Jewish Families in Europe, 1939-Present

History, Representation, and Memory

Joanna Beata Michlic, Joanna Beata Michlic

• Publisher: Brandeis University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781512600117
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book offers an extensive introduction and 13 diverse essays on how World War II, the Holocaust, and their aftermath affected Jewish families and Jewish communities, with an especially close look at the roles played by women, youth, and children. Focusing on Eastern and Central Europe, themes explored include: how Jewish parents handled the Nazi threat; rescue and resistance within the Jewish family unit; the transformation of gender roles under duress; youth's wartime and early postwar experiences; postwar reconstruction of the Jewish family; rehabilitation of Jewish children and youth; and the role of Zionism in shaping the present and future of young survivors. Relying on newly available archival material and novel research in the areas of families, youth, rescue, resistance, gender, and memory, this volume will be an indispensable guide to current work on the familial and social history of the Holocaust.

I

PARENTHOOD AND CHILDHOOD UNDER SIEGE, 1939–1945

1

DALIA OFER

PARENTHOOD IN THE SHADOW OF THE HOLOCAUST

During World War II, Jewish parents under Nazi occupation experienced unimaginable difficulties as they tried to function according to what they believed was their parental responsibility. In the Eastern European ghettos the situation was extremely complex. When hunger, forced labor, and death became the daily experience, living conditions were next to impossible, and parents faced unbearable dilemmas in their efforts to maintain the family and their parental responsibility. Nevertheless, the family remained central to life in the ghetto, serving as both a support and a burden. Parents lived in constant tension trying to care for both their own lives and the lives of their children.

When we read the primary documents of the time—diaries, letters, memoirs, and other sources—as well as the oral testimonies that were recorded later in the postwar period, we confront a paradox. On the one hand, we see parents who are totally devoted to their children and ready to sacrifice their own lives to save a child. On the other hand, these same sources describe parents who neglect and desert their children. Because the contemporary documentation is fragmented, in both official and personal sources, it is difficult if not completely impossible to follow individual families from the years that preceded the war through their entire ghetto experience. Thus scholars should be careful with making sweeping generalizations in biographies of individual Jewish families during the Holocaust.

My recent work has examined two dimensions of family experiences in the ghetto. In “Cohesion and Rupture: The Jewish Family in the East European Ghettos during the Holocaust,” I explored tensions within the family unit, and in “Motherhood under Siege,” I looked at the pressures on mothers. In this chapter, in addition to these two aspects, I also explore a third dimension, the role of men as fathers and husbands in understanding the family and parenthood during the Holocaust.¹

Parenthood has a life cycle that is based on the age of children and parents, and on the size of the family. Understanding parenthood is dependent on the relationship between couples and the structure of the family. Beyond the individual case of each couple and the particular relationships among family members, which will display a different reality in each case, parenthood is a cultural concept and contains a gendered code of conduct and responsibility of both father and mother.² The definition of responsibilities and norms reflects both the partnership and the particularity of each of the partners in organizing the family and caring for its members, in the context of society’s cultural conventions, class, and gender relations.

I explore how parents endeavored to maintain their basic obligations and responsibilities toward their children, as they understood them, and how this affected their identity as parents and their self-image. What were the results of the traumatic events following the war and of confinement in the ghetto on their behavior as parents? Were parents aware of the ever-growing crisis in their ability to sustain and live according to norms and conventions that guided life prior to the ghetto enclosure, and how did they react to it?

One should bear in mind that the generations of parents of the 1930s and 1940s had experienced the hardships of the First World War and the economic and political crisis of its aftermath. The 1930s were difficult years for a majority of the Jewish population in Eastern Europe because of the new widespread economic crisis and the rise of antisemitism. It became more difficult to provide for the family, and thus a growing number of Eastern European Jewish women were compelled to work. Over 30 percent were employed in industry and commerce, but many more were working traditionally in small family businesses, and not included in that statistic.³

At the same time, parents were being educated differently. On one hand, many young Jews took advantage of public education, which became obligatory in the 1920s, and a considerable group participated in supplementary Jewish education of different forms. However, there were also many youngsters who continued to attend traditional religious institutions—the heder and the yeshiva. How different were the younger parents, who were raised in modern Polish-Jewish culture, from their parents and grandparents in their feelings and expressions of love and affection between spouses and between parents and their children?

The Israeli American historian Shaul Stampfer’s research on the interwar period showed the increased importance of love, affection, and a romantic relationship between young Jewish men and women entering marriage. This was more prevalent among the lower and lower-middle classes, where economic considerations in marriage were less important than in the middle and upper-middle classes.⁴ Can we follow this growing centrality of love and affection into the ghetto and see how it is manifested in strong mutual bonds between spouses and between parents and children in both the nuclear and the extended family, including the parents of married couples?

What were the major tasks of parents in the prewar years, and how did they change in the ghetto? Parents viewed their main responsibility in the family as an economic one—to care for the basic physical needs of both children and adults by providing them with food, clothing, and housing. The gendered roles of parents placed on the husband the provision of the financial foundation, while the wife managed the household, taking care of food preparation, clothing, and cleanliness. This gendered division of labor was normative even in middle- and lower-class families, where women worked.

In addition to its vital economic role, in all societies the family has been responsible for transmitting culture and social placement to ensure that children grow up to become productive members of society and conform to its values and conventions. Assumptions about gendered roles led to a distinction between the upbringing of boys and girls, in particular in the sphere of education. In addition to the formal schooling that boys and girls received, fathers were responsible for the religious education of their boys and so enrolled them in a religious institution, while mothers had to ensure that their daughters, through their home experience, would be able to manage a Jewish household. These functions were central to the achievement of the social goals of the family. In this respect the parents provided continuity and the transmission of tradition.

In this context one must also consider the impact of emancipation and revolutionary movements such as communism, Bundism, and Zionism on the ability of parents to be efficient agents of tradition. A growing number of Jewish youths experienced a mental and educational divide between their views and those of their parents, and this led to many conflicts. (Calel Perechodnik, whom we will discuss further, is one example of a son who felt estranged from his parents.) However, some scholars claim that these generational differences and conflicts, in perspective, enabled Jewish adolescents and young adults to become independent and follow their own way of realizing their life vision.⁵ What happened to this sense of independence and freedom when the youths were confined to the ghetto? Did the conditions of living in the ghetto affect the solidarity between adolescent youths and their parents?

Another important responsibility of parents was to provide their children with psychological support and give them a sense of self-assurance. But we must remember that most parents during the 1920s and 1930s did not share a sense of the centrality of psychological self-confidence in rearing their children, as parents understand it today. In fact, we learn from the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research collection of more than six hundred autobiographies of youths, based on essays written in Poland and Lithuania in the 1930s, that many young children were critical of their parents as their emotional supporters. They complained that their parents did not understand their needs and ignored their emotional stress. Moreover, they often emphasized that parents considered provision of the basic economic needs as fulfillment of their obligations and were hoping that the children would soon grow up and participate in providing for the family’s economic well-being. The authors of the autobiographies often criticized the relationship between themselves and their parents and testified to the lack of love and care. In the lower classes, both mother and father were absent from home for long hours, and often an older sister took care of the younger siblings. Boys spent long days in the heder, which made up for the absence of a parent from home. However, descriptions of neglect are apparent in a number of the autobiographies and in other sources as well.⁶

In middle-class families, the involvement of parents in their children’s development was probably more evident. Calel Perechodnik, a young man from Otwock who left a diary in which he recorded his ghetto experience, provides us with a detailed portrayal of growing up in Poland, including a discussion of his home that focuses on his relationship with his parents. As he introduces himself, we learn

I was born in Warsaw, on September 9, 1916, into a family of average Jews, a relatively well-to-do, so-called middle-class family. They were honest people, with a strong family instinct, characterized on the part of the children by affection and attachment to their parents and on the part of the parents by a sacrificial devotion to the material well being of the children. I emphasize “material” because there were no spiritual bonds that tied me or my siblings to our parents. They did not try, or perhaps were not able, to understand us. To put it briefly, each of us was raised on his own; influenced by schooling, friends, books we read; conscious of our won material independence; and living in an atmosphere of free expression and thought in the years 1925–1935.⁷

This citation is a good illustration of the fundamental understanding of responsibilities among Jewish parents toward their children, but also reveals the criticism of the younger generation, who were more educated and knowledgeable in psychology and lived by a set of different life expectations. Perechodnik wrote that his own marriage was a love marriage, and his strong emotional bonds to his wife and daughter are evident from his despair when they were deported from the ghetto to their death. I will later draw on Perechodnik’s self-image as a husband and father and his attitude to his own father as examples of the complexity of parenthood under siege.

Historical research on the family and parenthood during the Holocaust confronts a number of major methodological questions that emerge from the difficulty of finding the adequate documentation to enter into the life experience of its members. The documentation on the family, as in many other topics of daily life during the Holocaust, is fragmented. Reflections on the situation of the family and parenthood are recorded in two types of documents. First, there are the formal documentations of the ghetto, such as Judenrat meetings, police reports, or the chronicles such as the one of the Lodz ghetto (Litzmannstadt ghetto). Alongside these sources are personal writings that typically discuss these issues in more detail, and more emotionally. The historical analysis endeavors to integrate all available sources and to contextualize them with the particular reality of each ghetto. Here I divide my discussion between nonpersonal records found in ghetto archives, such as official chronicles, and contemporary private diaries, of which some were also found in ghetto archives. I discuss each genre separately and integrate them in the final discussion.

NONPERSONAL GHETTO ARCHIVES DOCUMENTATION

The following entry is from the Lodz Chronicle, which was compiled under the auspices of the Judenrat. On January 12, 1941, the Chronicle reports under the title “The Little Denouncer”: “An eight-year-old boy complained to the police that his parents had deprived him of his bread ration; he asked the police to punish them. Interpretations are redundant.”⁸

Shortages of food and hunger were inherent in the daily life of the Litzmannstadt ghetto. However, the report of a child, who was deprived of the meager portion that was available, demonstrates at first glance a violation of the fundamental responsibility of the parents toward their children. It shows us that the ghetto authorities could intervene in the private sphere, and that ghetto institutions enabled a child to file a formal complain about his parents. Does it hint at recurring violations of this kind? From the comment of the author of this episode describing it along the lines of “interpretations are redundant,” can we conclude that this was a common phenomenon?

The interpretation of this episode remains open. What information is availa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Jewish Families in Europe, 1939–Present: History, Representation, and Memory—An Introduction
• Part I: Parenthood and Childhood Under Siege, 1939–1945
• Part II: After the War: Rebuilding Shattered Lives, Recollecting Wartime Experiences
• Afterword: In Defense of Eyewitness Testimonies: Reflections of a Writer and Child Survivor of the Holocaust
• List of Contributors
• Index