The youngest survivors of the Holocaust had direct experience of persecution. Some survived in hiding, some were imprisoned in ghettoes or concentration camps, but all saw the profound loss of families, birth communities, native languages and cultures. Because they were so young, however, they often had few or no memories of their wartime experiences, and they struggled to feel they could call themselves survivors at all. In this talk, Professor Clifford explores their individual and collective journeys from ‘lucky’ children who managed to live through genocide, through to ‘child Holocaust survivors’ with a profound new understanding of their own pasts.
Rebecca Clifford is a Professor of European and Transnational History at Durham University. She is the author of two monographs on the Holocaust, the award-winning Survivors: Children’s Lives After the Holocaust (Yale, 2022) and Commemorating the Holocaust (Oxford, 2013), and co-author of Europe’s 1968: Voices of Revolt (Oxford, 2017). Survivors, her latest book, was winner of the Yad Vashem Book Prize and the Canadian Jewish Literary Awards Scholarship Prize, a finalist for the Cundill History Prize, and shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize, among other accolades.