As the Second World War ended, an estimated 150,000 – 180,000 child survivors of the Holocaust emerged from their hiding places or centers of internment. They were a tenth of Europe’s pre-war population of Jewish children, a fragment of an entire generation. In the months and years that followed, these child survivors began to search for their families, and some (we will never know exactly how many) were reunited with surviving mothers and fathers. But this was rarely the happy ending that we would like to imagine.
In my latest book, Survivors: Children’s Lives After the Holocaust, I found that the stories of child Holocaust survivors upended my assumptions again and again, and nowhere was this truer than around the emotive topic of family reunions. We are so used to encountering scenes of joy as families are reunited in Holocaust film and literature that it is challenging to accept the reality of a bleaker picture. The notion that family reunification was the best possible outcome for a survivor child is deeply seductive, particularly as so many survivor children found themselves with no remaining family members at the war’s end. Children who found their way back to surviving mothers and fathers were frequently told how lucky they were. Yet of the 100 children whose stories I examine in the book, not one who was reunited with surviving parents described the experience as joyful.
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