays that does offer an entry into the lives of the children is by Christina Isabel Brüning. But Brüning's searching examination is of two German, non-Jewish interviewees. As a historian, she raises fundamental questions about whether trauma is an effective category for historical analysis since it erodes crucial historical distinctions between the experiences of Jewish children targeted in a campaign of annihilation and German children caught up in the cross winds of war and shaped by a racial ideology that was carried...