Bodily memory: Introducing immigrant organizations and the family

Venken, Machteld

doi:10.1016/j.hisfam.2009.02.003

The History of the Family

2009

DOI: 10.1016/j.hisfam.2009.02.003

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Bodily memory: Introducing immigrant organizations and the family

Machteld Venken

Abstract: This is an article about war survivors who ended up in migration in the aftermath of World War II: former Division soldiers from Poland and former Ostarbeiterinnen from the Soviet Union who settled in Belgium. It analyzes how these migrants dealt in their post-war lives with experiences of harm to their bodies undergone during the war. Often, attempts to ascribe meaning to the physical and/or psychological remnants of this harm were not made through words, but through non-verbal performances. However, such bod… Show more

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2015

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Cited by 3 publications

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Child forced labour: an analysis of ego documents throughout time

Venken

2015

European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire

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This article centralises a unique collection of ego documents created under Communism in which Polish former child forced labourers articulate their war experiences. A comparative analysis of them with recent testimonies reveals that these ego documents offer a more nuanced depiction of Germans and display richer information on the specific working conditions and daily routine for children than the contemporary ones. A comparative reading of the archival testimonies with their published equivalents shows how the streamlining of a publicly acceptable version of the past under Communism went both ways, that is, at times foregrounding the propaganda content of autobiographical wordings, but also at other moments downplaying this element. The collection increases our understanding of child forced labour experiences during the Second World War, specifically the ways in which children perceived that experience, and offers insights into the negotiated appropriation of Communist ideology at the individual level.

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Child forced labour: an analysis of ego documents throughout time

Venken

2015

European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire

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Accepting Jewish roots for a pair of shoes: identity dilemmas of Jewish children in Poland during the Second World War and in the early post-war years

Ansilewska

2015

European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire

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Jewish children who managed to survive Nazi attempts to exterminate them are a clear, yet still under-examined, example of a group who managed to resist the path to genocide. It was only by changing their individual social identity that they were able to survive. By more or less consciously breaking their ties with Judaism and converting to Catholicism, they abandoned membership of the group destined for extermination and strove to become unidentifiable as Jews. This article focuses on the issue of the identity of the Jewish children raised or born in Poland during the Nazi persecution and who survived the Shoah under an assumed non-Jewish identity. It will examine the war's impact on these Polish 'hidden children' and its consequences for their ethnic and religious identity. Many children were intentionally deprived of their Jewish identity by their parents or saviours since such a renunciation was the only way to survive. Therefore the role of non-Jewish rescuers and the attitude of the Jewish authorities towards these children's fate during and after the war is also discussed. The survival of these children hinged upon questions of identity and how successfully they were able to conceal their life-threatening origins and adopt the much safer disguise.

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Children of Dutch Nazi collaborators

Tames

2015

European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire

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This article looks into what happened to the children of Dutch Nazi collaborators after the liberation of the Netherlands in May 1945. The author first outlines the historical context in which these children lived and the manner in which they recounted and recorded their memories much later. In combination with new archival research on social-welfare policy and 're-education' of former National Socialist youth, this puts the discourse that dominated the Dutch debate, that is, the discourse of the 'innocent child' harshly punished by society, in a different light. The framework of the innocent child being punished by a cruel society obscured our view of experiences that did not fit this mould. Furthermore, it made the values and norms that were current during the reconstruction period disappear from the picture: the bad memories of children of collaborators partly originate in policy that was considered normal in those days. This, however, should not obscure the impact of the vulnerable social position which these children experienced after the war.

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Bodily memory: Introducing immigrant organizations and the family

Cited by 3 publications

References 10 publications

Child forced labour: an analysis of ego documents throughout time

Child forced labour: an analysis of ego documents throughout time

Accepting Jewish roots for a pair of shoes: identity dilemmas of Jewish children in Poland during the Second World War and in the early post-war years

Children of Dutch Nazi collaborators

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