I had a few download issues with the book and by the time it was sorted, the file had unfortunately been achieved.

Wow, what a beautiful and well-researched account of life as a child survivor of the Holocaust.
Clifford's writing is concise, yet she relays the stories of these people in such a manner that is filled with emotion. The whole book raises lots of questions surrounding how society defines a survivor, and it really got me thinking. We often consider this part of history as being well-documented but in reality, as this book clearly exemplifies, we have so much more to learn.

A really interesting book that is beautifully written. Highly recommend!

Many thanks to the author, publisher, and Netgalley for sending me a copy of this book in return for an honest review.

A heartwrenching exploration of the effects of the Holocaust on those children who survived it, and the way decisions made by the adults around them afterwards often left them even more scarred than the event itself. Harrowing, touching, beautifully written and full of empathy, this was a revelation!

Well researched and academic in a lot of the writing and description, this book wasn't quite what I had expected from the blurb. I'd expected more accounts of the survivors however I felt that this focus was lost at times due to the academic tone of a lot of the book. I felt that the book could have done with closer editing, both in terms of sentence fragments and in terms of focusing more on the stories of the children who grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust. That being said the book was obviously a labour of love and the respect and compassion of the author shone through throughout.

This book focuses on the child survivors of the holocaust, of stories that have not been told, of voices that have been heard, but should never be silenced.

A fascinating and interesting read which is heartbreaking in places. This is an evidently well researched and informative book. It documents the stories of children who survived the Holocaust and the impact of the Holocaust on their lives.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.

The ARC of this book was kindly provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. #Survivors#NetGalley.
This book was incredibly well researched and it shows from the first chapter. I have to commend Clifford for her detail in the research she put into this book and the dedication of telling the stories of those less heard about. There isn't a dull page, her way of retelling these stories of trauma and triumph is breathtaking. I appreciate how this book questions a lot of the general standards we hold to be true about the Holocaust, "What is a survivor?", "Who classifies as a survivor", "Do they ever really survive?" This read has been an eye-opener into a part of history that we believe to be well documented, and how much we still have to learn.

Thank you to netgalley and the publisher for the arc of this book by Rebecca Clifford.

5 STARS! this was utterly brillaint so informative and loved hearing all thr story of the survivors of the Holocaust! well done for writing it brillaintly you can think what it was like for them!!

Clifford has researched the very youngest survivors of the Holocaust, those born between 1935 and 1944, and therefore ten years old or younger when the war ended.
It’s an unexplored area and it’s fascinating. Some children didn’t even know their original names and couldn’t remember their origins. ‘How do we make sense of our lives when we don’t know where we come from?’
Others had their pasts cast into doubt because they had not been in the camps but had been hidden. Some pretended that parents had died to gain access to resources for unaccompanied children.
And the public had trouble making sense of the children too. A story was told whereby a group of survivor children were terrified when a postal van drew up to their home in Surrey. This story wasn’t true but it explained the stories that built up around these unfamiliar children, and the expectations of them.
Schools of thought also built up around how to handle their trauma and the children sometimes balked at the heavy-handed attempts to get them to open up and recall their pasts.
I have read much about the Holocaust but this is such a fascinating area.
Clifford tells it too in such a human way using children’s stories and interviews which she meticulously pieces together across the years.
Thoroughly recommended.

“If you cannot recount the story of your own family, your home town, or your formative experiences, how do you make sense of your childhood and its impacts?”

Most of us take our early childhood memories for granted. They form part of the story we tell ourselves about who we are and where we came from. For so many children who survived the Holocaust, these memories are either entirely missing or exist only in fragments. There are often no surviving family members who can help them fill in the blanks.

The survivors whose stories are explored in this book were all born between 1935 and 1944. Previous books I’ve read about Holocaust survivors were written by people who were either teenagers or adults during the war. The oldest survivors mentioned here were only ten years old in 1945.

“For most survivors who are not young child survivors, there was a before, you see.”

[from an interview with Zilla C., conducted by psychoanalyst Judith Kestenberg in 1987]

Even though I’ve now read the excerpts of their stories I’m still have trouble getting my head around what their lives have been like. For so many years they were not even counted as Holocaust survivors and were encouraged to simply move on with their lives and forget what memories they had of that time.

“‘Just think it never happened,’ they urged, ‘and you will start a fresh new life.’”

[Paulette S., on how OSE staff tried to prepare her to move across the globe]

In addition, there was a “disconnect between what children after the war felt and what their adult carers expected them to feel.”

The children’s wartime experiences consisted of at least one of the following: “survival in hiding, in flight to a neutral country or Allied territory, in ghettos and transit camps, and in concentration camps.”

The ways these children coped with the trauma of the war and the subsequent traumas of being moved between institutional care, family members, and foster and adoptive homes is addressed. Some of the children lived in stable, loving homes during the war, albeit not with family members, only to be abruptly taken from them at the end of the war.

More often than not, they were moved to countries where they didn’t know the language. Many went to live with strangers and had to try to figure out who they were with little to no assistance.

‘Survivors’ has been extensively researched, with sources from “archival material, including care agency files, records from care homes, indemnity claims, psychiatric reports, letters, photographs, and unpublished memoirs, documents originating from nearly a dozen different countries”. The bibliography and detailed footnotes make up almost 15% of the book.

I had expected almost all of the book to consist of detailed stories of individual survivors. Snippets of interviews with survivors are included, as are overviews of the wartime experiences of a number of them. There is also a lot of information and commentary on changes that occurred throughout the decades that impacted on survivors. Some of these changes relate to what was happening in the world at the time and some examines the ways survivors have related to their stories as they grew older.

“We should not be surprised to find that the way in which we tell the stories of our lives changes over time; this is true for child survivors as it is for all people.”

I found it unusual that whenever survivors in general were discussed, most of the time they would be referred to as ‘she’ or ‘her’, even though interviews with male survivors are also included in the book. Some information was repeated in different chapters and I began to dread seeing the phrase ‘as we have seen’, but I came away with a much better understanding of both the short and long term impacts of the Holocaust on these young survivors.

I’m left wanting to know more about the individuals I was introduced to. Having said that, I agree with the author (an oral historian) that the level of detail I’m interested in would require many more volumes.

Content warnings include anti-Semitism, child abuse, death by suicide and attempted suicide, domestic violence, mental health, murder, sexual assault and trauma.

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Yale University Press for the opportunity to read this book. I’m rounding up from 4.5 stars.