Innocent Witnesses: Childhood Memories of World War II by Marilyn Yalom

Abstract

Reviewed by: Innocent Witnesses: Childhood Memories of World War II by Marilyn Yalom Jennifer Craig-Norton Innocent Witnesses: Childhood Memories of World War II. By Marilyn Yalom. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021. xx + 195 pp. The impact of war on children and childhood could not be a more important and timely subject as conflict and displacement continue to upend the lives of countless families across the globe. Wherever war descends, children are, in cultural historian and feminist writer Marilyn Yalom's terms, its "innocent witnesses," whose memories of war and trauma will always be framed by the unique perspectives of childhood. In this, her final book, Yalom explores the effect of her own childhood war—the Second World War—on a select group of her peers who had also grown up during that conflict and recorded or published their memories long after the war. Yalom gathered these memoirs from friends [End Page 315] she had made over her long career as an academic and writer, and they represent a diverse and fascinating collection of wartime experiences that include her own recollections of childhood and young adolescence in 1940s America. In addition, the book contains the memories of a Jewish child refugee to Britain, a young Finnish girl caught between two enemy nations, the son of a Nazi official, a schoolboy who spent the war in Vichy, France, a biracial child living under Nazi occupation in Normandy, and a teenaged Hungarian Jew in the Resistance. Although numerous books have been written about children and the Second World War, most tend to focus on the experiences of Jewish survivors or victims, and this collection offers a variety of fresh new perspectives on children and war. For Yalom herself, the war was the muted backdrop to a secure and sheltered childhood, though as the daughter of a first-generation Jewish immigrant from Poland who still had family members there, she was not completely unaware of events in Germany and Europe. Her memories of those years, centered around her progress in school, serve as a counterpoint and contrast to the more dramatic stories of her contemporaries who survived the war in various European locales. All the subsequent memoirs excerpted here provide fascinating and valuable insights into the war experiences of children, perhaps none more so than those of Stina Katchadourian, who from the age of five spent the war years in Helsinki, Lapland, and Sweden as her family fled first the Russians and later the Germans. This is a little known theater of the Second World War, and this account, excerpted from her book The Lapp King's Daughter: A Family Journey Through Finland's Wars (2010) is an enthralling and beautifully written memoir augmented by her parents' correspondence from the war. Also notable is the story of Winfried Weiss, whose book A Nazi Childhood (1983) offers the less glimpsed memories of one who grew up in Hitler's Germany but whose experiences of fear, displacement, and deprivation as a child in wartime are nonetheless strikingly similar to those of children who fled from Nazi aggression or lived under German occupation. Equally as novel is the story of biracial Phillipe Martial, who spent the war years in Normandy recalling the brutal cold and lack of food, along with the ever-present threat of Nazi racism. By contrast, the account of Susan Groag Bell, a Czechoslovakian girl who spent the war years as an exile in Britain, brings the perspective of a refugee to the collection, and Robert Berger's experiences as a Jewish youth in Hungary round out the mosaic of European childhoods represented in this collection. Unlike the authors of similar books of this genre, Yalom did not write the accounts of the wartime childhoods featured in this volume based on interviews with the subjects, but excerpted them from autobiographical works, five of which had been previously published. Thus, each chapter has its own literary [End Page 316] voice and approach to memory writing, creating a somewhat disparate whole. Yalom's own contributions—a preface, her own memory chapter, brief introductions to each account, a summative chapter on memory, and an epilogue with biographical information on the contributors' adult lives—represent her attempt...