In 1989, Carla Lessing, the mother of two grown children and a social worker in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, heard about a lecture on child Holocaust survivors that was going to be delivered in Manhattan by a well-known Long Island psychoanalyst and author named Dr. Judith Kestenberg. A prominent researcher in the field of childhood trauma, Dr. Kestenberg’s family had been annihilated in Poland during the war. She now headed up Holocaust Survivor Studies, as well as the International Study of the Organized Persecution of Children, which she had started with her husband. She traveled the world with her associates, taping interviews with more than 1,500 child survivors of the Holocaust and their children. She had been born in Tarnov, Poland, in 1910, but like her Polish-born husband, she had immigrated to the United States in the late 1930s.
If anyone could speak to Carla Lessing’s experience as a hidden child during the war, she figured it was Dr. Kestenberg. Lessing had spent her adult life surrounded by Holocaust survivors. As often happened with children of survivors, Lessing’s children had gravitated, almost unconsciously, toward other children of survivors as friends. Lessing’s daughter became close with the daughter of a neighbor who was a Holocaust survivor, and her son’s closest friend was the son of a refugee of Nazi-occupied France.
The experience of hiding was with Carla always in one form or another. She had done, as she put it, “all the normal things”—school, college, graduate school—but she didn’t experience the world as a safe place. She lived on a steady diet of worst-case scenarios—especially involving her children. She awoke, startled, with heart palpitations, in the middle of the night. She saw that others enjoyed life so much more than she did; how could she allow herself joy when so many had suffered, had disappeared? She wasn’t sure she knew even how to express joy. She was in some ways still the girl obeying her grandparents’ warnings not to draw attention to herself, still the adolescent whose very life depended on suppressing emotions. She felt uncomfortable in any group. The years in hiding seemed to have killed in her the capacity to belong.
As a member of the “helping professions” whose job was to assist others, Carla knew she had yet to defeat, or maybe even confront, some of her own fears and anxieties. She had not lost any immediate family members during the war, and she had not even witnessed any Jews being beaten, tortured, shot, or hanged, but an aunt, uncle, three cousins, great-aunts, and many close friends had been murdered.
It was clear that the hidden children had come out of the war burdened by the very silence they had needed in order to survive. They had been the victims of one of history’s most malevolent hunts, but survival had left them in psychological pain, quietly excluded from the world around them. Worse, the vast majority had endured their misery alone, not able to broach it, even with loved ones, and had been made to feel unworthy of their own suffering.
In the decades that followed the war, Carla and Ed never talked about their experiences in hiding. They never discussed it with their children either. A detail might pop up in conversation here and there, but not whole narratives or chronologies. Not during the five years they spent in Israel in the early 1950s, when Carla cooked on a kibbutz and worked with infants and toddlers in their communal homes. Not during the years after they returned to America, when Ed got his design degree at Pratt Institute and Carla worked as a nursery school teacher in the Bronx and Dobbs Ferry, and earned her college degree and graduate degree in social work from Columbia University. Not when she spent ten years as a supervisor in a day treatment program for chronic mentally ill patients and another ten as a therapist and supervisor in an outpatient mental health clinic.
Carla and Ed treated their wartime experiences as detachable chapters, as easily uncoupled from their life stories as a boxcar. Even when they visited the van Geenens on visits to Holland over the years, the distant past—her mother would refer to it only as “the Hitler time”—was rarely part of the conversation.
The only time it regularly came up was in Ed’s psychotherapy, and then he wasn’t even aware of it. After twenty-three years of treatment, Ed Lessing said to his therapist in one of their last sessions, “You know something? The most important thing in my life I never talk to you about.”
His therapist said, “What was that, Ed?”
Ed said, “The Holocaust.”
“Ed,” the therapist said, “there hasn’t been a single session that you did not talk about it.”
The audience at Dr. Kestenberg’s lecture on Holocaust survivors was filled with mental health professionals, listening attentively as a panel of psychoanalysts talked about Kestenberg’s ongoing research into the effects of “genocidal persecution on the child’s psychic structure and on development throughout the life cycle.”
There was just one problem, as far as Lessing was concerned. Not once during the entire talk did Kestenberg mention Jewish children who had been hidden, rather than deported, during World War II. Kestenberg focused only on those children who had escaped extermination in the camps. What about the others? The children whose parents had given them up to Christian strangers, many of them too young to understand the reasons for this abandonment, who lived in terror, often without parental love at all, only to face further trauma at the end of the war, when they were “reunited” with devastated parents they didn’t know, and who couldn’t properly care for them? What about the children who watched the members of their family deported or murdered one by one? Or learned that their parents were dead, leaving them to be raised by their rescuers, by strangers, or after the war, by relatives who rejected them for not “being Jewish”? What about the hidden children who, as adults, didn’t know their given names or more than a scrap or two of information about their biological parents? Didn’t “genocidal persecution” also apply to them?
Carla Lessing wasn’t in the habit of speaking out, but during the question-and-answer period she summoned the courage to raise her hand and ask Kestenberg, “Have you done any research on children who survived in hiding?”
The answer was a polite no.
After the talk, however, Lessing was approached by another audience member named Nicole David, a Belgian who had been hidden in an orphanage, with a wealthy Catholic family, and finally in a convent during the war. She was now part of a survivors’ group that Dr. Kestenberg had started. Some of that group’s members, former hidden children, were thinking of organizing a conference devoted to these largely ignored members of the Holocaust survivors population. Would Lessing like to be part of it? After all, there had already been official Holocaust adult survivor events and conferences around the world since the 1960s. There had been conferences for children of survivors in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, Philadelphia, and Israel. Just eight years before, in 1981, 10,000 survivors and their descendants had gathered in Jerusalem.
At that gathering in Jerusalem in 1981, another former hidden child survivor and now Canadian psychiatrist Robert Krell had had the same idea as Nicole David and now Carla Lessing and others. Krell listened as Rabbi Israel Meir Lau said, “I am the youngest survivor of Buchenwald. My father, the Rabbi of Piotrowsk, died in Treblinka, my mother in Ravensbrück. I was eight years old at Liberation.” At that moment Krell realized that the child survivors “were genocidal war’s leftovers.” Older survivors were scared of the children of the Shoah; they had their hands full dealing with their own damage. A couple of years later, Krell tried to organize a group of child survivors in Los Angeles, hoping to get something started; similar groups were stirring in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Montreal. In 1988 there was a small gathering of hidden children survivors at a Lancaster, Pennsylvania, motel owned by a survivor, but none of the efforts got much traction. It was as if the children of the Holocaust—especially the former hidden ones—were still waiting for their Moses to lead them out of their silent enslavement.
One other person in the group Nicole David mentioned to Carla had impressive credentials, even though she had been born just after the war. However, Myriam Abramowicz had a personal stake in the matter. Although she was born after the war, her own parents had survived the war in hiding with one family in Brussels, while her older brother had been whisked out of the hospital at birth to hide with another.
Unlike most hidden survivors, her parents didn’t protect their children from the Holocaust. Myriam was seven when she learned the truth, which set her on a course to help change the destinies of thousands of hidden child survivors. When the daughter of the local butcher in Brussels called her “a dirty Jew” in 1953, she pushed the girl against a wall and ran home. She showed her father her well-washed hands and said, “See, I’m not dirty.” Soon after, her father called his two children into his study and told them of his own brother and sister, and her two children, who had been gassed.
In 1955, Myriam and her family traveled to America on the Queen Mary and settled first in Brooklyn. In a closet, her mother kept bags of photos, pictures taken before and after the war, nourishing Myriam’s curiosity about her family and the historical gap for which no photos existed. Later, when Myriam read Anne Frank’s diary and learned that they shared a birthday, June 12, the thought entered Myriam’s head that maybe she had been put on earth to finish the work Anne had begun. She came by her interest in storytelling honestly; she was the great-grandniece of S. Y. Abramowicz—aka Mendele Mocher Seforim, considered by many the grandfather of Yiddish literature.
As an adult, Myriam began attending Holocaust survivor conferences, noticing that the hidden children there were actually told to keep quiet by their elders. The children were on no one’s radar screen, not even the other survivors’. In 1977, when Myriam was thirty-one, she visited Belgium and met her mother and father’s savior, without whom Myriam would not have existed. On her return to New York City, she took a leave from her publishing job as assistant to André Schiffrin, editor in chief at Pantheon Books, and, inspired by Studs Terkel, whose books Schiffrin edited, she returned to Belgium to interview other non-Jewish hiding parents for a book she wanted to write.
However a book seemed inadequate for capturing her subjects’ emotions, and she decided in 1978 to make a documentary instead with a French potter-turned-filmmaker named Esther Hoffenberg, whose father had hidden in Poland. Released in 1980, As If It Were Yesterday documented the extraordinary Belgians who had hidden and placed over four thousand Jewish children during the Nazi occupation of Belgium. The title came from several interviewees’ response to her asking how well they remembered the day long ago when they brought a Jewish child into their home. The term “hidden child” was used for the first time in the documentary, lending a name at last to a forgotten population and an overlooked problem.
As If It Were Yesterday won awards and played around the world to audiences that included many hidden children, some of whom left their names and addresses in Myriam’s journal after the screenings. When she had collected a couple hundred names, her mother suggested that Myriam should invite them all into her apartment on 108th Street and Broadway in New York City. When Myriam proposed this at a survivors meeting in 1989, Dr. Judith Kestenberg and Dr. Eva Fogelman countered with a bigger idea. Fogelman, a New York psychologist specializing in Holocaust survivors and the writer/producer herself of an award-winning documentary about the children of survivors, had been instrumental ten years earlier in organizing the First International Conference on Children of Holocaust Survivors at Hebrew Union College in New York City. She was also a founding member of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors that followed.
“Wait,” Fogelman said. “Wait a year, and let’s do it right.”
Kestenberg’s husband, who was in real estate, loaned the group an office, and what Myriam’s mother had conceived as an informal coffee klatch in her apartment was on its way to becoming the three-day First International Gathering of Children Hidden During World War II.
The informal group didn’t need to look beyond its members to see the damage that had been done to hidden children since the war. No one embodied as many traumas and tragic ironies of the hidden child survivor as another woman in the group, named Marie-Claire Rakowski. When Marie-Claire was born in Belgium in 1943, her mother placed her with a childless Catholic couple named Hicket, whom she would learn to love dearly. In 1945, unknown to Marie-Claire, her mother, who had survived Auschwitz in terrible health, tried unsuccessfully to reclaim her from her devoted hiding parents. Two years later, her mother authorized a Jewish organization to kidnap her daughter and transport her to Switzerland, where she was reunited with her older sister, who had spent the war years in a convent.
“The first thing she did when she met me,” Marie-Claire said in an interview years later, “was to grab the doll I’d brought and rip it apart. From then on she took every possible opportunity to make me miserable.” The two sisters were sent to a succession of foster homes—a small tragedy, given the love Marie-Claire felt for the Hickets. There, Marie-Claire’s “mentally disturbed” sister continued to torment her, even physically beating her. When their mother finally showed up to visit, Marie-Claire said, “I refused to believe that this flabby, unattractive person who kept pawing me was my real mother. I felt disgusted.” After two years of foster homes, the girls were sent to the United States without their mother and placed in a Hasidic family that changed her name to Miriam and subjected her to the completely unfamiliar rigors of Orthodox law. They then landed in the homes of one rabbi, then another, the second of which sexually abused Marie-Claire. “That,” she said, “was when I finally felt the full impact of what had happened to me: I had lost my hiding parents (the only people I could ever think of as my real parents).”
While at Jewish summer camp when she was ten, her mother reappeared. The whole camp celebrated her arrival with a party, singing Hebrew songs, while Marie-Claire felt it was too late for her mother to be of any help. Nonetheless, she and her sister moved in with their mother in Brooklyn, who exhibited many of the behaviors common to survivors. “She wouldn’t even buy toilet paper or sanitary napkins. If any food spoiled, she ate it and expected us to do the same. There was no such thing as throwing out even a blackened, wet lettuce leaf. We were three sick people, living together.” When Marie-Claire was sixteen, her mother raised a frying pan against her, to which she responded by picking up a knife. Her mother called the police, who contacted the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, which placed Marie-Claire in a group home, where she was isolated again, this time as a “religious Jewish girl” thrown among juvenile delinquents.
“While I was hanging out with drug addicts and around drugs constantly, I never touched the stuff. What protected me was the solid foundation of love that I’d had up to the age of four. That was something I was able to hold on to in a private place.” She managed to finish high school, then worked as a bookkeeper, benefited from psychotherapy, and reconciled with her mother, whom she took care of until her death in 1970. With the sister, there was no further communication.
In her forties, Rakowski summed herself up as “relatively healthy, compared with a lot of other people. . . . But if you look at my history, I should be crazy! I should have killed myself at twenty-one. But I’m beyond that, which says a lot about the human spirit and a person’s recuperative powers.”
Carla jumped at the chance to be part of the planning for a conference, in charge of forty workshops conducted in three different languages. She realized that it would take time to reach as many members as possible of a group that, by its very nature, had not been in touch since the war—had not, with a few exceptions, even known of each other’s existence. With just a handful of names in hand, the planning committee placed announcements in two Jewish publications.
Carla dedicated herself to the conference, devoting virtually all her free time to it for a year. At last, she felt part of a community. She could share the experiences she had always held tightly within herself. She didn’t have to worry now; the whole purpose of their project was to create the safest and most meaningful context in which to share the stories and the grief. Calls from a few ambivalent former hidden children trickled in, and each caller needed help in making up his or her mind. It was slow going.
Then, in early 1991, New York magazine published an article about the coming conference, and the group started to hear from former hidden children everywhere. Most still needed encouragement and reassurance. Even artist Ann Shore, one of the planners, had her doubts about coming forward. However, the article had featured a large photo of her, and she couldn’t back out now. A stranger even came up to her in a parking lot, touched her arm, and said, “I’m glad you’re here.” Artists she’d known for decades were astonished to learn of her past. Shore considered registering under a false name, as if an alias would protect her from the powerful emotions she suspected would be released by the event.
Hidden children had, in effect, continued to hide, and be hidden, since the war. They didn’t even have a name for themselves. Although Myriam Abramowicz had used the term “hidden child” years before, it had hardly caught on; instead, it was “the Jewish children and babies who had been hidden during the war.” For most of these survivors, the sources of family stories and intergenerational conversations—a cornerstone of the foundation of an individual’s identity—had been exterminated. Even if relatives survived, the family narrative had been badly broken. What often remained were unspeakable memories, shame, and helplessness, which constituted a lingering atrocity. The Nazis had not only stolen their families but their pasts as well.
In a little-known documentary called Hidden Children, a Hungarian Jewish writer, therapist, and father of five who hid in Budapest in plain sight during the war would express it most wrenchingly:
“I know I can’t be a Jew the way one has to be according to Jewish custom, tradition, law,” a tearful André Stein tells the filmmaker, “but on the other hand I can’t be whole without embracing who I was meant to be. . . . It’s a loneliness with two poles and I just shuttle between the two. . . . I’m passing this on to my children. . . . That’s the saddest, is that [the Nazis] got to my kids through me.”
As the First International Gathering of Children Hidden During World War II loomed just a few months away, the influential Anti-Defamation League brought the fledgling group under its wing, spurred by ADL’s national director Abraham Foxman. Foxman himself had been a hidden child whose parents left him with his Christian nanny in Lithuania before they fled to escape the Nazis. He was all too familiar with the plight of hidden children even after the war; when Foxman’s parents came to claim their son, his nanny refused to give him up, and it took a kidnapping and several painful lawsuits before he was reunited with his biological parents.
With their new ADL affiliation, the organizers forged ahead. But how did you convince people to come out of hiding when hiding was all they had known? Carla and the rest of the group now thought they would be lucky to draw a few hundred former hidden children to the conference at the end of May.
But, incredibly, on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend, more than 1,600 middle-aged men and women from twenty-eight countries filtered into the ballroom on the seventh floor of the Marriott Marquis hotel in Times Square. They were glad to be out of the unseasonable ninety-degree heat, even if almost all of them were anxious about what awaited them inside. With few exceptions, they were strangers to one another, their fellow travelers from an old journey through darkness and terror. But it could also be said that they were strangers to themselves, and had traveled from near and far to learn more about who they were.
Just the day before, 300 last-minute callers had contacted the organization, only to hear a recording encouraging them, please, to come. They arrived from Europe, Israel, Australia, Canada, and all over the United States, and were joined by twenty of their Gentile rescuers—some of the Righteous Among the Nations—many of them poor Catholic Poles who had been flown in courtesy of the Jewish philanthropist and art collector Ronald Lauder.
Carla Lessing, now in her early sixties, watched in amazement as people lined up to get their name tags and packets. She would have felt even more emotionally overwhelmed if she weren’t distracted now by whether the attendees would know where to go, whether or not there would be enough chairs for everyone, and whether or not all the workshop leaders would show up.
One of those leaders was Dr. Flora Hogman, who knew more about the collective suffering around her than most people in attendance, since she had been one of the first psychologists to study how these hidden children had managed to surmount their traumas to lead functioning lives. Being a psychologist was not what Flora had in mind when she arrived in New York in 1959—she wanted to be like everyone else. She would have liked to be free to be a dancer or an artist, but eventually her history would leave her no alternative but to professionally explore the very depths in which she had come so close to drowning.
To the casual observer, Flora’s life during her first years in New York City looked like a thousand other Bohemian scenarios of the era. Flora had a fifty-dollar-a-month apartment on Horatio Street in Greenwich Village. She had a fireplace. She had a cat. She had friends. She had a beret. She roamed the Village’s little streets, dense with brownstones and dotted with cafés, feeling very free and avant-garde. She felt connected again to her mother, who had been a talented artist. She marched—for free speech, against the Vietnam War, for civil rights. She worked as a waitress at a tiny French restaurant, Chez Brigitte, a sliver of a storefront on Greenwich Avenue. The tips were good. Flora learned English there by refusing to speak French.
Of all New York City’s wonders, perhaps the most amazing to her was how many Jews there were. Yet they were not Jews like her—she didn’t feel anyone was like her. Flora was in good company; it was the dawn of the counterculture’s rebellion against conformity, and Greenwich Village was one of its epicenters. In 1960, not far from Flora’s apartment, an off-Broadway show called The Fantastiks opened in a small theater on Sullivan Street. It would run for forty-two years and become famous for one whimsical line that could have been the motto for not only the beatniks and hipster denizens of Greenwich Village, but also for the baby boomers waiting in the wings. Luisa, the show’s ingénue, cries, “Please, God, please, don’t let me be normal!”
But in reality normal was all Flora wanted to be. She looked at her fellow Greenwich Villagers on the street, longing to know how they managed. For all her ostensible competence, Flora felt she didn’t know how to deal with the real world—even the less dangerous one she lived in now—and she had no one to teach her. She didn’t feel she belonged anywhere. She didn’t know whether to go out with Jews or Christians. She was scared of being intimate with anyone because she felt she had nothing to give. Looking back decades later, she would think, I had post-traumatic stress syndrome. That’s what it was.
At the time, though, there was no name for the feeling that her sense of self had been overwhelmed and fractured, and that it was her impossible job to fit the pieces together. She had serious memory problems; there were huge gaps, and her childhood was a fog in which she was still trapped. Something in her was always hiding, paralyzed.
However confused in her personal life, she was quite organized in her work life. When she was hired as a file clerk at the Ford Foundation, she was so good at it that, after six months, her boss offered her a promotion to assistant bookkeeper. She turned it down and instead used her small inheritance from the Hogmans to enroll at New York University to finish college. She felt ignorant. In school in France, history class had only covered French history to 1936. Incredibly she had only a vague idea of the very events in Europe that had killed her mother and almost her. There was so much she didn’t know. Then Flora soon discovered something very interesting about herself: as uneducated as she felt, and as inarticulate as she was about her own feelings, hesitant and fumbling in her soft French accent, she wrote with clarity. When she was called on in class, she sounded clueless, yet when she sat down to write, she often turned in the best paper.
That she finished college, let alone earned a Ph.D. in psychology, was remarkable. By the early 1970s she was working in clinics and hospitals with children—she was, not surprisingly, very sensitive to children—when she decided it was time to take a good look at her own history. But she realized that her path to understanding and integrating her own trauma would have to pass through the experiences of others like her. She decided to study the psychology of other child survivors of the Holocaust.
There was no question in her mind that someone had to do it. That had become clear when she attended a meeting of the New York Psychological Association and heard a paper that portrayed Holocaust survivors as a bunch of basket cases. She was furious. What right did some psychologist who had not lived through the Holocaust himself have to label and dismiss a generation of broken but brave child survivors? For all her problems, Flora was hardly a basket case. She had struggled to learn to live in the world. She was in the process of finding a way, and she could help others too.
Flora proceeded to do something that no one had done before: through Jewish organizations and her network of friends and colleagues, she identified eleven adults who had survived the Holocaust as children, interviewed them at length, and wrote the first psychological paper exploring what coping techniques they had used to survive the war and what techniques they used as adults to overcome problems related to their war experiences.
“I had to make my trauma the subject of my work,” she would recall years later, “because I had to. I couldn’t do anything else. I was very upset about it. I wanted to be like everyone else. I didn’t want to think about the war. I wanted to go to the beach. I wanted to be a pianist. But the only thing I could do was be a psychologist and understand what the hell had happened to me. My history is so complicated, and I always felt everybody else had done better than I.”
No one had thought to do what she had: look at the positive aspects of having survived the Holocaust. Flora presented her findings in 1977 at a conference in Israel called the Second International Conference on Psychological Stress and Adjustment in Time of War and Peace. Her paper, titled no more succinctly, was called “Adaptive Mechanisms of Displaced Jewish Children during World War II and Their Later Adult Adjustment.” She interviewed eight men and three women who had survived the Holocaust as children. In 1939, their ages had ranged from two weeks to eleven years old. Seven came from Eastern Europe, the other four from Western Europe, and they survived in a variety of circumstances, from roaming Ukrainian forests to being hidden in children’s camps to living in Auschwitz. By the war’s end, two had lost both parents and other family members, five had lost one parent, and the other three had lost several relatives.
Flora found that the coping strategies used by all of the children fell into three categories, the first of which she termed “maintenance of some emotional link to their families.” Children in hiding, separated from both parents, maintained their connection by cultivating fantasies about them. The fantasies may have backfired later when they were reunited with their traumatized real parents, but during the war, the fantasies blurred their sense of loss. One of Flora’s subjects, hidden in a French children’s camp, reported that kids bragged about their families and made up stories in which the parents became younger and more beautiful. Absence made them heroic. Sometimes children assumed the role of a missing parent, taking care of the others.
The second mechanism she called, simply, “defiance.” “The children,” she wrote, “may have retained a sense of self by mobilizing their rage constructively,” which took the form of taking any initiative to survive, from actual escape to simply buoying up others’ optimism. One twelve-year-old boy carried a weapon in hiding; another focused on recalling his father’s teachings from the Talmud to support his stoicism in the face of suffering; another, hiding in the forest, practiced long-distance running to prepare for his eventual escape from the Nazis.
Most interesting, however, was the third coping strategy many of her subjects had used: “avoidance of full awareness of traumatic realities.” That is to say, their best friends were suppression and repression. In one case, a boy who discovered his dead brother and father proceeded to tell his mother that they had been taken away to work, and the mother chose to believe him, although she knew that he was lying. Older children reframed their fear and terror as adventures, not unlike what Roberto Benigni’s character did for his young son in the concentration camp in the movie Life Is Beautiful, when he convinces the boy that the camp is actually a game in which the most compliant and inconspicuous contestant will win a tank.
The mechanisms Flora identified—fantasy, defiance, repression—involved strategies essential for surviving a horrifying existence. Flora’s most traumatized subject resorted to every strategy he could. At a Czech work camp, he transformed his fear into curiosity about the guards’ rifles, pestering them with questions. Later, in Russia, when his father and brother were shot, he simply refused to face the fact that they had died. Living later in the forest, he carried his wounded sister to safety, telling Flora, “I became a Tarzan during the war.” Incredibly he then found himself in Auschwitz, subjected to Josef Mengele’s medical experiments, which he tolerated through a combination of prayer, partial identification with his aggressors, and volunteering to help the other children.
Of course getting through the war was one thing, but adult life was another. Conclusions reached on the page by a psychologist, even one who had been a hidden child herself, bore little resemblance to the very painful, long, and messy journeys hidden children were taking in real life. In her paper, Flora touched on all the lifelong repercussions for child survivors that would start to become a more familiar litany fourteen years later at the First International Gathering of Children Hidden During World War II: distrust, shame, memory loss, isolation, anxiety, depression, marital and career instability, and an exaggerated need for safety and control. The survivors who found it easier to adjust were those whose parents survived, or who could recall and “describe harmonious family life before the war.”
In regard to finding meaning in adult life, Flora wrote, accepting their Jewish identity was “the most powerful way to give meaning . . . to their suffering,” even though acceptance involved reclaiming a heritage survivors had no memory of or had been taught to despise and pity. Similarly, in order to liberate themselves from the passivity of victimhood, survivors needed to overcome their resentment for problems that had been unfairly and harshly imposed on them—a process of taking responsibility for one’s life that confronts all adults, to some degree.
In none of Flora’s cases was there “an account of a loss of interest in living after the war.” Her research had found not basket cases but people desperate to live like others. Trauma did not necessarily just create psychopathology; it could also launch new and stronger identities, not through dwelling on the disasters of the past, but by incorporating them into the conscious narrative of one’s present life. Courage became part of their identity. One important means of integrating the past concerned the search for work that was in some way related to hidden children’s war experiences. Her favorite example was a survivor who had never known his parents and who had spent his adult life in many unhappy jobs until he realized that he had a gift for handling emergency situations. Only when he became the head of a crisis intervention center did he begin to find himself.
So it had been with Flora herself, who turned her own psychological emergency into a study of others like herself, allowing her to clarify her own murky sense of self while helping others do the same. She had found her place in the world.
So when Carla Lessing asked her in the spring of 1991 to lead a workshop at the upcoming gathering called “Who Am I, Christian or Jew?” it hadn’t taken her long to say yes.