Lexington Books
Pages: 204
•
Trim: 6⅜ x 9
978-1-7936-2303-4 • Hardback • December 2020 • $111.00 • (£85.00)
978-1-7936-2305-8 • Paperback • May 2022 • $41.99 • (£35.00)
Shira Birnbaum is science and medical writer at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.
Introduction: Looking Forward While Looking Back: What We Learn about Child Development and the Refugee Experience by Reading the Memoirs of Holocaust Survivors
Chapter 1: 1939
Chapter 2: 1940
Chapter 3: 1941
Chapter 4: 1942
Chapter 5: 1942 in the Ghetto
Chapter 6: 1943
Chapter 7: 1944-45
Chapter 8: Young People in the Confrontation with Disaster
Chapter 9: Resonances of War
Epilogue: Conversations Across the Generations: Holocaust Memory and the Vocabulary of Remembrance
In this collection of Holocaust memoirs, Birnbaum presents the unique first-person stories of six child survivors, all members of her father’s extended family. The stories trace war’s ravages through the eyes of rapidly maturing children and adolescents. Each tale is extraordinary. One chronicler tells of passing as a gentile, surviving by selling her blood and submitting to Nazi experiments for pay; another details her escape from Poland to Lithuania to Africa; another memoir depicts the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto and the author’s daring escape; yet another family member describes her wartime sojourn in the relative safety of Shanghai. Riveting as these stories are, Birnbaum adds yet another layer to enhance the reader's understanding. In a chapter-by-chapter analysis that follows the memoirists through each year of the war, Birnbaum explores textual cues that illustrate childhood resilience. Through the astute perception of a psychiatric nurse, she elucidates survival strategies and ties them to today’s young survivors of traumatic conflict. This book is an important contribution to Holocaust psychology studies and will be of significant value to both specialists and those interested in obtaining a deeper awareness of the effects of catastrophic sociopolitical upheavals on children. Highly recommended.
— Choice Reviews
This is a remarkable book, very well researched and captivating with its emotional details. The book stands out among the many holocaust narratives. In addition to the extraordinary manner in which the six members of this family has survived, the book is rich in theoretical explanations of how the author had arrived at her conclusions.— Anna Ornstein, M. D. Professor of child psychiatry (retired), University of Cincinnati
What did it take to escape the Holocaust? This is the guiding question of a book on refugeeism, survival, and memory by American psychoanalyst Shira Birnbaum, who has done a great deal of work to combine psychological, historical, and familial themes in her consideration of these questions. Coming from the second generation of Holocaust survivors, the author examines the strategies of Polish Jewish children and youth of the time who were coping with the progressive decomposition of the world as they knew it. The author collated, translated, and edited the stories of six members of her family. The memoirs are notable for the amount of remembered detail and the ability of their authors to emotionally travel through time. Thus, we get not only a record of events, but also a moving glimpse into the feelings that accompanied the subsequent partings with loved ones.
— Austrian Journal of Jewish Studies