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The Acculturation of the Kindertransport Children: Intergenerational Dialogue on the Kindertransport Experience
Author(s): Barnett, Ruth
Date: 2004
Topics: Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial, Holocaust Survivors, Holocaust Survivors: Children of, Age and Generational Issues, Dialogue
Abstract: Dialogue in the lives of the first, second, and third generation of the Kindertransport is the focus of this essay, in which the author first highlights background factors in understanding the "narrative history" as distinct from the "factual history" of the Kindertransport. This is followed by an exploration of insights into the role that dialogue in various forms, including its absence, may have played in the pre-separation and post-separation phases of the Kindertransportees' lives. The author looks at a few general features in the dialogue of Kindertransportees with each other and then at some central themes in intergenerational dialogue between first, second, and third generations of the Kindertransport. Ultimately the text suggests that what can be learned from such dialogues might be of use to research and to those involved in the care of separated children today
The Other Side of the Abyss: A Psychodynamic Approach to Working with Groups of People Who Came to England as Children on the Kindertransporte
Author(s): Barnett, Ruth
Date: 1995
Topics: Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial, Holocaust Survivors, Psychotherapy / Psychoanalysis, Children
Abstract: This paper focuses on the psychological experience of children who were separated from their parents because they sent them to England to save their lives from the impending Holocaust in continental Europe. The parents of these children expressed their love and concern to ensure their offspring's survival through the self‐sacrificial act of parting with them. What they could not prevent were the traumatic effects of this separation and its sequellae. Drawing on clinical material of former Kindertransportees as adults from her private practice and group work with a colleague, Ruth Barnett offers an understanding of the psychic journey that was imposed on these children by the deliberately inflicted atrocities to which their families and communities were subjected in the name of genocide and for the purpose of ‘ethnic cleansing’. She hopes this may be of some value to therapists working with the victims of similar attempts at ‘ethnic cleansing’ such as perpetrated in Rwanda and Bosnia.