One indicator of increased public awareness of the theme "Kindertransport" is the fact that this event gradually is making its way into literature. Aside from the few fictional accounts (Cynthia Ozick, The Messiah of Stockholm, 1987, and W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz, 2001) there are numerous autobiographical texts about the "Kindertransport." These describe—in the form of keepsakes and clothing—an important landscape of remembrance and relating that contains entire thematic complexes symbolically solidified within it. Objects make a child's experience concrete; they become links to parents and later they support remembrance; with greater distance, such items serve the function of bracketing an experience. As special "transitional objects" (Winnicott) they still have not found their place within the psychology of personal objects.
Through evaluating files maintained by Jewish emigration agencies and British relief organizations that coordinated the Kindertransports and accommodations for children in exile in Great Britain, the author demonstrates that, in striving to accomplish the rescue of as many children as possible and provision of the best possible care for them after their arrival, certain strategic considerations were not abandoned. The Jewish emigration agencies—here the welfare office of the Viennese Jewish Community—wanted to be sure not to endanger an extended refugee program for children by placing children with adjustment problems on the Kindertransports. Therefore children were chosen according to their expected ability to integrate into a new environment.
The Refugee Children's Movement, too, aimed to integrate the children as discreetly as possible into British society. One hoped thereby to prevent an increase in antisemitic and anti-German resentments against refugees.
The author examines insights into the psychological impact of separation from family and home, one of the most troubling catastrophes for children. The younger the children, the greater their suffering and the more prolonged the consequences. Through empirical research on the traumatization of children as victims of war and persecution, Hans Keilson in Holland and Anna Freud in Great Britain have transmitted fundamental insights that assist in psychoanalytic reflection on the effect of the Kindertransports. A child's processing of the psychological burdens of persecution, separation, and starting life over is one important aspect; problems of the caregivers, including physical and emotional reactions, must be taken just as seriously. The author argues that the psychoanalytical perspective on historical events is key to understanding the Kindertransports as a complex event whose consequences extend way beyond the time of rescue from persecution under National Socialism.
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