A scholar explores the possible gap between what young Jewish refugees fleeing Nazism in Europe claimed to feel and their actual emotions.
During the years of the Nazi regime, unaccompanied-child migration programs enabled more than 1,000 young European Jews to come to the United States and escape persecution. Historian Daniella Doron was researching the migration of these Jewish youths when she noticed that their personal accounts of that experience had not been closely studied.
As she delved into correspondence between these children and their parents, their own diaries and autobiographical accounts, reports by social workers, and more, a question surfaced in her mind: “Do these sources document the children’s lived realities, or do they document something else?”
In other words, does the children’s emotional expression match their actual experience?
In a recent article, titled “Feeling Familial Separation: Emotions, Agency, and Holocaust Refugee Youths,” Doron shows that these children often offered constructed narratives about their lives, both to their own families and to the foster families who took them in — and that they did so as a way of exercising agency in a world in which they felt powerless.
The paper, which appeared in the fall 2023 issue of Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society, is part of Doron’s larger book project on the migration of unaccompanied Jewish youth from Central Europe to the United States in the 1930s and the 1940s, with a focus on the politics of family separation.
Doron, an assistant professor of Jewish studies at Colgate and the author of Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France: Rebuilding Family and Nation (Indiana University Press, 2015), came upon one of her richest and most revealing sources, the archive of Ernst Papanek, in the New York Public Library. Papanek was an Austrian psychologist who served as a children’s home director in France during World War II before migrating with his family to New York. For an academic paper on refugee children, he developed a questionnaire in which he asked more than 200 youths to reflect on their family life before separation, their flight to the U.S., and their adjustment to American life.
“I was stunned by the size and breadth of the Papanek collection, especially by the access to the children’s words,” Doron says. “I found it compelling, intriguing, and problematic — in the best sense — to see how the children are positioning themselves, choosing their words carefully, navigating all the expectations that encircle them.”
Many of the respondents, Doron writes, gave Papanek “strangely sunny accounts of familial separation,” underscoring feelings of excitement, adventure, relief, and liberation. One boy framed his five-month solo journey from Belgium to Portugal, Nazis at his heels, as a series of shrewd decisions and courageous actions on his part. Papanek noted, however, that the insomnia, noise sensitivity, and headaches afflicting the boy belied his version of events.
Expectations related to national culture may also have affected the emotional language used by the children — and by the adults who interviewed them. In response to a question regarding their feelings about being in the United States, for example, some children “knew how to prove their American bona fides” by extolling the “equality and liberty” they found there. One interviewer praised a boy for his “self-reliance.”
Doron found signs of this resistance to victimhood in family correspondence, as well. In the article, she describes a teenage boy from Vienna who, in letters to his parents, presents himself as confident, capable, and thoroughly engaged in trying to help them escape Europe, just as they had sent him to live with an uncle in New York.
Other children turned familial roles upside down, tending to their parents’ emotions (while perhaps suppressing their own) by writing cheerful letters about their new lives — even when their situations were in truth so problematic that they ended up being removed from their foster homes.
Gender expectations, too, may have had an influence on emotional expression. In the correspondence between Lilly Lösser, unable to leave Portugal, and her daughters, Judy and Gabby, who had made it to New Jersey, Lilly solicited demonstrations of their love and emotional support — often a responsibility assigned to girls — and of their own emotional vulnerability, reproaching them when they were not sufficiently forthcoming. To meet those needs, Doron says, the girls decorated letters with drawings of their mother coming to America on a ship and of the three of them hugging each other at their hoped-for reunion.
As for foster parents, some found themselves welcoming young refugees who presented not as loving and grateful but as aloof or even disobedient; in other households, children hid their homesickness and alienation and did housework in a bid to secure their place in the family. Either way, Doron writes, refusing to connect authentically with their foster families was another avenue by which these children could push against feelings of powerlessness and gain a sense of control over their lives.
While some historians of childhood center young people as historical actors with agency, others doubt children’s ability to significantly affect change and suggest that what children claim to be their emotions might in fact be performances that conform to societal expectations. Doron, who specializes in modern Jewish history and in the history of childhood, gender, and the family, hopes that her article will “open a conversation” among her colleagues in these fields and add a new dimension to debates about children and agency.
By disentangling professed feelings and lived experience, Doron says, she is not trying to discredit children. Rather, she wants to “complicate” the notion of agency and encourage scholars to be aware of different perspectives and methodologies when considering what they can really know about refugee youth and the Holocaust.
“It’s very tempting to ascribe agency to children and to Holocaust victims,” Doron says, “but what does agency really mean?”