‘Breaking the Silence: Voices of the British Children of Refugees from Nazism’ by Merilyn Moos (Rowman and Littlefield)
It’s no secret that some politicians are willing to play the refugee card, particularly in times of economic uncertainty. More than 1,800 refugees are known to have drowned this year in the Mediterranean; no-one knows how many have died in the Sahara or the other Middle Eastern routes that bring them towards Europe.
Despite the fact that 80% of the world’s refugees are in developing countries, members of the British government feel it is appropriate to use terms such as ‘swarms’ or ‘marauders’ to describe people seeking safety in Europe away from war and genocide. Like pre-war politicians, our leaders today are willing to overlook humanitarian concerns while they tap into and stimulate currents of racism and xenophobia.
While many of the 1930s refugees from nazism seemed well settled in the UK, little research has been done into their actual experiences of living here. Even less is understood about the experiences of the now elderly children of those people who fled from nazism – the second generation. The memories that haunt many of the second generation are not only of the Holocaust but also of the silence with which their parents surrounded their past lives. They had believed, along with Rosa Luxemburg, that the central conflict of their time was between socialism and barbarism; but in the countries where they had been young activists, barbarism had won. How did they live with their sense of defeat? How did they explain their world and their failure to change that world to the children whom they were rearing in 1950s Britain? Harold Macmillan told people then that they had ‘never had it so good’. What meaning did that axiom have for the refugees from nazism and their children?
Merilyn Moos challenges the lazy perception that the refugee story ends with the granting of citizenship and the acquisition of a bungalow in the suburbs. The particular group on whom she has focused her attention are the British-born children of political refugees from nazism. Some of them had Jewish backgrounds but it was more the political terror, rather than their ethnic identity, that had driven them to flee to this country.
Moos herself was born here during the second world war to left-wing parents who had left Germany shortly after the nazis took power and never spoke about these experiences to her. After their deaths, she discovered boxes of letters from relatives who had not been able to leave Germany; letters written in a dated German which she could not fully understand. These provided a basis for her 2010 autobiographical novel, ‘The Language of Silence’, whose central character is a woman seeking to understand the silence of her deceased German-born parents. The response to this novel helped her to understand that, far from being unique, her sense of dislocation from her parents and their past was widespread among this second generation.
‘Breaking the Silence’ is an exploratory research study which contextualises and analyses the experiences of people of the second generation and is primarily based around a series of testimonials by people from that group. Central to their narratives are questions about belonging. Some of the most powerful stories are from people talking about the ways they faced up to topics-which-could-not-be-discussed during their everyday lives as children.
‘Tania’ explains: ‘When I was a little girl and I would wake up to a new day and life was so exciting, then I would go to the kitchen and my mother would be sitting there and would greet me with “Today so-and-so would have been so old”. She was mourning for her brothers, one murdered by the nazis, another executed in the Soviet Union, and her son, K’. How can any child learn to engage with this history of a brutality to which her own mother has not become reconciled?
‘Robert’ explores some of the complexity of his life in Kilburn in the early 50s, at a time when other little boys would be learning about the heroics of the second world war from films such as ‘The Dambusters’. ‘When I was about nine, I got beaten up, not terribly badly, by the little Irish boys, as I called them, for being Jewish. “Bloody German. We won the war.” I’d say, “I’m not German, I’m Austrian”. And then they’d say, “Bloody Jew”. So when we left [Kilburn] and moved, my parents said, “Don’t tell anybody we are Jewish. Don’t even tell your younger brothers you are Jewish because they are too young and they’ll let it out”.’ Despite the fact that his family name sounded Jewish, he was learning that it was deemed ‘advisable’ not to appear different from some kind of British norm.
For some, their knowledge of their family’s history was limited to photographs. As ‘Mike’ told Moos: ‘That’s the only picture saved of my family. That’s my dad as a young boy. That’s his family. None of these people survived. They are his parents. His father was Ernest, his sister was Eva, and his mother was Edith; no, his mother was Emma, his sister Edita. They were known as “the three Es” in the cards from Auschwitz-Birkenau’. That was the only tangible memory he had of his murdered relatives until he was nearly 60 when he went to search for more information in Czechoslovakia after his father’s death.
These stories of distress and estrangement form fragments of a bigger, more complex narrative that suggests considerable trauma. While most of the interviewees had successful careers, they identified issues of greater anxiety, lower self-esteem, more troubled relationships than was typical of their professional peers. Much of the research that has been carried out in this field has been psychoanalytically oriented; it has also been carried out in either Israel or USA and with Holocaust survivors and their descendants rather than the children of political refugees.
There has been considerable media coverage recently about the work of Rachel Yehuda suggesting that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) among Holocaust survivors can be transferred in vitro. But the impact on the sense of attachment among children whose parents were political refugees has yet to be explored. Moos’s book provides an unprecedented opportunity for such people to tell their stories.
Moos is concerned about the way in which much public debate about the second generation is dominated by a particular concept of victimhood; a reductive concept which defined the person solely in terms of what had been done to them and their parents. She shares the concern of Judith Butler that the focus on ‘trauma’ can actually demean the suffering of the survivors and can result in ‘re-enacting the past as the present’. She found this individualistic approach to trauma and victimhood ahistorical and disempowering; she welcomed signs of resilience in some of her informants.
‘Tom’ addresses this issue very directly: ‘Even when I’ve had “suicidal thoughts”, I’ve thought of what my parents went through, and I say to myself, “Our family does not commit suicide”. Things may be very bad, but my parents didn’t give up, and they came to England and they didn’t give up, and I haven’t given up’. This alone is not enough to prove that resilience is widespread among people of the second generation but the testimonials do provide an opportunity to question established notions about victimhood and to generate a new framework of understanding.
Changing patterns of global conflicts and mobility suggest that there is a need for a new politics to help us to engage with dislocation. Moos makes clear that, in addition to that, there is also a need for indepth research into the long term psychological impact of dislocation. The indicators of distress that she identifies among the second generation of refugees from nazism will prove invaluable for those studying and seeking to promote the wellbeing of people who have survived any of the catastrophes of our age. They may be particularly helpful in minimising future traumas among children whose parents thought it best to take them away from the persecution in Syria or Eritrea; the European Union was, after all, born out of a desire to prevent any repetition of the nazi terror.
for Andrew Hook’s review of ‘A New Way of Living, Georgian Town Planning in the Highlands and Islands’ by Gordon Haynes
for Morelle Smith’s review of ‘Hamam Balkania’ by Vladislav Bajac, translated by Randall A Major
By Bob Cant | September 2015
