The past century has told us much about the inner life of children—their desires and worries, their attachments and aspirations for the future. By now we understand the home life of children, as well as their struggles within the family and on the streets and playing grounds of the neighborhoods which they have come to know as their very own. We also observe schoolchildren with increasing sensitivity and assurance, hence the substantial number of clinical workers who help teachers and parents to view the youngsters in their charge with a kind of confident sophistication and subtlety denied earlier generations of mothers and fathers, as well as classroom instructors. Moreover, as the child psychoanalyst, Erik Erikson, so wisely reminded us, we can learn about the world through the eyes and ears of children: What they notice and remember hearing gives us a good idea of what is out there, waiting for them to attend. Note the title of Erikson’s first and seminal book, Childhood and Society—its author is at pains to insist that even as the young are shaped by the world around them, that holds as well for their grown-up guardians, at home or in the classroom. “So often,” Erikson once remarked to a group of his colleagues,
we want to explain a child’s behavior by looking at the “social rules of the game,” the values and norms that affect a boy, a girl, who grows up in a country, in a class or race or religion that is part of that country’s life. But there is another side of that coin: children require our care, our constant concern, and so their presence among us exerts a strong influence upon us, to the point we become the beneficiaries of their requirements (and once in a while, I suppose it can be said, the victims—since some children can drive some of us, as we all know to say, “to distraction.”
A subtly knowing and seasoned clinician was remarking upon the young, as they prod and stir us, especially at a time, these days, when we are so aware of their complex psychology, so interested in knowing about their yearnings and apprehensions, their secrets, their daytime thoughts and evening experiences (the passing dreams and nightmares that come upon them once they have gone to bed, shut their eyes, entered the oblivion of sleep, until the morning call of daytime action asserts itself and gets heard). Of course, the ordinary childhood of family and neighborhood life can abruptly and threateningly give way to the felt urgencies and fears, the shared social jeopardy, of war, as it travels well beyond the confines of battlefields into the cities and towns “behind the scenes” of conflict. Airplanes bring destructive danger; radios and televisions tell of what is happening far away, but also of what can, alas, in an instant become all too dangerously near at hand. Once war involves a child’s ongoing psychological life, all sorts of consequences ensue, as this book’s many essays make quite clear: yes, the inner emotional turmoil, but also the suffering, the constant jeopardy and vulnerability, which in their sum become an all too evident and overbearing presence, prompting nervous irritability and fearfulness, needless to say. But as we learn in the pages that follow, the consequences of war prompt other responses, too, including a combative desire (on the part of certain children) to take part in the very violence visited upon them and their families or neighbors. Indeed, the heart of this anthology is its comprehensive and telling account of war as it has become a critical aspect of the lives of children across the continents.
As I read these accounts, I kept thinking of the photographer Robert Capa’s collection of images, published many years ago as Children of War, Children of Peace. Those visual images in their own way spoke volumes of what befalls the young as violence and hatred come to rule every day’s experiences (words heard, deeds and sights seen). I also took note of the words of this anthology’s editor—his fine introductory assist to us readers, which helps carry us through this extraordinary volume, a repository of history and psychology and sociology as those disciplines can be fathomed (and narrated) by recourse to children as witnesses, and even antagonists, or protagonists, in what takes place during certain wars. Once, ruminating on “war and children” as she observed boys and girls in London during the Nazi air blitz days of the early 1940s, Anna Freud (who appears in this book) fell into a spoken memory as she conversed with a few of us lucky to be in her presence (New Haven, 1972):
We were trying so hard to be of psychological assistance to those children, but I have to say, they were of great assistance to us—I mean [by that] there was so much for us to learn from them. We learned about the stresses placed on the young by war, but we also learned about the agility and resourcefulness of children, how they become fighters as well as hurt ones (I mean, how they responded in a difficult time, became solid citizens of a country gravely embattled). A remarkable time for the boys and girls, but a remarkable time for us—we became, in a way, their interested, always alert students as well as their adult guardians!
This anthology will help many of us, yet again, to learn from (and certainly, about) children—as did Anna Freud and others. Now, courtesy of one essay after another, and an editor’s knowing, thoughtful diligence, we readers will be able to comprehend human possibility and variousness as they affirm themselves in young people whose lives become connected to war (hurt by it, or stirred toward involvement in it)—children, in a sense, at war during war (within their minds, or within their bodies).