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Title

Paul Valent. Child Survivors of the Holocaust (Port Melbourne: William Heinemann Australia, 1993. Repr. New York, NY: Brunner-Routledge, 2002.

Abstract

"How can the abused child remember the events of childhood? What help does our society offer our traumatised children? With an unreliable memory inhibited by frightening feelings and a society keen to repress its own responsibility, the traumatised child is left alone and unsupported. At the end of the Second World War it was estimated that 1.5 million Jewish childred had been killed by the Nazis. In this book ten child survivors tell their stories. Their experiences range from living in hiding to physical and sexual abuse. Safe from neither the supposed protector nor the obvious enemy, these children's stories are remarkable. From these unchildlike childhoods we learn about courage and fortitude, and we respond with admiration and compassion. The testimonies in Child Survivors offer insights into our own pasts and give us all greater courage ... In this book, ten child survivors tell their stories. Paul Valent, himself a child survivor and psychiatrist, explores with profound analytical insight the deepest memories of those survivors he interviewed. Their experiences range from living in hiding to physical and sexual abuse. Child Survivors of the Holocaust preserves and integrates the personal narratives and the therapist's perspective in an amazing chronicle. The stories in this book contribute to questions concerning the roots of morality, memory, resilience, and specifc scientific queries of the origins of psychosomatic symptoms, psychiatric illness, and trans-generational transmission of trauma. Child Survivors of the Holocaust speaks to the trauma facing contemporary child victims of abuse worldwide through past narratives of the Holocaust ... The survivors are: Eva Slonim, who was subject to experiments by Mengele in Auschwitz; Bernadette Szkop Gore and her sister Frankie Paper, who were hidden in Paris; Richard Rozen (born Rozencwajg), who was in the Lublin ghetto; Juliette Zeelander, who survived in Amsterdam; Eva Steiner Grant, who was in Theresienstadt, as was George Hammerschmidt, after living in Zwickau and Berlin; Eva Marks, who fled from Vienna to Riga, and then to the USSR; Danial Kogan, whose father and siblings were deported from France to Auschwitz; and an anonymous woman who was abused, including sexually, by members of several families that hid her in France during the Holocaust."--Publisher description.

About the Author

Paul Valent is a child survivor of the Holocaust who spent the war in open hiding in Budapest, Hungary. He migrated with his parents to Melbourne, Australia in 1949. After studying medicine he received a postgraduate psychiatric degree in London, and then worked in Israel for three years. Back in Australia he specialized in liaison psychiatry (mainly in emergency departments), in psychotherapy and in traumatology. He co-founded and is ex-president of the Australasian Society for Traumatic Stress Studies and he founded and is ex-president of the Melbourne Child Survivors of the Holocaust group.