Children in the Holocaust and its Aftermath

Historical and Psychological Studies of the Kestenberg Archive

Sharon Kangisser Cohen, Eva Fogelman, Dalia Ofer, Sharon Kangisser Cohen, Eva Fogelman, Dalia Ofer

• Editorial: Berghahn Books
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781785334399
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Histoire
• Categoría: Histoire de l'Holocauste

The testimonies of individuals who survived the Holocaust as children pose distinct emotional and intellectual challenges for researchers: as now-adult interviewees recall profound childhood experiences of suffering and persecution, they also invoke their own historical awareness and memories of their postwar lives, requiring readers to follow simultaneous, disparate narratives. This interdisciplinary volume brings together historians, psychologists, and other scholars to explore child survivors' accounts. With a central focus on the Kestenberg Holocaust Child Survivor Archive's over 1, 500 testimonies, it not only enlarges our understanding of the Holocaust empirically but illuminates the methodological, theoretical, and institutional dimensions of this unique form of historical record.

PART ONE

METHODOLOGY

1

AGE, CIRCUMSTANCE, AND OUTCOME IN CHILD SURVIVORS OF THE HOLOCAUST

Considerations of the Literature and a Report of a Study Using Narrative Content Analysis

Gila Sandler Saban, K. Mark Sossin, and Anastasia Yasik

Introduction and Overview

Narratives elicited in interviews of child Holocaust survivors provide historical testimony as well as emotive and heartrending descriptions of subjective experience of exposure to trauma. Each survivor’s distinctive story of life before, during, and after the Holocaust is woven into his or her own autobiographical memory. Their stories incorporate elements that are explicitly recalled, often elaborated semantically, and consciously retained. Procedural and unconscious facets of memory also contribute to the way the story is remembered and told, though these are generally more embodied and sensorimotor. Interview narratives, as conducted and considered within the framework of the International Study of Organized Persecution of Children (ISOPC) Child Development Research (CDR),1 underscore each survivor’s uniqueness while contributing to more-generalized conclusions about children’s psychological processing of their encounters with atrocity, brutality, loss, separation, fear, encampment, hiding, and more.

As the ISOPC archive has grown, we have sought to expand what we know about children and findings regarding lasting psychological effects to more-recent state-sponsored persecutions and genocides. Methodologically, interviews have been valuably viewed individually, comparatively, and inductively, often informed within a psychoanalytic frame. We may further examine elements of the narratives themselves because they may index mental and emotional states. The application of narrative coding analysis and the highlighting of various categories and dimensions of experience may offer further knowledge about interviewees’ states of mind. Formalizing a priori narrative analytic methods and mixed-method designs (looking at both qualitative and quantitative data) can contribute substantively to both exploratory and hypothesis-testing approaches. Herein, we exemplify how one such approach is applied to the ISOPC interviews, using a well-developed method of narrative content analysis.

This study is conducted against the background of an aging and decreasing number of Holocaust survivors, a world in which organized child persecution sadly persists, and within a fast-growing field of trauma psychology. The research looks to benefit the living child survivors of the Holocaust. In addition, be it from the experience or witnessing of abuse,2 violence,3 natural disasters,4 terrorism,5 or war,6 children across the world continue to be challenged by the hardship of recovering from trauma. Although progress has been made in framing interventions for children in the immediate wake of trauma and loss, questions still remain regarding the long-term outcome for individuals who have been traumatized by systematized persecution. Factors contributing to symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and anxiety, as well as fear of separation and interpersonal difficulties,7 need further explication. Children suffer from disruption of primary attachments, while also demonstrating vulnerability to intergenerational transmission of stress and distress from their traumatized parents.8 Assessment of posttraumatic sequelae, analysis of comorbidity and differential diagnosis,9 and the study of treatment efficacy utilizing various approaches,10 have all contributed to a substantive literature.

Utilizing a portion of the ISOPC archive, this study examines long-term effects of the Holocaust on child survivors. Both within and outside of this project, child survivors have borne witness, written memoirs, and volunteered and participated in professionally conducted interviews11 in which they have recounted their stories in great detail. Many narratives have been reviewed qualitatively, while quantitative studies have generally involved survey or target-question responses regarding experiences during and in the aftermath of the war.12 The narratives themselves are rarely transposed into quantitative data. In the broader psychology literature, the strengths of both qualitative and quantitative approaches are increasingly combined and include narrative coding designs wherein transcribed verbal accounts are organized and systematically analyzed using specific criteria.13 Formalized narrative coding analysis tools have been developed for use in evaluating themes, content,14 and process variables. These narrative content research methodologies have been shown to be relevant to psychological and diagnostic variables, lending support for the application of such methods to Holocaust- and persecution-related interviews.

Perspectives Relevant to the Life Trajectories of Child Survivors

Many child survivors of the Holocaust have demonstrated tremendous resilience as they rebuilt their lives, raised families, and engaged in successful careers.15 Many others have confronted underlying social emotional difficulties in their adult lives due to early traumatic histories.16 Success in one realm of life did not preclude difficulties in another. Some child survivors have had difficulties forming and maintaining close and intimate relationships,17 as well as with child bearing,18 parenting, and, upon death of a loved one, managing grief.19 Child survivors who were hidden during the time of war have shown ongoing difficulties regarding integration of identity. They endured the loss of their own familial, communal, and religious traditions,20 while assuming alternative self-characteristics in order to survive.21 Emotional constriction resulted from the need to repress natural spontaneity by remaining silent, controlling their voices, cries, laughter, and, at times, bodily functions, so as not to draw attention to themselves. Prior research has documented that child survivors have shown vulnerability to a delayed onset of PTSD, as well as features of anxiety22 and depression.23

Factors identified in the literature as heightening risk for long-term adjustment difficulties (as reflected in symptom-development and reduced levels of quality of life in adulthood) include: age at the time of the trauma, implying a host of cognitive, psychodynamic, developmental factors, and the critical nature of the postwar situation. Immediately after the end of the war and liberation, child survivors were confronted with the reality of their losses and had to endure new transitions and adjustments.

Age has been examined from a developmental perspective with regard to attachment and coping with loss and distress. Kestenberg and Brenner noted that adults who were older children and adolescents when under persecution were often later able to hold onto positive prewar memories. By contrast, many adults who were younger children when under persecution had little or fragmented recollections of their parents and their families, and some did not even know their own names. Hence, it has been reported that those who were youngest later struggled to recall and make sense of their own histories, lacking an internalized secure attachment to a parent or caregiver. Those who did not have a close surrogate figure or who were institutionalized during and after the war lacked sufficient attachment representations, further complicating their ability to form meaningful relationships in adulthood.

Developmental psychology finds that while declarative memories are undeveloped and fragmented among those who are quite young, procedural, kinesthetic and olfactory memories are strong. Sensory stimuli that resemble those that were present when memories were encoded will elicit recollections from early childhood. Preverbal procedural memories are critical in attachment and developing mentalization processes. Because children at a young age make sense of their world through their bodies, many of these children were found to express somatic complaints as adults linked to their traumatic experiences. Young survivors often had only fragmented prewar memories, leading some researchers24 to conclude that age was more critical than the nature of the trauma (e.g., in concentration camp versus in hiding) in determining later outcome for child survivors.

The current study was designed to study the factor of age empirically, while modeling use of narrative analysis, because it has potential for further use in child survivor research.

Method

Findings as Reported in This Chapter

Though sound scientific and statistical methods were employed throughout the data analysis, in the reported findings below the authors have avoided mathematical jargon that is more likely to be found in a professional journal. Most correspondences between constructs were identified using Pearson-r correlations, and inter-rater reliability was tested using intraclass correlations (ICC). Multiple interaction effects among constructs were identified using regression analyses. The following rubric informed the text: (1) All correspondences reported met minimal criteria for significance; in other words, the chance that the relationship reported is genuine, and not random, is 95 percent or greater. Though additional results may, upon further investigation, turn out to be meaningful, a conservative approach was adopted. (2) Consistent with research standards, if the significant result attained a correlation of 0.20 or less it is reported as small, if it is between 0.21 and 0.35 it is reported as medium, and if it is above 0.35 it is reported as large. Of course, precise statistical details are available to readers and researchers who may want them. Study procedures and results will be summarized, followed by a discussion of what was gleaned.

Procedure and Participants

One hundred interviews were randomly selected from ISOPC CDR archive from among four hundred English language–transcribed interviews. Reliability was established between ratings conducted by the current researcher and the original coding25 that was conducted by the original coders of the Kestenberg Archive of Testimonies of Child Holocaust Survivors across half the sample, as well as between the current researcher and a co-rater across the other half of the sample. Since several of the original Code Book items are on a three-point Likert scale, the first author developed and used a modified five-point Likert scale because such an expansion allows for greater precision in defining the range of variables. An evaluation was conducted to determine whether using the five-point scale yields more-reliable coding results and whether this impacts the findings.

Of the hundred interviews included in this study, 57 percent were of women. The majority of the data (58%) was gathered from individuals who were between the ages of 50–59 at the time they were interviewed, followed by 22 percent who were 60–69 years old, 19 percent who were 40–49, and one individual over 70. The mean age of the interviewees at the onset of persecution was 6.58 (SD = 4.60), ranging from birth to 14 years of age. Specifically, 15 percent were from birth to 12 months, 17 percent were 1–3 years of age, 15 percent were 4–6 years of age, 28 percent were 7–10 years of age, and 25 percent were 11–14 years of age.

The transcribed interviews were uploaded for coding and scoring by the Psychiatric Content Analysis and Diagnosis (PCAD) 2000 Gottschalk-Gleser Scales26 on a specified set of constructs. The PCAD computerized narrative analysis brings inherent advantages and disadvantages in comparison to purely qualitative analysis. While the PCAD is not as nuanced, associative, or insight-bearing as a trained clinician, an advantage is that applying the same exact coding and analytic procedures to each interview transcript fosters comparative study and the application of parametric statistics, yielding rich data. In addition, all hundred interviews were read by and coded on items from the original CDR Code Book, as well as the revised Code Book items.27

Measures

Age

Age was measured as a continuous variable according to Code Book item #9: “Child’s age at start of persecution (in country of origin): years, months.”28 Measuring age at onset of persecution is consistent with prior studies.29

Early Memories

Quality of early memories was assessed using Likert scale CDR Code Book items and revised items pertaining to quality and intensity of prewar memories. High and sufficient inter-rater reliability was established between the current researcher and the original raters of the data and between the current researcher and the co-rater.

Postwar Situation

Again, CDR Code Book items and revisions thereof pertained to postwar physical and mental health, postwar parenting, the competence of parents during the postwar period, and postwar adjustment of parents to daily life and functioning. Varying within high and sufficient ranges, inter-rater reliability was established between the first author and the co-rater, as well as between the first author and the original raters of the data for all variables except for questions regarding paternal adjustment, an item for which reliability was not established. Hence, the...