Such Good Girls by R. D. Rosen

Author:R. D. Rosen
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins

PART TWO

THE GATHERING

STILL HIDING

In 1989, Carla Lessing, the mother of two grown children and a social worker in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, heard about a lecture on child Holocaust survivors that was going to be delivered in Manhattan by a well-known Long Island psychoanalyst and author named Dr. Judith Kestenberg. A prominent researcher in the field of childhood trauma, Dr. Kestenberg’s family had been annihilated in Poland during the war. She now headed up Holocaust Survivor Studies, as well as the International Study of the Organized Persecution of Children, which she had started with her husband. She traveled the world with her associates, taping interviews with more than 1,500 child survivors of the Holocaust and their children. She had been born in Tarnov, Poland, in 1910, but like her Polish-born husband, she had immigrated to the United States in the late 1930s.

If anyone could speak to Carla Lessing’s experience as a hidden child during the war, she figured it was Dr. Kestenberg. Lessing had spent her adult life surrounded by Holocaust survivors. As often happened with children of survivors, Lessing’s children had gravitated, almost unconsciously, toward other children of survivors as friends. Lessing’s daughter became close with the daughter of a neighbor who was a Holocaust survivor, and her son’s closest friend was the son of a refugee of Nazi-occupied France.

The experience of hiding was with Carla always in one form or another. She had done, as she put it, “all the normal things”—school, college, graduate school—but she didn’t experience the world as a safe place. She lived on a steady diet of worst-case scenarios—especially involving her children. She awoke, startled, with heart palpitations, in the middle of the night. She saw that others enjoyed life so much more than she did; how could she allow herself joy when so many had suffered, had disappeared? She wasn’t sure she knew even how to express joy. She was in some ways still the girl obeying her grandparents’ warnings not to draw attention to herself, still the adolescent whose very life depended on suppressing emotions. She felt uncomfortable in any group. The years in hiding seemed to have killed in her the capacity to belong.

As a member of the “helping professions” whose job was to assist others, Carla knew she had yet to defeat, or maybe even confront, some of her own fears and anxieties. She had not lost any immediate family members during the war, and she had not even witnessed any Jews being beaten, tortured, shot, or hanged, but an aunt, uncle, three cousins, great-aunts, and many close friends had been murdered.

It was clear that the hidden children had come out of the war burdened by the very silence they had needed in order to survive. They had been the victims of one of history’s most malevolent hunts, but survival had left them in psychological pain, quietly excluded from the world around them. Worse, the vast majority had endured their misery alone, not able to broach it, even with loved ones, and had been made to feel unworthy of their own suffering.

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