How Young Holocaust Survivors Rebuilt Their Lives

France, the United States, and Israel

Françoise S. Ouzan

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780253033963
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Geschichte des Holocaust

"Shines light to the world through the individual stories of people who came through darkness... a book of courage, strength and inspiration." — The Jerusalem Report Drawing on testimonies, memoirs, and personal interviews of Holocaust survivors, Françoise S. Ouzan reveals how the experience of Nazi persecution impacted their personal reconstruction, rehabilitation, and reintegration into a free society. She sheds light on the life trajectories of various groups of Jews, including displaced persons, partisan fighters, hidden children, and refugees from Nazism. Ouzan shows that personal success is not only a unifying factor among these survivors but is part of an ethos that unified ideas of homeland, social justice, togetherness, and individual aspirations in the redemptive experience. Exploring how Holocaust survivors rebuilt their lives after World War II, Ouzan tells the story of how they coped with adversity and psychic trauma to contribute to the culture and society of their country of residence.

1

FROM VICTIMS TO SOCIAL ACTORS

THE ENORMITY OF the Nazi genocide of the Jews cannot be grasped without listening to the voices of the former young victims who suffered a series of psychological blows and faced constant fear during the war years. This study attempts to understand how a number of those who survived triumphed over adversity even though their families, culture, and religion were all annihilated. The individual stories I have chosen provide a wealth of information on the survivors’ rehabilitation and involvement in social, economic, and cultural activities. These narratives are classified by country of return (in the case of France) or of resettlement (the United States and Israel), and also, as much as possible, by the method of survival during the war. The main distinction lies in the fact that concentration camp survivors underwent a radical dehumanization, which other categories of survivors in hiding did not. However, they all faced various forms of harmful humiliation, which is enough to destroy self-confidence. As a consequence, the two main categories I examine in this volume may be distinguished in the following way: those who experienced proximity to death, and those who fled or were hidden without experiencing direct contact with death. Indeed, the genocidal process was not limited to deportation and internment in extermination camps such as Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Sobibor, and to concentration and labor camps. It also involved mobile killing units (Einsatzgruppen) operating in German-occupied territories in eastern Europe during World War II.¹

While the dates of birth of those who survived constitute an important element since reactions to trauma often vary according to age, classification according to age seemed less appropriate for this project. All in all, the postwar life stories demonstrate the extent to which young Holocaust survivors, as migrants, adopted some of the social, behavioral patterns of the Jews after their emancipation. This is strikingly clear in their need to excel to gain social acceptance and recognition. In Israel, they made a point of serving as soldiers in several wars, even if they were the last remnants of their decimated families. More than a thousand lost their lives in the 1948 War of Independence. In America, many volunteered to enlist in the Korean War, thus running counter to the negative stereotype of the Jew as one who evades military service.² The life story of Tibor Rubin showed that strategies of survival learned in the concentration camps saved the lives of American soldiers in Korea. It also enabled the exploration of the American army as a field of belonging and identification. Yet, the numerous hurdles Rubin encountered until he was socially recognized as a war hero testified not only to the long persistence of anti-Jewish feelings in the American military but also to his resilience in that respect.³

Definitions and Their Evolution

Displaced persons (DPs), refugees, postwar refugees, former victims of the Nazi yoke, stateless Jews, and pariahs—several terms overlap while their meanings may fall under the wide definition of “survivor.” The multiplicity of contexts, milieus, and individual fates account for the diversity of categories behind the heterogeneous group of survivors. It is worth noting that the degree of their integration into their new social environments appears to be closely linked to changing perceptions of the image of survivors and of the Holocaust itself.⁴

In 2004, demographer Sergio DellaPergola proposed a broad definition of survivors according to the following criteria: “(a) those who were in concentration camps or ghettos, or who were otherwise submitted to slave labor, (b) those who fled such confinement or subsisted illegally, or (c) those who at least for a period of time, were subject to a regime of duress and/or a limitation of their full civil rights due to their Jewish background, whether by a Nazi occupying power or by a local authority associated with the Nazi endeavour.”⁵ DellaPergola’s definition, unlike previous ones, included North African Jews during the war years (except Egypt) and added those who lived in Syria and Lebanon. Apart from implications of consciousness, there are economic consequences linked to that definition insofar as so-called reparations are concerned. A significant number of survivors interviewed for this study were reluctant to apply for the reparations that the German government agreed to pay in 1953 to victims of the Nazis, especially those who were made to work as forced laborers. A general term for restitutions or reparation, Wiedergutmachung—made up of wieder (again), gut (well), and machung (a verbal noun of machen, “to make”)—appeared all the more fallacious and ironical to survivors as the verb wiedergutmachen means to make well again or to compensate. Furthermore, they were required to undergo thorough medical examinations to prove that they were entitled to indemnities. Most interviewees related to this procedure as a humiliating one, reminiscent of past experiences. Sensing humiliation once again, and having to prove that they were victims, served as deterrents, which is why some of them either did not entertain the idea or renounced it. However, later—when deadlines had not yet expired—a number of former victims convinced themselves that they should not forego that monetary compensation in addition to everything they had lost. The Claims Conference on Material Claims against Germany was cofounded in 1951 by Nahum Goldmann, then president of the World Jewish Congress, and Saul Kagan, a Lithuanian refugee who was an intelligence officer in the US Air Force and whose mother, brother, and grandparents were murdered by the Nazis.⁶ The Claims Conference was conceived as a body that would engage the German government in negotiations, with eligibility criteria being determined by Germany but continually under discussion. While this matter is beyond the scope of the present study, it is worth mentioning that Article 2 Fund limited pensions to “certain persons who were incarcerated in concentration camps, ghettos, or forced labor battalions, or were forced to go into hiding.”⁷ The amount of Article 2 compensation, which is set by the German government, is a fixed Euro amount. From 1999 onward, the German government agreed to recognize previously unrecognized camps and labor battalions of Jews in Europe for purposes of eligibility for this compensation. In 2012, the Claims Conference negotiated to reduce from twelve to six months the time that victims had to have lived “in hiding or under false identity” in order to be eligible for Article 2 compensation.

Distinctions within the Heterogeneous Group of Survivors

Peter Suedfeld, himself a survivor and a noted social psychologist, wrote that more subtle distinctions could be made between “identified” Jews and “hidden” ones. The former were persons who the authorities had identified as Jews during the years of persecution and had been in concentration camps, slave labor programs, or ghettos. Hidden survivors were concealed in rooms, attics, forests, underground bunkers, sewers, or other unpleasant places, or in “open hiding,” that is, not physically concealed but hiding their Jewish identity. Some of the survivors interviewed for this volume had false papers identifying them as Christians. As Suedfeld summed up, a high proportion of these hidden children were “passing as non-Jews and sheltered by Christian families, monasteries, convents, orphanages and other kinds of homes.”⁸ Some of these issues are broached in the diverging narratives or testimonies of Nechama Tec, Zev Sternhell, and Robert Finaly.⁹ The former rebuilt her life in the United States, the latter two in Israel.

By May 1945, at the war’s end, between one and one-and-a-half million children, targeted as Jews by the Nazi genocide, were murdered, while before the war they numbered approximately 1.6 million in the territories occupied by the Nazis and their allies in September 1939.¹⁰ Judith Hemmendinger, then a young social worker who took care of a group of Buchenwald Jewish boys, wrote about the efforts of the Oeuvre de Secours Aux Enfants (OSE) homes to rehabilitate 426 youngsters liberated from Buchenwald and brought to France, admitted that mental health professionals had said these children would never recover, an opinion she shared when she first became aware of the extent of their trauma. Hemmendinger dealt with a group of ninety young survivors who were among the thousand Jewish children detained in Children’s Barrack 66 in Buchenwald and liberated by American troops. These children were the first to leave Buchenwald; about two months after the liberation of the camp, the orphaned boys, aged eight to eighteen, were sent to England, France, and Switzerland.¹¹

The present volume includes the life stories of ten former “Buchenwald boys” and focuses on their rehabilitation and dynamics of identities in different contexts and environments.¹² Six of them were personally interviewed, some of them several times over the years, like Izio Rosenman.

According to Rosenman, a physicist and psychoanalyst, children and young adolescents who survived concentration camps had abruptly been robbed of their childhood or adolescence and developed defense mechanisms, one of which was insensitivity. This was essential to protect them from cruelty and suffering. Witness to the powerlessness of their parents in ghettos, in concentration camps, or in both, the youngsters had to be constantly on their guard to save their lives. Hidden children did not experience the cruelty of survival in the concentration camps. Their hardships were different.

This is the point at which a methodological question needs to be raised: how to determine whether to use the term “child survivor” or “young adult survivor”? It is generally accepted that any person who was sixteen or younger in 1945 may be considered a child survivor, while those who were seventeen or older are “adult survivors.” The arbitrary quality of this distinction is somewhat subdued by the addition of “young.” But, above all, this differentiation is due to the postwar issue of child placement in homes and orphanages, or the decision made by the youngsters to immigrate, often to the Jewish homeland in Palestine. In other cases, relatives in the United States sponsored the child’s immigration. More often than not, emotional issues were closely connected to political ones, and the course of the postwar lives of these youngsters could sometimes lead to long years of court battles, especially when the children had had to assume a Christian identity to survive.¹³

Even among the resistance fighters or partisans, in particular among French girls in the Jewish networks engaged in rescuing children and finding hiding places for them, it was not uncommon to find girls around fifteen or sixteen years of age who served as couriers. Although considered children according to the previous definition, they would perform crucial tasks when, for instance, they rode a bicycle on the dangerous French roads to hand over regular payment to the Christian families who were hiding Jewish children. This is the case of Margot Cohn, who was active in the Jewish underground. She began a new life in Israel after World War II.

Hidden children have long remained silent, feeling they were no heroes and more generally feeling guilty for having survived while most of their families had perished. Many of them did not even consider themselves Holocaust survivors, since they believed that only those who had survived the camps were entitled to inclusion in such a category.¹⁴ Often, they had not talked about their war experience to their children. But 1991 turned out to be a turning point in their lives as they began a collective existence as hidden children who had testimonies to transmit to future generations. With the help of Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League and himself a hidden child from Poland, 1,600 former hidden children from twenty-eight countries met for the first time in May of that year in New York City at the First International Gathering of Children Hidden during World War II. As a matter of fact, the conference not only attracted former hidden children but many survivors as well.¹⁵

Social psychologist Eva Fogelman, born in a displaced person (DP) camp, paved the way for the recognition of the importance of the emotional scars of hidden children when her efforts culminated in that first international conference. It was to be followed by numerous other gatherings of survivors, in Jerusalem and elsewhere. These gatherings and conferences fulfilled a specific aim: to help survivors come out into the open, embrace their Jewish past, share memories, and tell the world what they had endured under the Hitler regime.

Success can be defined rather objectively in relation to social status and economic success, more precisely success in the academic field, in the arts, or integration into the host society. A pioneer work in that domain by sociologist William Helmreich focused on the successful integration and achievements of Holocaust survivors in the United States.¹⁶ However, professional success does not necessarily entail personal success consisting of personal balance and fulfillment. A number of cases of French survivors who committed suicide despite their apparent professional success in France provide a tragic indication that the global notion of social success requires more attention. Sarah Kofman, a former hidden child who became one of the best-known p...