Abstract
This unusual way of narrating what happened to large groups of children consists of anthologies of the voices of children, whose oral or written experiences have been collated.1 ‘Choral’ works do not distinguish narrators or characters in the usual way, as no individual details of names, ages or — in some cases — gender are given, so the children whose voices we read are anonymous. Such anonymity contrasts with other examples in this study, which are all by individuals whose experiences and suffering were extremely particular and often undergone alone.
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Notes
The term is from the blurb on the back cover of Henryk Grynberg, ed., Children of Zion (trans. Jacqueline Mitchell, Evanston, ILL: Northwestern University Press 1997; all further page references are in the text).
It is also used in the blurb of Karen Gershon’s Postscript: A Collective Account of the Lives of Jews in West Germany since the Second World War, London: Victor Gollancz 1969, the constituent voices of which are described as ‘a many-voiced choir bearing witness’.
Claudine Vegh, ed., I Didn’t Say Goodbye, trans. Ros Schwartz, London: Caliban Books 1984.
Clara Asscher-Pinkhof, Star Children, trans. Terese Edelstein and Inez Smith, Detroit: Wayne State University Press 1986 [1946]. All page references are in the text.
See Joanne Reilly, Belsen: The Liberation of a Concentration Camp, London: Routledge 1998, pp. 13–18.
Gillian Lathey points out that books of this kind may be categorized differently at various points in their production or reception (The Impossible Legacy: Identity and Purpose in Autobiographical Children’s Literature Set in the Third Reich and the Second World War, Berne: Peter Lang 1999, p. 31), so my commentary will assume an adult reader of Asscher-Pinkhof’s text.
Hans Keilson, Sequential Traumatization in Children: A clinical and statistical follow-up of the Jewish war orphans in the Netherlands, with the collaboration of Herman R. Sarphatie, trans. Yvonne Bearne, Hilary Coleman and Deirdre Winter, Jerusalem: The Magnes Press 1992, p. 53.
Christine Lattek, ‘Bergen-Belsen: From “Privileged” Camp to Death Camp’, Journal of Holocaust Education 5(2&3) Autumn/Winter 1996, Special Issue: Belsen in History and Memory, pp. 37–71: 46.
See Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin, Texas: University of Austin Press 1981.
See for instance Shimon Redlich, ‘The Jews in the Soviet Annexed Territories, 1939–1941’, Soviet Jewish Affairs (1) 1971, pp. 81–90.
Irena Grudzinska-Gross and Jan Tomasz Gross discuss the difficulty of ascer-taining the numbers involved; Polish authorities estimate that 1.2 million people were resettled in the Soviet Union from south-eastern Poland in the first two years of the war, of whom 8,80,000 were forcibly sent to Russia between 1940 and 1941; about 4,40,000 people were ‘dumped into settlements (poselki)’ of whom a quarter were children below fourteen (Irena Grudzinska-Gross and Jan Tomasz Gross, eds and compilers, War Through Children’s Eyes: The Soviet Occupation of Poland and the Deportations, 1939–1941, trans. Ronald Strom and Dan Rivers, Stanford: Hoover Institution Press 1981, pp. xxii–xxiii).
Irena Wasilewska, Suffer Little Children, London: Maxlove Publishing 1946, pp. 6–8.
Elie Wiesel, Night, trans. Stella Rodway, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1981 [1958], p. 80;
Art Spiegelman, Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1987, p. 28.
In Gerhard Durlacher’s The Search: The Birkenau Boys (trans. Susan Massotty, London: Serpent’s Tail 1998) Gerhard is a character in his own text rather than simply its narrator, as his responses to the adult boys’ reactions to their experiences frequently show: he is ‘taken aback’ (69), envious of those whose parents survived (75), weeps (92) and he refers to ‘our past’ (22).
Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Epic and Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Hoiquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin: University of Texas Press 1981, p. 13.
See Rachel Falconer’s discussion of this essay, ‘Bakhtin and the Epic Chronotope’, in Carol Adlam et al., eds, Face to Face: Bakhtin in Russia and the West, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press 1997.
Karen Gershon, ed., We Came as Children: A Collective Autobiography, New York: Harcourt, Brace and World 1966, p. 28; all further page references are in the text. Although the Movement for the Care of Children, founded in November 1938 after Kristalinacht to bring unaccompanied children under 17 to Britain, was only briefly known as the Children’s Transports, the German term Kindertransport is widely used in English.
Vera Gissing, Pearls of Childhood: The poignant true wartime story of a young girl growing up in an adopted land (London: Robson Books 1994).
Marion Berghahn, Continental Britons: German-Jewish Refügees from Nazi Gennany, Oxford: Berg Publishers 1988, pp. 110–11. She explicitly contrasts her conclusions with Gershon’s possibly ‘too rosy’ picture of how the children settled down with their foster-families (ibid., p. 150).
Rather, the picture of British generosity towards and acceptance of the refugees is ‘rosiest’ in the compilation I Came Alone (Bertha Leverton and Shmuel Lowensohn, eds, I Came Alone: The Stories of the Kindertransports, Sussex, England: The Book Guild 1996).
Karen Gershon, ed. and trans., Postscript: A Collective Account of the Lives of Jews in West Germany since the Second World War, London: Victor Gollancz 1969, p. xv.
Mark Jonathan Harris and Deborah Oppenheimer, eds, Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport, London: Bloomsbury 2000.
Alan L. Berger, ‘Jewish Identity and Jewish Destiny, the Holocaust in Refugee Writing: Lore Segal and Karen Gershon’, Studies in American Jewish Literature 11(1) 1992, pp. 83–95: 83. His concluding remark — ‘Yet through their writings, refugee children witness to the world both their pain and their espousal of Jewish identity after Auschwitz’ (p. 93) — is true only ironically of We Came as Children.
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© 2004 Sue Vice
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Vice, S. (2004). Choral Narration. In: Children Writing the Holocaust. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230505896_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230505896_3
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