Childhood Traumas

Narratives and Representations

Kamayani Kumar, Angelie Multani

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000699838
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Entwicklungspsychologie

This volume contributes to understanding childhoods in the twentieth and twenty-firstcentury by offering an in-depth overview of children and their engagement with the violent world around them. The chapters deal with different historical, spatial, and cultural contexts, yet converge on the question of how children relate to physiological and psychological violence.

The twentieth century has been hailed as the "century of the child" but it has also witnessed an unprecedented escalation of cultural trauma experienced by children during the two World Wars, Holocaust, Partition of the Indian subcontinent, and Vietnam War. The essays in this volume focus on victimized childhood during instances of war, ethnic violence, migration under compulsion, rape, and provide insights into how a child negotiates with abstract notions of nation, ethnicity, belonging, identity, and religion. They use an array of literary and cinematic representations—fiction, paintings, films, and popular culture—to explore the long-term effect of violence and neglect on children. As such, they lend voice to children whose experiences of abuse have been multifaceted, ranging from genocide, conflict and xenophobia to sexual abuse, and also consider ways of healing.

With contributions from across the world, this comprehensive book will be useful to scholars and researchers of cultural studies, literature, education, education policy, gender studies, child psychology, sociology, political studies, childhood studies, and those studying trauma, conflict, and resilience.

1
Poof! up in Smoke

A modern fairy tale*

Kamayani Kumar

This evening I walked along the street of death.

—The Closed Town, Anonymous, Terezin

Shoah is indisputably the most horrendous horrors that human civilizations have endured. A colossal cultural trauma, its impact is far from having lessened with time. Instead, transgenerational transmission of trauma has claimed the psyches of second and even third generation survivors of Holocaust. Psychologists assert that the “conspiracy of silence” that underlined survivor accounts compounded with “survivor’s guilt” has contributed immensely towards lack of cathartic redemption and assimilation of survivor communities who continue to be haunted by the post memories of Shoah.

Having said that, one cannot ignore that there is no paucity of narratives on Holocaust—all of which “speak” of the trauma it generated. Yet, paradoxically a lot remains “unsaid”, largely because of the magnitude of horror that the “telling” entails. Representing “holocaust” was consistently challenged by “limits of representation”, and as Adorno wrote, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”. Of all the discourses available on Holocaust, some fictional, some reconstructions from memories, some testimonies, the most powerful form of discourse is from children who were victims of this horror. Millions succumbed to it in gas chambers, or were starved to death. These children have left behind testimonials which speak volumes of their incomprehension as the world around them collapsed. This chapter focuses on three texts, Terezin: The Story of the Holocaust by Ruth Thomson, I Never Saw Another Butterfly, Children’s Drawings and Poems from Terezin Concentration Camp, 1942–44 by Hana Volavkova, and the memoir Helga’s Diary by Helga Hosokova-Weissova. The attempt is to examine how children used art and poetry as a means to lend expression to their unheimlich experience of being a victim of Nazi persecution at an age where the concepts of race hatred, ethnic violence, and ethnic cleansing held little or no meaning for them.

Of fifteen thousand children who passed through Terezin less than one hundred survived the “model ghetto”. Yet, these children have left behind a legacy of paintings which “speaks” of the brutality of Shoah in a way that does not “rely on conventional historical narratives but ... produce(s) ... trauma texts that resist conventional modes of narrativization” (Simine 2013: 38). These children’s art polycontexturally¹ (to borrow Israeli painter Brach L. Ettinger’s term) makes us a part of their trauma via “aesthetic wit(h)nessing” (Pollock 2010: 1). Their art not only works as testimony but also as “a keeper of historical memory” (Pollock 2010: 3). It is in such discourses that one finds “an alternative space for expression” (Beliwal 2011: 4). Taking this argument further one can list the support of critical theorists Janet Walker, Ann Kaplan, and Joshua Hirsch who point out that visual media provides a semiotic framework which is “central to the idea of secondary witnessing and vicarious trauma” (Simine 2013: 36) and in this capacity offers a crucial tool for understanding second generation’s response to vicarious trauma. Theatre too was a powerful form of testimony in Terezin and together these discourses resonate with a sobering and chilling reminder of the trauma thousands of innocent children underwent. While they may not have survived to tell their stories . .. their paintings and poems do the same in far more substantive manner.

Of the works of these children the paintings and writings of Helga are significant for she not only survived the camp to write her memoir but also used her interest in art to paint “what she saw” while she was in Terezin. Helga survived but she lost her father who was probably gassed to death. Her testimony is of extreme significance for as a child her perception of the world as it crumbles around her while she holds on to hope till the last is extremely moving.

Terezin accounts for the largest number of drawings on Shoah—4387 drawings by Jewish children about this Ghetto. The paintings were done clandestinely under the guidance of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis (1898–1944), a remarkable artist from the interwar avant-garde. It was an attempt by this artist to prevent the children’s creative and social intellect from dying under such inhumane conditions. She managed to bring out the individuality of each child and allowed them the freedom to express themselves, unleash their fantasies and emotions, and as a result her instruction had an invaluable therapeutic effect. She continued doing this subversively until in 1944 she and almost all of her students were sent to their death in Auschwitz. Before leaving Terezin she hid two suitcases full of children’s drawings from Terezin which are indisputably an incredibly rich testimony. By riveting the narrative on the viewpoint of children it shifts the onus of the whole discourse drastically. As children have sensibilities tangentially different from adults it often becomes difficult to reconstruct experiences of children. These poems and paintings however, open a window that reveals their pain. That they are different from an adult survivor’s reconstruction of his experiences of trauma as a child is what makes them so precious. These remain naked to the core speaking aloud of how these lost, bewildered souls engaged with their experiences of the Holocaust. In doing so, it facilitates the exposition of the psychological effects of the war from a child’s perspective in a manner in which other frameworks available could never achieve. As Silverstein, a child survivor of Holocaust describes the feeling of complete abandon that millions of children in Terezin must have encountered, “With nobody to console you, with nobody to tell you it’s okay, it’ll be better, hold on. Total isolation, total loneliness. It’s a terrible feeling. You know, you are among people and you are like on an island all alone. There is nobody you can go to ask for help. You can nobody ask for advice. You had to make life-threatening decisions all by yourself in a very short time, and you never knew whether your decision will be beneficial to you or detrimental to your existence” (Altman 2010: 71).

Terezin labelled as the “Führer’s gift to the Jews”, and a “model ghetto” had a large number of artists and intellectuals under whose influence some semblance of cultural richness survived in the ghetto in tango with humiliation, starvation, disease, and continuous transports to the extermination camps. The children worked under the guidance of Dicker-Brandeis who would give them scraps of paper, and ask them to draw often at random. The paintings collectively suggest a narrative which speaks mournfully of their nostalgia for “home”. The children strove to represent the dystopia that Terezin was; clinging all the while to remnants of hope that found expression in the idyllic pictures of garden in bloom, of human figures scaling peaks to liberation, a lighted menorah....

Helga Weiss who was only twelve when she found herself at Terezin used the next three years to come up with a powerful documentary on the plight of millions as perceived and represented by a child. The first picture she drew was of a snowman revealing a child’s desire for representing things which he/she cherishes and desires. However, upon seeing the child’s representation of her memories of a lost “home”, playfulness and innocence of childhood games, etc., Helga’s father told her to paint what she saw. Thereafter, Helga’s paintings became a true reflection of her life, as well as the life of those around her in the ghetto. Several other children who drew under the guidance of Dicker-Brandeis fell into the temptation of drawing glorified images of “home” nestled in idyllic surroundings which were not remotely in tune to the harsh conditions in which they were living. Perhaps, this was their way to cope with the harsh, bleak reality that threatened to shadow each moment of their lives. As Moning points out, “There is indeed a feeling of optimism that radiates from the drawings. . .. While some sought to depict camp life, very few children chose to portray scenes of violence or death that were likely seen every day in the camp. Of the camp pictures, the majority were not dismal or even fearful. Rather, they were completed with cheerful colours.... It seems as if the children were using their artwork to depict the world they wished was their own. There were no picturesque houses in the country, no bountiful feasts, and no park for play within Theresienstadt. These things existed only in the children’s imaginations, and then upon the paper they chose to create them on” (Monnig 2014: 48).

Helga however, was one artist who took her father’s advice and painted what she saw. Children at Terezin saw as Jiri Weil points out “the endless lines in front of the canteens, they saw the funeral carts being used to carry bread and the human beings harnessed to pull them. . .. They saw executions, too, and were perhaps the only children in the world who captured them with pencil and paper” (Mardirosian 2012: 256).

While Helga’s works bring home the gruesome reality of Terezin the artworks of other children in contrast profoundly represent the “home” they desired to return, a home which had become a fantasy, or even as obscure as a fairy tale. They speak of tales of faraway places where there are kinder people, no hunger, no death and no grandfathers gnawing at stale bread and rotten potatoes.

While almost all of Helga’s art work speaks of some harrowing aspect of Terezin one painting titled “Cutting Down Bunks” (Figure 1.1) is quite significant for it captures the false propaganda that the SS Troops were consistently engaged in both as a preamble to their discourse on how Terezin was a model ghetto as well as in preparation of the Red Cross visit to Terezin in 1944. She shows how the cramped and inhumane living conditions were not what was revealed to Red Cross. Instead, days ahead of the visit the thirdtier bunk was sawed off to make the room look less narrow when in reality she and her mother had 1.8 metres space unto themselves.

The drawing exhibits a maturity which is way beyond what ideally should have been a carefree existence of a school going girl. Instead it is steeped in the history of the worst genocide ever. In yet another work she refers to the Red Cross visit, the aim of which was to represent this dystopia as a model ghetto for Jews in the eyes of the world. Titled Red Cross Visit, the painting (Figure 1.2) shows how the Nazis engaged in intensive deception and charade to keep the truth of the dehumanizing treatment of millions of Jews a secret.

Another recurrent trope that emerges predominantly in the paintings that Helga made was—hunger. Titled simplistically as Standing in the Queue in Front of the Kitchen shows emaciated, ridden with grief figures waiting for food. In 1943 she made a painting titled Birthday Wish which showed two eager children carrying an enormous imaginary birthday cake from Prague, the pathos of which is heart wrenching. Helga, through her art work, testifies to how the Jews were reduced to mongrels by the Nazis. Deprived of spoons, plates, or bowls they were made to eat from a common bowl with their hands. In her drawing she has captured the inhumanness in stark reality. In one painting Helga has drawn emaciated, stooped women huddled together around a bowl of food eating it with their hands, and in another she represents how the Ghetto commander would sadistically allow dogs to eat the food meant for the Jews all the while enjoying the perfidy. Like Helga, another ten-year-old child’s work titled, Everyone Is Hungry speaks of the food deprivation and horror that the children went through. One does not know which child drew the stooped, emaciated figures lining for a quarter of litre of watery soup, but it is a very powerful narrative on what these children had to endure.

Figure 1.1 “Cutting Down Bunks”, Helga Weissova, 13 years old
Source: Terezin: A Story of the Holocaust by Ruth Thomson (London: Franklin Watts, Hachette UK Ltd., 2011). Reproduced by permission.

Figure 1.2 Red Cross Visit
Source: Terezin: A Story of the Holocaust by Ruth Thomson (London: Franklin Watts, Hachette UK Ltd., 2011). Reproduced by permission.

In her diary she writes, “I stuff myself with food . .. I swallow mouthfuls; I’m not hungry, but with each spoonful I swallow a single tear. There is not enough food; there are far more tears” (Hosokova-Weissova 2014: 46). Another time she writes of how for weeks they would not get even a quarter of a loaf of bread and how humans were reduced to fighting like animals for something as despicable as rotten potato peels.

While hunger was a recurrent theme in the narratives on Holocaust another common trope that threaded the predicament of the Jews was the constant dread of losing one’s beloved. Helga Weissova in her memoir, Helga’s Diary constantly speaks of her fear of losing her mother. She lies about her age so that she is not sent away to the children’s section and hence taken away from her mother. One change that swept over children during the war years was a sudden sense of responsibility thrust upon them so that the children often played the role of a caregiver to their forlorn and debilitated parents. Another inmate of Terezin, Ella Liebermann, too drew a painting which shows how an infant is being snatched away from his mother by the SS commanders. The brutality of the act and the horror it arouses is extremely potent and serves as a powerful indictment of the Nazi’s acts of violence—physical and psychic. The constant threat of deportation to the concentration camps in the east is another fear that finds echo in many paintings of these children. Helga Weiss made a series of drawings of her on the eve of her exit from Terezin in 1945. The last of the series captures the dread of being gassed to death. Drawn in all black with no colour the sombreness of it shows the broken spirited mother and daughter leaving Terezin with their only hope perhaps being able to find Helga’s father before they meet their certain death. The blackness which consumes this work is deeply connotative, suggestive of their doom.

The most horrific statement is made by the painting of Yehuda Bacon who drew the emaciated and grief ridden face of his father coming out against the smoke of the gas chambers. Drawn after his father was taken away from Terezin to the concentration camps, Yehuda drew this picture. Although Yehuda is one of the survivors of Terezin, to date his work resonates with the horror and brutality that he and his race suffered under Nazism. “Through their artistic expressions, the voices of these children, each one unique and individual, reach us across the abyss of the greatest crime in human history ...” (Mardirosian 2012: 264).

While some had recourse to art other children expressed their trauma through their poems steeped with their longing for a past which was idyllic when seen in context of the dystopia that defined their lives in the ghetto. As Monnig observes “Children’s poetry in Theresienstadt [Terezin] contained both positive and negative views of the children’s situation within the camp. These poems depicted the daily suffering, the pervasive fear, and constant hunger that re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Poof! Up in smoke: A modern fairy tale
• 2 Colours of trauma paint a thousand words: "Leaving Tibet" in paintings by Tibetan children in India
• 3 War babies
• 4 "Waiting for my mum to come back": Trauma(tic) narratives of Australia's stolen generation
• 5 Drawing an account of herself: Representation of childhood, self, and the comic in Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis
• 6 Cache-cache: Writing childhood trauma
• 7 Negotiating trauma: The child protagonist and state violence in Midnight's Children and Cracking India
• 8 Quest into the past: Heroic quest and narrative of trauma in Jane Yolen's Briar Rose
• 9 Et tu, brute?: The child soldier and the child victim in Shobasakthi's Traitor
• 10 Children at war: Child(hood) trauma in popular Japanese animation
• 11 Returning horror, re-visioning real: Children and trauma in Grave of the Fireflies
• 12 Coping with killing?: Child soldier narratives and traces of trauma
• 13 We needed the violence to cheer us: Losses and vulnerabilities in Ishmael beah's A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
• 14 Children of the trail: The trauma of removal and assimilation
• 15 Child/hood and 9/11 trauma: A study of Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
• Index