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Parenthood and the Holocaust

Dan Bar-On & Julia Chaitin

  1. All the names in this manuscript are pseudonyms.
  2. The first author discusses elsewhere three other questions from the perspective of this historically contextualized psychodynamic perspective in relation to the Holocaust: Who counts as a Holocaust survivor? Who suffered more? And why did the Jews refrain from taking qualified revenge on the Germans after the war? (Bar-On, in preparation).
  3. The testimonies were chosen from the Yad Vashem archives by using the following key words: Parents, children, family, mother, father, son, daughter, siblings. 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.
  4. The interview that lasted nine hours was conducted in three sessions by Nurit Zamish in February 1995.
  5. During the first years after the Second World War, Israeli commissions gathered the survivors in Europe and brought them by ship illegally to Mandatory Palestine (Gutman, 1990). Most of these boats were caught by the British who transferred them forcefully to camps in Cyprus. The survivors finally arrived in Israel only after the state was established on May 15, 1948.
  6. For 10 years we gave a year-long seminar at Ben Gurion University on the psychosocial effects of the Holocaust on second and third generations. In the seminar students interviewed survivors and their descendants and we analyze the transcribed interviews during the seminar.
  7. One should, however, be aware that each additional source provides different insights as people may express one aspect of their family life in their diaries, another one in their letters to family members and a third in their testimonies and interviews that usually took place years later. However, a cross-examination of these sources should be of value and is worthwhile examining in future research.