Rebuilding the Lives of Children and Staff: Survivors of the Holocaust, Poland 1945

This paper will focus on the people who worked with Holocaust survivor children in the immediate post-war period. It will show their concerns, deliberations and subsequent choices. These young caretakers in their early 20s, themselves Holocaust survivors or refugees, usually lacked pedagogical education or training. Yet, they felt that while they "did not know what to do, no one knew better than us". They too had lost most of their families, communities and pre-war social networks. But, instead of rebuilding their lives, they dedicated the immediate post war years to the child survivors. Some of them also took care to have the children`s voice heard. They interviewed the children and recorded their testimonies, thus providing us with a unique insight into children`s war experience but no less into the adult perception of such testimony.

The research into the work of survivor caretakers with survivor children provides a unique view into the post war realities of the survivor community, its problems and experiences. The ideas and methodologies and practices of the caretakers vis a vis the children, their encounter with administrators and bureaucracies are indicative of both a continuity of Jewish pre-war culture and of new approaches demanded by new circumstances. This paper will examine the work of several such caretakers and through their work offer insights into post war or post conflict work with children.