PETER SUEDFELD (Ed.) Light From the Ashes Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2001, 456 pages (ISBN 0-472-06745-1, US$24.95, Softcover) Reviewed by ANDREW WINSTON How does a child of twelve experience this upheaval? asks Gerda Lederer, in Peter Suedfeld's Light From the Ashes. This upheaval is the Nazi persecution culminating in the Shoah. The contributors to this volume explore the way in which childhood experience of the Shoah affected their careers in psychology and other social sciences. The volume is the outgrowth of a 1996 symposium at the International Society for Political Psychology. Peter Suedfeld, who has studied coping in Holocaust survivors for a number of years (see, e.g., Suedfeld 1997, 2000; Suedfeld, Fell, & Krell, 1998), asked the participants to reflect on the relationship between their childhood trauma and their adult research interests. He subsequently invited other social scientists from a range of disciplines and countries to contribute to the published work. Specialists in Holocaust studies were explicitly avoided in this opportunity sample in order to focus on less obvious kinds of influence. The task proved painful for many; some potential contributors refused or withdrew. Readers will recognize such familiar names as Herbert Kelman and Ervin Staub, who are well known for their work on group conflict and violence; those from other disciplines generally have interests that overlap with political, social, or clinical psychology. In the case of Staub and Suedfeld, who have written explicitly on genocide, the influence of their experience seems obvious. However, they and the others have used these memoirs to explore the more subtle ways in which the Shoah helped to shape their emotional life, interpersonal style, values, and sense of meaning. The chapters are divided into three groups. First are six contributors, including Peter Suedfeld, who survived during the war in hiding. In contrast to the memoirs of adult concentration camp survivors such as Victor Frankl (1963), these are recollections of childhood. Mostly from assimilated middle class or professional homes, these children were forced to hide, flee, confront their own death, and confront the real death of their mothers and fathers. The use of unadorned prose increases the poignancy. Hadasa Black-Gutman tells of her experience at age five: Another family moved into our room as well. There was a tall man, his wife, and two children. They were nice. After a while the Gestapo took them away. The man came back alone. His wife and children had been killed. He became very ill, lying there for hours staring at the wall, refusing to eat. They made chicken broth for him, but he did not want any food. He died. He was put in the room at the end of the hallway where he lay covered with a sheet. I kept sneaking in, along with another little girl, to see what a dead body looked like and whether he would move again. He did not. (p. 19) Older children assume adult roles: The late Mary Engel relates how she quickly transformed herself into a courier of forged documents, an aid to the underground, and a scrounger for food. The brief narrative of her capture by the brutal Hungarian Arrow Cross is gripping, no matter how many times one has read such accounts. The urgent problem for these children was the management of their Jewish identity. Their names and histories were changed, often several times, and woe to the children who failed to remember which name was current, or to cross themselves, or to say recently learned Christian prayers. For boys, there was concealment of the body as well as the name. Circumcision must be hidden, a theme portrayed brilliantly in Agniezka Holland's 1991 film, Europa Europa. It is not surprising that themes of identity, stress, and danger appeared later in the research of these survivors. A second group of eight memoirs is provided by refugees who were able to leave Europe by 1940, some just barely in time. …