ABSTRACT
As little is known about children in concentration camps, Chapter 5 provides a rare opportunity to investigate children’s experience of concentration camps. Children in the camp of Bergen Belsen were almost the sole Jewish children under 14 years old upon whom the death penalty was not inflicted in concentration camps. Two transports, one on August 2, 1943, from Salonika and the second on April 2, 1944, from Athens arrived at Bergen Belsen. The first transport carried Spanish and Greek citizens from Salonika and the second transport Spanish citizens most of whom had escaped to Athens from Salonika. Unravelling the myth of a “privileged camp,” the tragic life of children in captivity comes to light in the interviews with child survivors. The difficulty to understand the ways in which a child experienced captivity is unravelled as the chapter tries to grasp the physical and psychological burden that the camp left as inheritance in adulthood. Liberation and postwar rehabilitation are further explored in the atmosphere of anti-Semitism in which children and adults had to breathe in Greece. The conflicts within the community and the shaping of a collective memory that assigned the blame of the perishing of the community to the leaders had repercussions on children’s self-perception and endangered their reintegration into the community. In this chapter, the usefulness of emotions for historical analysis gains full recognition, as the analysis illustrates how emotions can illuminate children’s subjectivities. Fear, anxiety and anguish shaped psychic structures whose embodiment and unconscious impact are evoked in the stories that children tell in their testimonies.
