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This article was published in Volume 12, Number 4 “Legacies of Mass Violence” of Mind and Human Interaction. The full reference is:
Chaitin, J.and Bar-On, D.. (2001). The Family during the Holocaust: Memories of Parent-Child Relationships. Mind and Human Interaction, 12: 238-260.

To cite particular passages or pages, please contact us for a hard copy of the original published version: E-mail: mind@virginia.edu; phone: 434-982-1045.

The Family during the Holocaust: Memories of Parent-Child Relationships

 Julia Chaitin and Dan Bar-On

Julia Chaitin holds a Ph.D. in social psychology from Ben-Gurion University in the Negev, Israel. Her research focuses on the psychosocial effects of the Holocaust and on cooperative Palestinian–Israeli research. This year she holds the Lentz post-doctorate fellowship in Peace and Conflict Research at the University of Missouri in St. Louis and is a researcher at PRIME–the Peace Research Institute in the Middle East.

Dan Bar-On, Ph.D. is a professor of psychology in the Behavioral Sciences department of Ben-Gurion University. With Prof. Sami Adwan, he co-directs PRIME, a jointly run Palestinian–Israeli center dedicated to cooperative research that aims to enhance reconciliation between peoples of the region. His most recent book, Die Anderen in Uns [The Others within Us], was published by the Koerber Foundation in 2001.

Introduction

Today we know that the Nazis’ persecution and genocide of the Jews not only affected the victims, but also deeply impacted subsequent family relationships of the people who survived the traumas. For years, researchers have examined the effect of the Holocaust on emotional relationships between survivors and their children, finding that the Holocaust experiences have often made it very difficult for the survivors to be good parents (Davidson, 1980; Kestenberg, 1980) and that many of them have transmitted traumas to their children, either directly or indirectly. Interpersonal parent-child problems that have been reported in the literature focus on the emotional unavailability of parents toward their children (e.g. Krystal, 1968; Wardi, 1990), problematic communication patterns (e.g. Davidson, 1980; Hass, 1995; Solomon, 1998), and over-involvement by the survivors in their children’s lives, which makes it hard for the offspring to gain autonomy (e.g. Baracos and Baracos, 1973; Danieli, 1988). While there is also evidence of positive survivor-children relationships (e.g. Chaitin, 2000; Zlotogorski, 1985), it cannot be disputed that Holocaust experiences often negatively affected interpersonal family relationships. In addition, more recent literature has shown that the effects of the Holocaust did not end with the second generation, but have continued to influence emotional relationships with the third generation as well (Bar-On, 1995; Berger-Reiss, 1997; Chaitin, in press; Rosenthal, 1998).

There has been much literature on the long-term consequences of the Holocaust on the families of victims, but there are relatively few psychosocial studies of family relationships during the Holocaust. Information about families has mainly come from written or oral narratives, testimonies, and clinical cases (Bergmann and Jucovy, 1982; Eisenberg, 1982; Kestenberg and Brenner, 1996; Krell, 1993; Felman and Laub, 1992), with historians providing insight into how family life was organized (Bugner, 2000; Ofer, 1998). Further psychosocial research on the interpersonal relationships within the family during the Holocaust should not only provide important information about that period of history, but also help us in our understandings of post-war family relationships.

Why has there been relatively little research in this area? We see four main reasons for this: First, the introduction of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) into the Diagnostical Statistical Manual (Lifton, 1988) may have influenced researchers to focus on the after-effects of the trauma, drawing attention away from a deeper examination of family structures and processes that occurred during the Holocaust. A second reason may be tied to the fact that, since it is well known that the Nazi persecution totally disrupted normal family life, in-depth examinations of family relationships were perceived as being unneccessary. A third reason may be that the survivors were very reticent to talk about these issues, probably since these were their most painful losses (Danieli, 1981). The final reason is connected to the fact that, until recently, quantitative research designs dominated psychological research of the Holocaust. Since these methodologies are not designed for the in-depth study of specific interpersonal family relationships during genocide (Rosenthal, 1993), relying on such methods made it difficult to learn about how Holocaust survivors experienced their families during the war. In sum, whether the reasons are taken separately or together, the relative lack of research into parent-child relationships during the Holocaust has left us with many questions about that period.

Undertaking this research calls for a look at theories of parenthood and personal relationships within the family. Today there are many theories of parenthood (Bengston and Allen, 1993). These theories focus on different emphases and/or explanations of family processes and structures, but they are all based on the assumption that it is the parents’ responsibility to care for the physical, economic, social, and psychological needs of their children, at least as long as they are minors (Muncie et al., 1995). However, it is important to remember that it was not until after World War II that family theories emerged concerning what a person needs for emotional survival, and that this type of survival both differs from and complements physical survival. Therefore, when examining family life during the Holocaust, we should keep in mind that most parents, and their children, probably did not feel that they should or could place emphasis on the emotional aspects of survival, if the physical needs were more or less attended to.

One theory that can help in an examination of parent-child relationships during the Holocaust is Attachment Theory, as formulated by Bowlby (1969, 1973, 1980). According to Bowlby, the degree to which one is vulnerable to stress and anxiety is influenced by early development and present life circumstances. Early attachment to the parent is of special importance to maintaining emotional stability during adulthood. When a child feels insecure or fears the loss of security within the relationship, “anxious attachment” may arise (Bowlby, 1973). Bowlby (1969) noted that children who experience their attachment figures as available and emotionally supportive develop internal representations of them as such and then learn to see themselves as competent and worthy of love. The child then uses the parent as a secure base from which to explore and master new endeavors. The opposite is true for children who experience unresponsive and unavailable parents. They develop rejecting parental models and tend to see themselves as incapable of being loved when they become parents. It also appears as if these internal models often persist over time, creating relational patterns that are transmitted from one generation to the next.

How can this theory help us understand the impact of the Holocaust on families living through it? We have learned from narratives of children survivors that as life became precarious, they tended to perceive their parents as unable to extend to them a sense of security and physical support (Friedlander, 1979; Langer, 1991). At times the parents gave up trying to be protectors and left it up to their children to manage their physical needs (Bergmann and Jucovy, 1982; Laub, 1992); at times the children went out on their own in order to survive (Wiesel, 1972). In rare cases, parents abandoned their children, leaving them to face the dangers alone, so that they could save themselves (Schiffrin, 2000). In order to secure physically a child’s future, parents often had to leave young children alone for periods of time, so that they could go to work or look for food (Eisenberg, 1982), or to find a hiding place for him/her with Gentile families or in monasteries (Bergmann and Jucovy, 1982; Bugner, 2000; Friedlander, 1979; Kestenberg and Brenner, 1996). While parents undertook these actions because they hoped that they would give their children a better chance to survive, the children were often too young to understand why their parents had left them alone or with strangers.

In other instances, parents prepared their children for survival on their own; some taught children to memorize addresses of relatives, to lie about their age and make themselves older during selections in concentration camps (Kestenberg and Brenner, 1996), or they taught them ways to hide their Jewish identity (Amir and Lev-Wiesel, 2001; Bugner, 2000; Kestenberg and Brenner, 1996). What these actions and the ones noted above have in common is that, under normal conditions, parents would never have suggested, let alone encouraged, such behaviors. Furthermore, these behaviors had the effect of quickly maturing even the youngest of children.

Attempts at securing physical protection for one’s child, then, often resulted in parental behaviors that deviated from “normal” patterns of behavior to which the children were accustomed. The children were left feeling unsure of what these actions would lead to and unsure of what they could expect from their parents in the future. Moreover, when the parents succeeded in physically providing for their children, they often did so at the expense of the children’s emotional needs, which then often led to emotional blocking that continued for years after the war ended (Bar-On, 1995; Chaitin, 2000, in press; Friedlander, 1979).

As the Holocaust proceeded, however, the persecution usually ended in death. Children survivors talk about being suddenly and cruelly separated from their parents (Kestenberg and Brenner, 1996), witnessing their parents or other loved ones being murdered (Bergmann and Jucovy, 1982), or watching their parents commit suicide when they felt that they could no longer handle the suffering (Kestenberg, 1992). These traumatic experiences were then followed by other ones that left the children no time to deal emotionally with what had happened.

In sum, survivors’ documented narratives provide information concerning the kinds of traumatic experiences faced by the persecuted families. In this study, we tried to understand the significance of these traumas on the victims, based on their narrated memories. Therefore, we would like to address briefly the use of these memories as a reliable account of what happened. As Auerhahn and Laub (1998), Kestenberg and Brenner (1996), and Langer (1991) have pointed out, historians and psychologists do not always agree about the validity of life stories and testimonies. Historians prefer basing their knowledge on survivors’ stories that can be objectively validated. Psychologists, on the other hand, tend to be less concerned with the historical truth of a memory, but more focused on the meaning that the narrated memory holds for the survivor and the needs that are fulfilled by the survivor remembering a certain event in a certain way. This is our interest as well.

Researchers have devised different categorization schemes for the survivors’ traumatic memories. While Langer (1991) tends to stress the difficult and tormented aspects of narration of memories, Auerhahn and Laub (1998) focus on different levels of “knowing” that range from the least integrated understanding of the past to the capacity of the survivor to integrate the memory into his or her understanding of the present. In this study, as we explored the memories of survivors connected to their families, we were interested in learning what issues the survivors raised and the kinds of memories they had of those times and relationships. We also wanted to learn whether the children and parents maintained the expectations of parenthood, and if so, how? Since the interviews from which these memories were drawn provided us with an enormous amount of material, we have chosen here to focus on themes that appeared to us to lend important insight into the meaning these experiences had for survivors. The four themes presented in this paper are:

1. The focus on family members caring for each other

2. The “family” as the most important value to uphold

3.Idealization of parents

4.“Mistakes” that parents made during the Holocaust—behavior and/or decisions which were difficult for child survivors to understand

Sample: This study analyzed 93 biographical interviews and testimonies of survivors. The biographical interviews were drawn from interviews with survivors that have been collected at Ben-Gurion University since 1990, and the testimonies came from the archives at Yad Vashem2. The testimonies were chosen from the archives by using the key words: parents, children, family, mother, father, son, daughter, and siblings. Since we were well acquainted with the Ben Gurion collection, we were able to choose the survivors’ interviews in which the family was discussed. The interviews included in this sample had all been transcribed and were either in English or Hebrew, the languages in which we are fluent.

The survivors came from many countries, had many different experiences, and were of different ages during the Holocaust. The oldest survivor was born in 1900, the youngest in 1943. Most of the interviewees were children or adolescents during the war; of the 90 survivors for whom we have age information, 55 were born between 1925 and 1935. Orginally, we had not intended to focus on child survivors. However, as the study progressed, we found that the survivors who were parents during the war rarely talked about their relationships with their children. As a result, most of our information about parent-children relationships came from interviews with survivors who had been children or adolescents at the time of the war.

Data collection: When the survivors were interviewed for the Ben-Gurion collection, the interviewers employed biographical interviewing (Rosenthal, 1993). The interviewees were asked to “tell their life story.” The interviews were conducted by both the authors of this article and by many other interviewers (usually students), who had been trained in this method. In this open-ended interview, the survivor was given the opportunity to talk about whatever s/he saw as relevant to the life story. The interviewer did not disturb the main narrative, but posed questions of clarification after the survivor had finished telling the life story. We chose this method since we believed that an exploration of the significance of the Holocaust for the people who lived through it should be one that allows the individuals to talk about issues they perceive to have relevance for their lives without being limited to closed-ended questions or questions that had been prepared ahead of time. Furthermore, since the life story is considered to be a gestalt, which reflects the person’s understanding of self and social world (Rosenthal, 1993), it can be systematically analyzed in order to uncover those meanings.

The Yad Vashem interviews were conducted over many years by a number of interviewers who had been trained in historical interviewing by Yad Vashem staff members. Here, the survivors were asked to recount life before the war and detail their Holocaust experiences. In this type of open-ended interview, the survivor responded to questions about specific events and situations, providing historical information concerning the issues raised.

In both sets of interviews, the interviewee may or may not have talked about family issues, just as s/he may or may not have discussed other issues. This is because the choice of topics and the amount and kinds of detail were ultimately left up to the interviewee’s discretion, willingness, and ability to remember difficult experiences. As a result, some interviews contained many memories about parent-child and other family relationships while others contained almost none. Since, for the most part, the survivors were not directly asked about their family relationships during the war, what the survivors did say about these issues can be seen as representing their need to talk about these aspects of the Holocaust.

All of the interviews were audio taped in face-to-face, personal interviews. In the University interviews, the survivors were interviewed in their homes. In the Yad Vashem interviews, the survivors were interviewed either at Yad Vashem or in their homes. Interviews ran from one to nine hours, with most lasting approximately two hours. All of the interviews were then transcribed word for word. The analyses were carried out on the transcriptions.

Data analysis and procedure: The authors and research assistants divided up the interviews from the two archives. Each staff member read through his/her interviews in order to see if there was mention of family relationships existing during the Holocaust. If family relationships were mentioned, the interviews were reread and analyzed using a modified version of global and thematic analyses (Rosenthal, 1993). These analyses involved overall summaries of the interviews that noted: emotional atmosphere during the interview (e.g. Did it appear difficult for the survivor to talk or did s/he use a dry reporting style of narration?), central themes (e.g. experiences during the Holocaust, childhood, life in Israel after the war), and tentative hypotheses concerning the significance of an experience for the survivor’s life (e.g. “It appears as if Anat judges others based on their similarity/dissimilarity to her mother”). The analyses led to the identification of six major themes that were connected to family relationships (Bar-On and Chaitin, 2002): (1) the potential for emotional memories, (2) the focus on family members caring for each other, (3) the “family” as the most important value to uphold, (4) idealization of parents, (5) “mistakes” that parents made during the Holocaust—behavior and/or decisions which were difficult for child survivors to understand and (6) socio-economic factors connected to the family (such as economic class and religiosity).

The authors, who had trained the research assistants in the analysis process, read all of the analyses written by the assistants, answering questions and helping them refine their skills. After the themes had been discerned, we then returned to the interviews and categorized them according to whether the survivor had spent (a) most of the war without family/parents, (b) most of the war with family/ parents or (c) more or less an equal amount of time with and without family members. In this article, we have chosen to focus on four of the major themes noted above that emerged from our work: mutual family caring, the importance of the family, idealization of parents, and “mistakes” that parents made during the Holocaust.

Results and analyses:

Themes of family relationships from Holocaust memories

Table 1 presents the categorizations of spending the war with a parent or alone and the narration of the four different themes. To begin with, we would like to note that we found many more instances of survivors who spent at least half of the war with a parent or loved one than of those who spent it mostly on their own (79 vs. 14). This finding may be an artifact of our search. That is, since we looked for interviews in which key words related to the family appeared, perhaps this led us mostly to interviews with survivors who had experienced the Holocaust with a family member. However, there was no way of knowing that talking about family members, or not talking about them, would be indicative of whether or not the survivor experienced the war mostly on his/her own or with others before we began our work. Concerning the thematic results, it can be seen that the theme of mutual family caring came up often, appearing in 70 of the interviews (75% of the overall sample). The greatest number of these memories came from the sub-group of survivors who lived through the war with at least one parent (83%). This was followed by the sub-group that spent part of the war alone and part of the war with loved ones (77%) and then by the group that had gone through the Holocaust mostly on their own (43%). Very few people talked about family members exhibiting lack of concern about one another; only two people in each sub-group expressed this theme in their interviews (6% of the entire sample).

Our analysis showed that the overall pattern observed in the theme of mutual family care was also observed in the theme of the family as the most important value to uphold. While fewer victims talked about this in general (47% of the entire sample), this issue was narrated more by survivors who had lived through the Holocaust with parents (54%), than by survivors who had done so partly on their own (48%), and by survivors who had spent most of the war without parents (21%).

The pattern holds true also for the theme of idealization of the parent. However, in this case, there were just a handful of memories in which idealization of both parents was narrated by survivors who had lived through the war partly on their own and partly with others, and this theme was mentioned in only one interview with a victim who had gone through the Holocaust on his own. Furthermore, only 25% of the victims who had spent most of the Holocaust with parents talked about their idealization of them. The results also demonstrated that there was a more or less equal idealization of the mother and the father presented in these stories; eight stories contained idealization of the father and ten idealization of the mother.

The final theme addressed in this article, “mistakes” that parents made during the Holocaust, as in the cases of the other themes, was noted more often by survivors who had lived through the war mostly with a parent than by survivors in the other two groups. This is not surprising given that we could expect that the survivor who spent more of the Holocaust period with a parent had more opportunities to witness behavior that s/he may not have been able to explain easily than the victims who spent less time with parents. In general, however, this theme was narrated much less often than the other ones, with only a handful of survivors talking about such issues in each sub-sample (12% of the entire sample).

In conclusion then, we can see that, relatively speaking, the survivors who spent most of the Holocaust with a parent tended to recall and narrate more instances of the four themes than those who spent only part of the war with them. The group of survivors who faced the traumas mostly on their own talked about these themes less than the other two groups. The most oft recounted theme had to do with mutual care for one another, followed by the family as the most important value, idealization of parents, ending with “mistakes” made by parents. In the following sections, we will present examples of each of these themes and discuss the meanings that they may hold for the narrator.

“Mutual family caring” and “the family as the most important value”

As noted above, the issue of caring was a theme that appeared in most of the 93 interviews, followed by the theme—the family as the most important value to uphold. Although these two themes have a lot in common, and those who emphasized caring also tended to emphasize the centrality of the family, they differ in that we saw expression of caring in memories of specific acts that parents or children engaged in and expression of the family as the most important value reflected in survivors’ memories of their parents instilling in them, again and again, the need to do everything to keep the family alive, and if that failed to keep the memory of the family alive for future generations. In this section, we will present examples of both themes.

An example of caring comes from the Ben-Gurion interview with Anat3, who was three years old when her mother hid her in a cellar in the Warsaw ghetto, after her father had been apprehended by the Gestapo and all other family members had been deported. Anat’s mother, who belonged to the Jewish Polish underground, smuggled children out of the ghetto, often leaving Anat alone, sometimes even for a few days. Anat talks about how much her mother cared for her, even during the most extreme times. Through her reconstruction, we learn how her mother both knew what Anat’s needs were and how to meet them, despite the limits imposed by the dangers they faced. Even though Anat often presents a child’s perspective in the interview, when she does talk about her understandings from her adult perspective, she critically reflects on the impossible “promises” that her mother made her. Here follows an example of caring and Anat’s subtle criticism:

When she (mother) would come back from her excursions, when she would go for … for … days, … she would leave me something to eat like cooked cabbage … carrots, cooked potatoes, that was a feast, sometimes bread … dry toast. … I would always wonder where did she get it? How did she get it? She would always laugh and say, “Don’t ask, just eat.” She would hug me and laugh … and … say, “There is no need to ask, (you) need to eat.” And I thought, “How does she know?” I too want to be a mother like that, who knows where to get bread from …. She used to tell me that she’d come back and then she’d leave …. Sometimes two or three days would go by and she still wouldn’t come back. But she would always tell me, “I promise that I will come back.” When I was … a mother myself, (I thought) “How can a person promise a child a thing that he is completely uncertain about?” Perhaps she did that, not only for me, but for herself as well. That she must come back, because she promised. She can’t give up .… She wanted me to tell her that I agree that she go. She would say …, “There are 5 children, if I don’t save them, the Germans will kill them. So, do you agree that I save them?” … I would cry and scream, “I agree ….” And she would … not return … for a number of days….

After Anat and her mother spent most of the Holocaust together, Anat’s mother died two weeks after they immigrated to Israel, due to consequences of the torture that she had suffered at the hands of the Gestapo. From the interview, we learn that Anat never actually separated emotionally from her mother; she refuses to visit her mother’s grave, and she has daily “talks” with her. Though by traditional psychoanalytic standards this behavior could be viewed as hampering the process of normal separation and independence, it is very difficult for us to judge what would have happened to Anat if this “childish” construction of her mother had failed then or vanished later.

The testimonies from Yad Vashem also include many references to the importance of caring and the value of the family. Examples of these memories come from the interviews with Simon, a Czech man who survived the war with his parents and brother, and with Lili, a survivor from Hungary, who also presents herself as having spent much of the war helping family members make it through. The interview with Sara, a child survivor from Warsaw, has many instances of the value of the family. Finally, Bobbie, Juli and Arlene—a mother and two daughters who survived the Holocaust together through the camps of Majdanek, Plaszow, Bialichka, and Auschwitz, and who gave a triple interview—also talk about these issues at length. One thread, which appears to run through these different stories, is the caring, the close relationship, and the centrality of the family that characterized the families of these survivors before the war.

Simon, for example, speaks of the close relationship with his family before the war stating that, “ … we definitely had a good and happy life.” In 1942, when the family had to leave Bratislava and move to Nova Masto, his parents kept him informed of what was happening and their plans, again stressing the need to uphold the family:

(The hard time) did two things … it … shook our feeling of safety that was under our feet, but on the other hand, Father and Mother as well always emphasized that we would go on. That is, it was hard but we will stand up to it … we will do everything for you, and you can feel secure with us. They also kept their promise … we always had that feeling … that we are in a protected position, that they worry about us … the hard times made us very close … we always had the feeling that as long as we are together, that is the goal of life … it became our life’s goal.

Even when 11-year-old Simon and his brother were separated from their parents in Auschwitz and later had to survive on their own in Birkenau and Buchenwald, Simon continued to emulate his father, taking care of his younger brother as he believed his parents would want him to. Simon remarks:

Of course I took care of him … as soon as Father left it was clear that I am the one responsible for what happens to us …. [w]e did everything together … we even tried to go to the bathroom together….

Lili, who was a Hungarian survivor, has many references in her interview concerning how her parents took care of her and her four brothers and sisters both before and during the war:

We grew up with a lot of love and much culture … until the age of 10 … 12 … everything was fine, later on, I also have the feeling that my parents saw the bad things coming and I was little and very sensitive, they tried … to hide it from me, because they knew that they were unable to give more than they gave ….

Lili appears to have learned the lesson of helping others and the message that had been passed down in her family that the strong ones must help the weaker ones. In her testimony, she reminisces often about how she cared for others. For example, after the family was sent to Auschwitz, where her mother and brother were killed upon arrival, Lili’s older sister became very ill and was put into the infirmary. Lili recalls how she sneaked into the infirmary to nurse her sister:

I remained, the nurse left, the doctor left, they all left and I remained in the empty building with 12 sick women who had tuberculosis, and my sister was one of the women. After work I would always go and help the doctor, I gave out the medicine …. I found potatoes and cooked ….

An example of caring also comes from the Yad Vashem testimony of Sara, who came from a middle-class Warsaw family and was six years old when the war broke out. Sara was the sole survivor of her nuclear family as her parents and younger brother were killed in Majdanek. Sara recalls how her mother prepared her for living alone without them, doing so in a loving and emotionally caring way. Sara also tells us how her mother stressed the importance of Sara remembering from where she came:

I trusted my mother so much that I don’t remember the period … as something very dramatic.… I was surrounded by my family … it wasn’t terrible … at some point … they began teaching me things, and they told me straight out. “You have to get out of here,” … mother (told me). They got me prepared for leaving the ghetto … they taught me … to comb my hair by myself … and to darn socks … and all kinds of practical things … and names of people who aren’t in Poland, and they told me to remember it, and they told me night and day, they taught me names … I guess they knew what was going to happen….

This feeling of safety was shattered when Sara was smuggled out of the ghetto to a Christian family and was eventually moved to another one. In her interview, Sara states that what kept her alive was her steadfast belief that her mother would come back for her at the end of the war. When she speaks of these times, the value of the family is a very clear theme and appears prominent in her memories. For the last year and a half of the war, Sara hid behind a closet in an apartment. This was an especially difficult time; she was only allowed out from her hiding space during the evenings, family members never talked to her, never called her by her name, and never gave her food (she had to take it by herself when they were not looking). It was not until Sara graduated from the university that she acknowledged that her parents were not coming back for her, and it took her years to learn of their fate. Due to an “obligation to the family,” Sara made a promise that she would marry a Jewish man and have a Jewish home:

I have to marry a Jewish boy and my children must have Jewish names …. [b]efore I left the ghetto, mother said, “We can’t leave, you are the only one, you must remember us” … that was very, very deep and very, very strong, till today …. [m]y children will know who my mother was, and who my parents were, who my brother was ….

The final example of the two themes comes from the testimony that was conducted at Yad Vashem with Bobbie and her two daughters, Juli and Arlene. For this religiously observant family, the Holocaust began in 1938 when they were incarcerated in Germany and ended in April 1945 when they were liberated by the Americans near Berlin. While the daughters’ interviews are mostly filled with praise for their “courageous” mother, there are subtle signs of disappointment in their father who was perceived as not being able to “maneuver” as easily and as well as Bobbie. According to Juli, the family made a decision that the daughters would be responsible for keeping the women alive and that Ira, the older brother, would be responsible for keeping Chaim, the younger brother, alive. From the interview, we also learn that Bobbie stressed the importance of keeping clean in the camps in order to enhance their chances for survival. While the women succeeded in staying both together and alive (Juli even made sure that they got three consecutive numbers in Auschwitz), in the end, Ira could not protect Chaim; during a time when Ira fell sick and was in the infirmary, Chaim was shot. The women were afraid to tell Ira what had happened, waiting for him to get better before they told him of Chaim’s fate. As Juli notes:

He was so bitter, he cursed me, he cursed himself and he never ever forgave himself for not saving Chaim … it shadowed the rest of his life…. (He said,) “I never want to be responsible for anybody again,” so when he married … she was very independent, they never had children …. (He said,, “I don’t want to be responsible for anybody” ….

This passage highlights the painful price that some of the survivors paid for “failing” to keep other family members alive and their resulting perspective on parenting. While the other children (who did survive the war) went on to get married and have children, Ira sentenced himself to a life without children, as punishment for letting his family down, that is for failing in his caring and for failing to uphold the family.

When summarizing the themes of caring for family members and of upholding the value of the family, we see the supremely high value placed on keeping the family alive. We note that caring extended not only from parent to child, but from child to parent and from sibling to sibling as well. In cases where the family member believes that s/he had a hand in keeping another family member alive, it is often related to strong family ties that were characteristic of the family before the war began. Furthermore, these individuals transmit the message that their success was partially due to both personal and family strength. However, in cases where this mission “failed,” and the upholding of the family gave way to another value—such as self preservation—self-punishment was inflicted, sometimes to the extreme of deciding not to have children of one’s own. We do not know if these themes were only post-hoc reconstructions, whether the survivors imposed on their traumatic memories in order to make them sound more “humane,” or if they reflected a reality of strong family commitment and caring that actually occurred during the Holocaust. Whatever the case, we found that for these survivors, caring and upholding the family were connected to notions of parenting in their memories of parent-child relationships during the Holocaust.

Idealization of the parents

Idealization of parents was another theme that appeared in many interviews. While it it is somewhat similar to the themes of caring and the value of the family, it differs in the sense that when survivors engage in idealization, they are making very serious attempts to prevent negative emotions from surfacing. In this sense, therefore, idealization is closer to a defense mechanism than the two themes discussed earlier. For example, Anat expressed idealization of her mother. She attributed her with beauty, assertiveness, sensitivity, and almost total powerfulness. Anat told us that she yearned to be like her mother who was able to go in and out of the ghetto, bring back bread, and always appear to know what to do. However, Anat did not only idealize her mother; at times, her words also reflected a later more mature and critical understanding of her mother’s actions. We also hear, through her voice, however, her mother’s acceptance of Anat’s behavior as a child’s normal reactions to the extreme stress of their daily life.

Through Anat’s reconstruction, we sense a deep relationship that developed between mother and daughter, as the two withstood extreme traumatic experiences, and, later on, how this relationship helped Anat develop strategies for choosing people and priorities in her own life. We do not hear in her voice the need to rebel and disassociate herself from her mother, as is usually expected from teenagers and young adults. Again, we believe that we have no right to judge what should be counted as “normal” behavior and emotional maturity under these extreme conditions.

Other evidence of idealization of parents came across in the Yad Vashem testimonies of Bobbie, Juli and Arlene. For example, Juli opens her testimony with this introduction of her mother:

I just wanted to introduce my mother and to point out that all three of us are here thanks to her courage and thanks to her faith … the motivating force for survival was my mother … who never for one moment lost faith and it’s really her courage, her story, that saved not only us, her own children, but also many hundreds of women … whom she infected with her faith … this is my very brave and wonderful mother….”

The idealized picture of Bobbie, which is the picture presented throughout most of this triple interview, cracks at times, however; there are segments where the daughters subtly express disappointment and anger. For example, Arlene mentions her anger at Bobbie for “abandoning” the children by placing them in orphanages at the beginning of the war for a few months, until she managed to save enough money to take them out. Later on, Juli also talks about how she was responsible for saving her mother from being selected for the gas chambers, by distracting Mengele for a few moments and not the other way around. It appears as if the daughters feel the need to present an idealized picture of their mother, perhaps, in order to help them explain to themselves why their parents acted as they did during the Holocaust. The daughters can only hint that the mother occasionally let them down and was not able to protect them from the Nazi persecution. Interestingly enough, the father, who was killed, is not presented in an idealized manner, as evidenced by the relatively few references made about him in the interview. For example:

An only son … father was very much indulged … he was very observant … he didn’t have the “skills” to start crawling … mother … was able to maneuver a little bit better, her background had prepared her better for this … he loved luxury, loved elegance … needed a maid for himself ….

A third example of idealization comes from the Yad Vashem testimony of Nicole, a child survivor from Antwerp. In the interview, a great deal of respect and idealization of her parents comes though, especially where her mother is concerned. Here too, however, idealization is mixed with small signs of anger, perhaps due to the fact that Nicole felt that she was somewhat less important to her mother than her work. Nicole tells us:

In 1933 … she (my mother) went back to Germany and she … pulled her parents out …. [S]he said (to them), “You’re going back now.” Somehow my mother could see the scenario, what was going to happen … and she forced her parents to come back with one of her sisters … my mother was involved in many … things … B’nei Brit … the Jewish Committee … I always had an au pair … to take care of me … she was completely dedicated to her work, not to motherhood, I didn’t see my mother that often, but when I did … she always carried the whole world on her shoulders ….

We can only conjecture how the picture of a mother “carrying the whole world on her shoulders” affected Nicole’s understanding of what it means to be a parent. Perhaps, as in Anat’s case, Nicole also learned during the Holocaust that a mother’s duty is not only to her own children, but to others as well. Although Nicole does mention her father’s bravery, it is the mother’s story that is stressed. Toward the end of the testimony, Nicole talks about the effect that she thinks that the past had on her children:

For the longest time, I kept it very … quiet and didn’t even talk about it, I didn’t want the children to be oppressed … my mother was talking a lot about the war .… I didn’t want to do that to my kids, so they really didn’t know too much for a long time …. I have one daughter who is affected … she is very much into all that …every year she takes yeshiva girls and boys to Warsaw, to all the concentration camps ... she has a compulsion and so I guess I must have talked more about it than I think …. I tried not to burden my children too much ….

In this passage, there is another crack in the idealization of her mother. While Nicole believes that talking about the Holocaust may “oppress” her children, and as a result she has refrained from doing so, she notes how her mother “talked a lot about it.” This could be another subtle sign that while Nicole may idealize her mother for her self-sacrificing work, she feels that as a parent, she may not always do what is best for a child’s peace of mind.

Based on the interviews that we read, we may need to question the validity of employing current psychological theories of what constitutes healthy child development when attempting to understand how the Holocaust affected parent-child relationships. We must now ask whether an idealization of one’s parents or alienation from one’s parents hampered the child’s psychological well-being. Many Holocaust survivors were not as successful as Anat when it came to holding on to such positive feelings of parenthood. However, it does appear that for some of them, idealization of their parents served as a defense mechanism that helped them, perhaps, place less blame on their parents for not being able to protect them from the horrors that they had to endure. Therefore, we believe that one cannot decontextualize the question of normalcy or psychological well being. This brings us to the understanding that, when analyzing memories of survivors, there is a necessity to take into account the specific historical and social circumstances of the period while discussing psychodynamic individual or family processes.

“Mistakes” that parents made during the Holocaust

In a number of the interviews and testimonies, the issue of understanding certain parental decisions arose. At times, survivors said that their parents acted strangely, or made “bad” choices, thus putting themselves or other family members in danger. This is a difficult issue for the survivors to express, since it puts their parents in a bad light. One recurrent theme concerns the lost chance of escape due to the parents’ “inability” to foresee the future. For example, Olga (reported in Bar-On, 1995) tells us how her mother missed out on the opportunity to escape from the ghetto, when her husband came to rescue her and her children, because she did not want to leave her own mother. When Olga’s grandmother could not obtain a work certificate, and understood that this meant that she would have to go into hiding to avoid deportation, she decided to commit suicide. Olga witnessed her dying. Although in the interview Olga never criticizes her mother’s or grandmother’s decisions, we imagine that these events had a great impact on her. Olga’s mother showed total submission to her own mother’s needs, even when it meant that in doing so she might be giving up her own life and that of her children.

Batya, a Hungarian survivor who was interviewed in Yad Vashem, tells an interesting story about her father’s attempt to keep out of the work camps.

[I]n ’42 … he made himself “crazy.” He got papers for that, from the most famous professor, and he paid for that with all of his energy. He tried to hang himself with his belt from the door. My mother didn’t go with him. Because she was always laughing from the shows that he put on, so my sister went with him … in the end, he got off due to that ….

On one level, it appears as if Batya understood the absurdity of the situation and realized that her father’s actions saved him from a terrible fate. However, we have to ask ourselves how her father’s “attempted suicide” affected the way that she, as a fourteen-year-old, looked at him as a parent. Was she truly able to understand her father’s behavior? Did she think of her father as being creative or crazy? While we do not have the answer, it is important to note that this memory stands out from the rest of her interview in which she stresses that, “[I]t was hard. Most of the time that I remember … were hard times, I don’t remember the nice times for some reason ….” In our opinion, Batya did have difficulty understanding her father’s actions, and she therefore vacillated between seeing her father’s actions as being sound, on the one hand, but dangerous, on the other.

Moshe, who was interviewed at Yad Vashem, was born in 1932 into a wealthy family in Yugoslavia. He also speaks of the “bad” choices that his parents made, and especially those of his father, during the war. Moshe expresses some anger toward his parents for not escaping when they had the opportunity to do so and toward his father for not saving himself. After the family was put into a ghetto, his father was taken to a camp. Moshe and his mother were allowed periodically to visit him “where he was sort of in charge of the barrack with the sick and old people ….”  Later on, when the family obtained false papers and had the chance to escape, Moshe and his mother tried to persuade his father to join them. According to Moshe, his father said, “[H]ow can I leave these people? You go …” and that was the last time that he saw his father. At the end of the interview, Moshe says outright, “[O]ur parents weren’t smart enough … since they were killed. In terms of money there wasn’t a problem, there was the opportunity (to save ourselves) ….” In Moshe’s eyes, therefore, his parents were partly to blame for their own deaths, a fact for which he appears still unable to forgive them.

The interview with Yitzchak, a survivor from Sarajevo, provides further evidence of the difficulty that children sometimes had understanding the problems that their parents had in functioning and in making “better” decisions. As a result, the parents began to look ineffectual. Yitzchak states repeatedly throughout his interview that, due to the war, his parents gave up trying to parent him and that he could depend on them less and less. The following passage highlights the complexity of the situation; while Yitzchak appears to be angry with his parents for “being in shock,” he is unable to provide a clear answer as to whether or not he would have behaved in the same way if he had been the parent. He says:

[M]y parents … didn’t have kids on the brain … we were very free, my mother worked all of the time, during the day and night …. [M]y mother was in shock that her father had been taken, and her sisters as well … and they killed her daughter (Yitzchak’s sister) … my mother was in shock from this whole situation …. I had to manage by myself … my parents were in shock … when I look back, I try to think whether I would have acted in the same way with my children during such troubles, I have the feeling that they lost their head ….

A final example of mistaken or bad choices comes from the Yad Vashem interview that was carried out with Brigitte, a Polish survivor. According to Brigitte, her father, who had always been the decision-maker in the family, made all of the wrong decisions during the Holocaust and lost his ability to trust in his judgement. His “failures” began with his refusal to let Brigitte join her husband, who had escaped into the USSR, and continued when he counseled his son to report to the police station when he was ordered to do so, insteading of helping him to escape, a decision which led to Brigitte’s brother being executed. According to Brigitte, the “wrong” decisions were partly due to her parents’ desire to protect their children and partly to their inability to share their fears openly with one another. Brigitte states:

[M]y brother came home and told my mother and father, they were worrying … my mother gave him lunch … I had such a bad feeling about it … the tragedy was so great that we didn’t talk to each other because we didn’t want to worry one another …. I gave him my father’s handkerchief…. I didn’t say a word, we never saw him again … we respected our father very much and he was very smart … we never thought of doing anything without asking him, he had the last word, so I thought, “If I ask father what to do (whether to try to escape or not), he’ll know for sure,” … because a father knows everything. Right? So I said, “Daddy, what are we going to do?” … [H]e was completely broken, he had lost that fantastic son of his, by such a mistake, because if he would have been smart, we didn’t have to let him go to jail … but my father said, “… I’m sorry to tell you, do whatever you can … don’t ask me, I don’t know how to live life like this.” [A]t that time I realized that I’m all by myself … my father is no father anymore … my mother was terribly depressed ….

In Brigitte’s words, we hear how her perception of her parents as protectors fell apart. This is a very harsh acknowledgement and is accompanied by puzzlement and helplessness. At the height of the chaos, Brigitte realized that her father could no longer protect his children as a father should and that her mother was too depressed to carry on in her role. If in the previous quotes we presented examples of how people struggled with maintaining a positive perspective of parenthood, here we hear how it collapsed.

From Brigitte’s and other testimonies we learn that when the children perceived that their parents had lost their ability to trust their instincts and judgement, this had the effect of shaking the children’s belief in their parents. This often left them with the feeling that they were totally “on their own.” This discovery led to a new perspective concerning their parents. The children reacted with sadness and fear or the belief that their parents had become ineffectual and therefore could no longer function as “true” parents did. One should, however, be guarded concerning this conclusion, as the interviews and testimonies were given many years after the Holocaust. That is, when the children talk about their parents’ decisions in their interviews and judge them as being right or wrong, and when they think aloud about whether or not they would have come to the same decisions if they had been the parents, they are doing so in retrospect, based on the actual outcomes that these decisions and behaviors had.

Before leaving this theme, we would like to mention one more instance of “parental mistakes” that appeared in the interviews. This is the case of parents leaving their children with foster families, or in monasteries, convents, or orphanages, when they believed that this gave their children a better chance of surviving. When the children talked about these experiences, many of them expressed—either manifestly or latently—that this was “wrong” behavior since their parents had “abandoned” them. While, as adults, they can give a rational explanation for why their parents decided to leave them with others, it is clear that this is an understanding reached after the war, when they were adults. An example of this comes from the interview with Juli, Arlene and Bobbi, described above, in which Arlene hints at her mother’s “abandonment” of the children when she left them in an orphanage. A second example comes from the Yad Vashem interview with Sara, also referenced above, who describes, in an extremely emotional sequence, how her mother smuggled her out of the ghetto to a Christian family, right before the liquidation of the ghetto. Although, as an adult, Sara understands that this is what saved her life, it is clear that she still perceives this act, on some very deep level, as abandonment by her parents.

In sum, the mistakes made by parents during the war may be one of the hardest memories for children-survivors to vocalize. These narrated memories not only put their parents in a bad light, but they also give expression to the fear and anger often still felt by the children-survivors so many years after the trauma. While at the time that a decision was made neither the children nor the parents could know whether it would turn out to be “right” or “wrong,” these decisions both affected the family at the time and continued to haunt the survivors for years to come.

Discussion and conclusions

This paper took a look at four major themes connected to parent-child relationships that appeared in interviews with Holocaust survivors. In our opinion, one way to approach these themes is to view them as preservation mechanisms that have helped the survivors retain “normal” memories of their families that were so brutally threatened, attacked, and destroyed during the Holocaust. We can also use these themes to help us understand the ways in which the survivors have constructed their understanding of themselves as children during the Holocaust, and how they construct their sense of parenthood, as they recall and narrate stories from their traumatic family past.

What can we learn about parent-child relationships during the Holocaust from the survivors’ memories centered around these four themes? To begin with, these memories show that, in spite of the horrors that the survivors experienced, many of the survivors appear to have held on to the expectations that their parents would continue to keep them physically safe, and furthermore, that they would do so in much the same ways as they had before the war. Paradoxically, this might account for some of the negative memories that the victims narrated, including memories of parental “mistakes” in which survivors recounted parental choices, such as putting their children into harm’s way, that led to bad outcomes. In general, the survivors appeared to be judging their parents by “normal” standards, as opposed to “abnormal” standards that one might expect, considering the historical period that the children and their families were living through.

Attachment theory (Bowlby, 1969, 1973, 1980), a theory that has been widely accepted as providing a good explanation of parent-child relationships and inter- generational models of parenthood, can provide a partial answer for understanding the four themes discussed in this study. As was seen, some of the survivors interviewed, such as Anat and Juli and Arlene, managed to hold on to positive representations of the “mother model,” thus instilling in them a long-term sense of love and security. This was expressed through their emphasis of family caring and the importance they attributed to the family, even many years after the Holocaust had ended. This was also evident in their stories which revealed idealization of their parents, that is, their need/desire to present their parents in an extremely good light. This phenomenon, of course, may be due to the fact that Anat, Juli, and Arlene lived through most of the traumatic experiences with their mothers, and who had therefore provided their children with “living proof,” that they really could be depended on to see them through the war. However, this was not always the case, as evidenced, for example, by the interviews with Yitzchak and Brigitte, who saw their parents as being so overwhelmed by events, that they gave up parenting, leaving it to the children to figure out for themselves how to go on.

The analyses of the interviews have also led us to the understanding that there are limitations involved in applying a theory of parent-child relationships such as attachment theory—that was not devised to explain such relationships during periods of genocide—to parent-child relationships during such times. As some of the cases showed, a positive, strong attachment with a parental figure in childhood before the war did not necessarily lead to a long-term positive emotional relationship after the severe traumatic situation set in. It appears as if a child’s expectations of a parent could be seriously undermined for good if the child was exposed to a parent who dramatically changed his/her behavior for the worse, due to the external events taking place during the Holocaust. Furthermore, if we think about the intergenerational aspects of attachment theory, we believe that for the individual who experienced the loss, there was the further risk that, s/he would be unable to recapture its memory and to extend emotional security to his/her own children, when s/he became a parent, later on in life. Hence, there is the risk that the absence/disintegration of emotional security continued into the next generation born after the war. Examples of this were found in the larger study on which this paper was based (Bar-On and Chaitin, 2002). For example, Sara was a harsh parent whose warmth only returned when she became a grandmother so many years later.

The discerning of three of the themes present in the interviews highlighted another interesting point, one we connect to the post-war world-views held by the victims that resulted from their experiences during the Holocaust. While it was emotionally moving for us to discover that during the Holocaust there were many families that emphasized the need to care for one another, to uphold the family as the most important value, even to the point of idealization of parental figures, research has often shown that survivors’ Holocaust experiences led them to be extemely distrustful of non-family members in their post-war lives (Chaitin, in press; Danieli, 1988; Janoff-Bulman, 1992; Lifton, 1988). Therefore, while there is no denying that the emphasis placed on the family had obvious important and positive effects—such as instilling in the children a sense that they were loved and that their well-being meant everything to the parents, thus enabling them to carry with them a positive internal parental model into adulthood—it might also have led many survivors to the conclusion that outsiders should not be trusted, as they often cause loved ones harm. If we connect this idea to the tenets of attachment theory, we must reexamine the universality of Bowlby’s assertion (1969, 1980) that a positive parental model will lead a child to feel free to explore his/her world. We now pose two questions: How creative and free could child survivors be if they were taught by their loving parental figures that the external world was primarily a source of threat (objectively true, during the Holocaust)? And, when these survivors became parents, did their fears of outsiders (objectively unfounded, in most cases) inhibit their children’s free exploration of the world as well? While we do not have answers to these questions, and while we certainly do not call into question the tenets of attachment theory under normal times, we pose them here as issues that need to be considered when applying attachment theory to an understanding of parent-child relationships that took place during the Holocaust. Exploring such issues could also help us better understand the working through processes (Bar-On, 1995; Chaitin, 2000) of the descendants of these survivors.

In closing, we find it important to note that in the interviews in our sample, there were many more instances of children talking about their parents than of parents telling us about their children during the Holocaust. While Holocaust testimonial archives include some interviews that were carried out with parents and one or more of their children, they are, unfortunately, rare. This can be explained by the fact that very few parents who had children during the Holocaust survived and/or gave testimonies about aspects related to their own parenthood. In one sense, therefore, our sources of information about parenthood are quite limited, as we can base our understandings mostly on the perspectives presented by the children. Given that so much time has elapsed since the end of the Holocaust, it may be too late to learn about family relationships from individuals who were parents at the time. However, this should not keep us from the endeavor of trying to learn more about what family life must have been like and how it was subjectively experienced by those victims who are willing and able to share their stories with us. As we listened to the survivors’ voices through their interviews, we could not remain emotionally untouched, and our admiration grew for what many parents during the Holocaust appear to have succeeded in passing on to their children. While there is no way of “proving” that what the child-survivors told us actually happened—and as noted above, this is not what we set out to do—through the children’s reconstructions of their past, we learned that parents often transmitted a sense that the family unit was going to remain intact and that the children were going to be continued to be looked after, no matter how horrific life became. However, we were also aware of the problems faced by the parents and children during the war; in these voices, we heard some stories of parents’ cruelty toward their children, of parental dispair that left children to deal with unbelievably cruel conditions, and of parents who became so emotionally unavailable for their children that, even as they managed to survive physically, their psychological well-being was scarred for life.

The insights gained from analyses of the interviews lead to issues that need to be addressed in future work. We hope that this study will comprise a first step into the understanding of the essence of parenthood during the Holocaust and its possible aftereffects so many years later. We believe that by conducting further analyses of interviews with survivors and their descendants, as well as by reading their diaries and letters, we will be able to attain a fuller picture and to arrange the themes addressed here into a comprehensive theoretical framework. We hope that such a historically and socially contextualized psychodynamic perspective will also be of use for scholars and clinicians who are engaged in the study of other instances of prolonged social trauma, in which individuals act cruelly and inhumanely to others.

Notes

1.   We would like to thank Professor Yehuda Bauer of Yad Vashem and the many others there who helped us gather the information needed. We further extend our thanks to The Raab Center for Holocaust Studies at Ben Gurion University, which helped support this study. Thanks to the Lentz Association and the University of Missouri–St. Louis whose fellowship to Dr. Chaitin facilitated the writing of this article. Finally, we thank our students, who helped us categorize and undertake the first analysis of the data.

2.   Yad Vashem is a complex of museums, outdoor monuments, exhibition halls, archives, a library, and other resource centers located in Jerusalem and devoted to the legacy of the Holocaust. We wish to thank Ms. Bella Krechner for her help in conducting this search and the secretaries of the International Studies Institute for their help in photocopying them.

3.   All of the names of the survivors are pseudonyms.

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