Postwar Reconstructions of Family through the Eyes of Polish Jewish Child Survivors

In this paper, I investigate the possibilities and challenges to the reconstruction of (Jewish) family in the early postwar period through the eyes of Jewish child survivors. I focus my analysis on four key aspects: 1. the ways the children mourned and coped with the loss of their biological parents; 2. how they searched for relatives in the country and abroad; 3. how they formed relations with surviving relatives and the difficulties and possibilities of happy family reunions; and 4. how they dealt with and understood attempts of being adopted and their adoptions by relatives, strangers and their former rescuer-guardians. The analysis is based on ego documents produced by child survivors in the early and late post-war periods.

On a theoretical level, this paper aims to show the contribution of the children’s turn in history to a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the postwar social history of Polish Jewry.