Trauma and Attachment in the Kindertransport Context

Book excerpt: The present volume is the result of an interdisciplinary oral history research project, which was carried out at the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex. It focuses on the Kindertransport, the British rescue operation saving 10,000 predominantly German-Jewish children from Nazi Germany, and is based on in-depth case studies of five child survivors of the Holocaust. Looking at human development over the life cycle as mediated by intervening trauma was at the heart of the project, which examined the making and breaking of a child's close ties to significant others, processes of identity formation under acculturative stress as well as the creation and recall of traumatic memories. The study is thus one of the few in the field of attachment research which sheds light on the lifelong influence which early attachment has on coping with massive cumulative trauma. The former child refugees' narratives are enriched by letters, diaries, or articles written by them and their (host) families as well as by interviews conducted with family members and friends. Consequently, we can look at individual lives and collective destinies from more than one perspective as we are provided with rich, multi-layered accounts of people's whole-life trajectories. While each Holocaust survivor's developmental story is unique, it is, however, linked to the others' by the common experience of negotiating an identity between two countries, cultures, and religions against the background of unparalleled political upheavals, and as such also sheds light on, and offers ways out of, the traumata suffered in present-day contexts of enforced migration and displacement.