Children Surviving Persecution

This international study of children's experiences of organized persecution, explores the Holocaust and its aftermath as prototypical social trauma. Traumatized persons' feelings of shame and guilt as well as a sense of being different may prevail, and they may attribute great power to others, seek safety in isolation, or search for a rescuer. Nevertheless, as a group, the child survivors of the Holocaust have achieved remarkable success as adults. Drawing on the wealth of personal and interview information, the contributors create a synthesis of personal history and psychological analysis. Adult memories of traumatic childhood experiences are accompanied by discussions of their effects and by analysis of the various coping mechanisms used to establish a viable post-war existence. These accounts are distinguished by the fact that they are by and about individuals who grew up in undistinguished Christian and Jewish families; not those of prominent figures or resistance fighters or rescuers. All experienced unrest and many suffered trauma during the Nazi regime, as a result of the war, and during the post-war turbulence. An important collection for students and scholars of the Holocaust and for those professionals in a position to help surviving victims of other organized persecution, civil violence, strife, and abuse.

The result of a four-year, in-depth study of those refugees who came as children or youths from Central Europe to the United States during the 1930s and 1940s, fleeing persecution from the National Socialist regime. This study uses social science methodology and examines their fates in their new country, their successes and tribulations.

Persecution can kill the church—unless there is an adequate understanding of, preparation for, and response to this potentially fatal threat. Surviving Persecution is a study based on more than forty years of living and working with the Mayans of Chiapas, who inhabit the highlands of the southernmost state of Mexico. This book can serve as a guide for Christians living in a hostile environment to know how to avoid unnecessary persecution and to survive violent persecution when it strikes. This analysis of persecution can also be a valuable resource for students and congregations who desire to better understand the challenges and complexities of persecution. The last chapter gives guidelines for how national and international church organizations can play a vital role in helping the suffering church survive and thrive. From his personal experience of being the target of persecution and then working with the persecuted indigenous church, the author employs an anthropological approach with a biblical perspective to formulate a response to persecution that can promote the growth of the church.

Holocaust Trauma offers a comprehensive overview of the long-term psychological effects of Holocaust trauma. It covers not only the direct effects on the actual survivors and the transmission effects upon the offspring, but also the collective effects upon other affected populations, including the Israeli Jewish and the societies in Germany and Austria. It also suggests various possible intervention approaches to deal with such long-term effects of major trauma upon individuals, groups and societies that can be generalized to other similar traumatic events. The material presented is based on the clinical experience gathered from hundreds of clients of the National Israeli Center for Psychosocial Support of Holocaust Survivors and the Second Generation (AMCHA), an Israeli treatment center for this population, and from facilitating groups of Austrian/German participants in Yad Vashem and Europe; as well as an upon an extensive review of the vast literature in the field. "...a long awaited text from one of the most experienced and knowledgeable psychologists in the world. The text is groundbreaking in its sensitivity, historical grounding, insight and scholarship." Michael A. Grodin, M.D.

This book examines a wide range of works written by and about child survivors and victims of the Holocaust. The writers analyzed range from Anne Frank and Saul Friedlander to Ida Fink and Louis Begley; topics covered include the Kindertransport experience, exile to Siberia, living in hiding, Jewish children masquerading as Christian, and ghetto diaries. Throughout, the argument is made that these texts use such similar techniques and structures that children's-eye views of the Holocaust constitute a discrete literary genre.

Special attention is paid to the effects of the Holocaust on children who were in hiding and the experience of adolescent children, as described in the diary of an adolescent girl.

This book addresses age-based persecution of children as a crime against humanity in connection with genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes (persecution - with some variation in the elements of the crime - is an existing offence under the Rome Statute of the permanent International Criminal Court, the statutes of various international criminal tribunals i.e. International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and under the statutes of other international criminal courts (i.e. the Special Court of Sierra Leone)). The book introduces a completely original concept in international criminal law, however, in discussing age-based persecution of children as an international crime against humanity where (i) the particular discrete child collective is targeted ‘as such’ for international atrocity crimes or (ii) individual children are targeted based on their age-based group identity as it intersects with other perpetrator – targeted characteristics such as gender, ethnicity, religion etc.

This is a unique exploration of the experience of children who survived the Holocaust—including Roma and Sinti victims—and the genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia. Children are among the principal victims of armed conflicts and slaughters; nonetheless, they perceive events through the prism of their unique perspective and have a different range of coping techniques than adults. This overview of the writings of ninety-one child survivors bears evidence to a wide range of human ruthlessness. The author presents little-known texts along with famous memoirs and autobiographical fiction, with abundant quotations. Many of these are not only compelling as historical testimony, but poetic, moving and stirring. Yudit Kiss has not written a historical study or literary criticism of the children’s books. She explores, instead, what the authors went through and what they felt and understood about their experience. Accessible and captivating, this volume presents a close-up, human-size dimension of destruction. The books written by child survivors also describe the resources and means that helped them to remain human even in the deepest well of inhumanity, offering precious lessons about resistance and resilience.