Bringing Up War Babies

The figure of the wartime child in the mid-twentieth century unsettles and disturbs. This book employs a range of material – biographical, literary and historical – to chart some of the surprising and unanticipated crossovers between women’s writing and early psychoanalysis in the years of the Second World War and the decades before and after. This volume includes examples of children’s adventure fiction, as well as works written for adult audiences and important and previously unrecognized similarities are noted. The war was a disruptive influence in the lives of all who lived through it. Although active self-censorship is observed in the behaviour and attitudes of adults at this time, this book demonstrates how fictional children are able to articulate feelings such as anxiety and fear that adults were under pressure to conceal or to repress and at times, the figure of the wartime child becomes a surrogate for the writer herself or her suppressed fears and anxiety. When peace returned, this study finds women writers quick to identify and communicate a discomfiting new ambivalence between parents and children.

The history of 1971 Bangladesh War of Liberation accords the mass rape of Bangladeshi women by the Pakistan Army and their local collaborators. After about 40 years of the Liberation War, the matter of rape of the Bangladeshi women was brought under litigation, to a certain extent, in the International Crimes Tribunal of Bangladesh (ICT-BD). However, the issue of justice for the rape victims of the 1971 Bangladesh War of Liberation still lacks comprehensive social and legal attention. A question remained very much unexplored as to whether ‘legal justice’ through trials essentially ensures ‘social justice’ for the war rape victims of Bangladesh. It thus remains an unspoken narrative in Bangladesh in respect of how the war rape victims actually perceive ‘justice’. Another question that arises in this regard is whether ‘complete justice’ is being done in the course of ensuring legal justice to war rape victims. It may be mentioned that no systematic and/or comprehensive research has been conducted so far on this subject. This research would endeavor to get an account from 385 Bangladeshi war rape victims and their families about the socio-legal aspects of the long-awaited justice.

Rachel Booker has a difficult start in life. When her father dies, deep in gambling debt, her mother must harden herself to make ends meet, but becomes so hard she has little room left for affection or warmth. Mother and daughter work at the open market in Birmingham, selling second-hand clothes or whatever they can find just to put a little food on the table. But the market has a silver lining: it's there that Rachel makes her first childhood friend, Danny. As they grow older, the friendship grows into something more and their innocent romance gives Rachel the care and comfort she's always craved. But at just sixteen, as World War II breaks out, Rachel falls pregnant. They marry in haste but it isn't long before Danny is called up. Left on the home front with a new baby and little else, Rachel must scrape by with the other residents of Sparkbrook. But if Danny ever makes it home, will he be the same boy she loved so fiercely? And if Rachel can sustain the family until then, will she end up as hard-hearted as her own mother? Annie Murray's War Babies is a moving and insightful novel about hardships on the home front and how the war changed everybody it touched . . .

Shortlisted for the 2021 Wolfson History Prize and a finalist for the 2021 Cundill History Prize Told for the first time from their perspective, the story of children who survived the chaos and trauma of the Holocaust—named a best history book of 2020 by the Daily Telegraph ​"Impressive, beautifully written, judicious and thoughtful. . . . Will be a major milestone in the history of the Holocaust and its legacy."—Mark Roseman, author of The Villa, the Lake, the Meeting How can we make sense of our lives when we do not know where we come from? This was a pressing question for the youngest survivors of the Holocaust, whose prewar memories were vague or nonexistent. In this beautifully written account, Rebecca Clifford follows the lives of one hundred Jewish children out of the ruins of conflict through their adulthood and into old age. Drawing on archives and interviews, Clifford charts the experiences of these child survivors and those who cared for them—as well as those who studied them, such as Anna Freud. Survivors explores the aftermath of the Holocaust in the long term, and reveals how these children—often branded “the lucky ones”—had to struggle to be able to call themselves “survivors” at all. Challenging our assumptions about trauma, Clifford’s powerful and surprising narrative helps us understand what it was like living after, and living with, childhoods marked by rupture and loss.

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Rachel Booker has had a difficult start in life. When her father dies, deep in debt, her mother is left to make ends meet. Mother and daughter work together at Birmingham's Rag Market, selling second-hand clothes to put food on the table. Rachel's friendship with her first childhood friend, Danny, blossoms into something more and she falls pregnant just as WWII breaks out. The young couple marry in haste but it isn't long before Danny is called up. Left on the home front with a new baby, Rachel must scrape by. If Danny ever makes it back, will he be the same boy she loved so fiercely?