ABSTRACT

A historical investigation of children’s memory of the Holocaust in Greece illustrates that age, generation and geographical background shaped postwar Jewish identities. The examination of children’s narratives deposited in the era of digital archives enables an understanding of the age-specific construction of the memory of genocide, which shakes established assumptions about the memory of the Holocaust.

In the context of a global Holocaust memory established through testimony archives, the present research constructs a genealogy of the testimonial culture in Greece by framing the rich source of written and oral testimonies in the political discourses and public memory of the aftermath of the Second World War. The testimonies of former hidden children and child survivors of concentration camps illuminate the questions that haunted postwar attempts to reconstruct communities, related to the specific evolution of genocide in Greece and to the rising anti-Semitism of postwar Greece.

As an oral history of child survivors of the Holocaust, the book will be of interest to researchers in the fields of the history of childhood, Jewish studies, memory studies and Holocaust and genocide studies.

chapter |3 pages

Prologue

chapter |25 pages

Introduction

chapter 1|27 pages

Meaning, memory and archive

The politics of the creation of archival material on the Holocaust

chapter 2|18 pages

The war became real

chapter 4|24 pages

Hidden children in Volos

Trajectories and identities

chapter 5|32 pages

Life and memory of concentration camps

The Bergen Belsen experience

chapter 6|23 pages

The beginning of an unknown era

The role of anti-Semitism in the construction of postwar identities

chapter 7|25 pages

Remaking the meaning of living entre mozotros

Postwar reconstruction of Jewish communities

chapter 8|17 pages

Family legacies

Memory, postmemory and transgenerational haunting

chapter |8 pages

Epilogue

The legacy of the Holocaust and beyond